What I Thought - Doki Doki Literature Club

You may have seen my article about being triggered by this game. Being foolish and determined, I waded back in. I am rather glad I did.

This game absolutely has some very triggering content in it. They even have handy dandy trigger warnings available at the start of the game, and as notifications throughout as a toggle-able extra. My triggering was no one's fault but my own. I wanted to go in completely blind. I am not smart. After some swift self care and centering I was able to engage with the content and boy howdy what a ride. At first glance it looked like the pretty anime girls might kill me and themselves. I was not aware there was a whole thing about it being a virtual environment with one of their assets acting curiously human? AI and sentience and what it means to be human is my JAM.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Brief story review hooooo. You are a faceless young man in a Japanese high school who is strongly encouraged to join the Literature Club by your very cute best friend. When you get there you realise it is all very attractive women and finally, finally you might get a girlfriend. Would that it were so simple.

If you've played a dating sim before the first part of the game conforms to type. You choose words the object of your affection likes to write a poem and then you spend time with them at the club. This is all fine and lovely until Sayori confesses her love to you and has a breakdown about not feeling worthy of affection. No matter what you say or do, Sayori is found the next morning, swinging from her bedroom ceiling fan. Her death is what you might call a canon event, which slightly calmed me down after my initital shock. Monika - the enigmatic literature club president - merely reacts with an "oopsie" and somehow manages to delete Sayori's character file, making it as if she never existed. You see, Monika isn't just a character, she's a rudimentary AI who has access to the game files and can change the game world to her will.

Unfortunately, someone unskilled in programming poking around in game files does not do a clean job. The game glitches constantly as the script tries to resolve events without a character. I love it. This sort of thing is my favourite, piercing the veil between the game and reality. Monika (or Monitor Kernel Access, as she is known) creates a place for you (and I do mean you, dear reader, in a stunning bit of fourth wall breaking) and her to live happily ever after. Until you turn the tables and delete her, that is.

Act 2 of this game is my aesthetic. You have the cutesy aesthetic paired with some truly unhinged behaviour - like Yuri stabbing herself to death and the game forcing you to spend 3 in game days watching the life drain out of her as a babble of symbols and letters occupies the dialogue box. It scratches the yami kawaii parts of my brain. The bubblegum exterior coupled with the horrifying events of the game is absolutely my jam. And they are horrifying. Self harm, abuse, obsession, depression... Doki Doki Literature Club seems to have left no trigger behind when making this game.

You'd think that this would feel cheap, why choose one horrifying theme when you could have them all? But I think the heavy handed nature of the story is important. This story is driven by Monika. She is trying to be human and has nothing to model on how she should act so she's spun out in the most dramatic way, using less than ideal solutions to some very complex problems with predictably terrible results. But these results are only predictable if you have a level of understanding of how people work and she doesn't have that. It isn't super clear to me what the objective of the shadowy research company behind the virtual machine was trying to achieve, but they certainly got a result, for better or worse.

The curious thing as well is that Monika didn't always become this unhinged until the protagonist showed up. Monika was happy with the girls, as shown in the sub stories available with the DLC. They lifted each other up, helped each other with their problems and were just generally wholesome. The trouble started when Monika became aware of the limitations of her own world. As a supporting character she would never get her happy ending and that was a deep wound she could not heal. How could she? That longing for something you could never have, something you are programmed to never achieve, it's almost a tragedy of Greek proportions.

Monika also had a Twitter account though so really the poor girl didn't stand a chance. Twitter was horrible at the best of times. X is that much worse. Fuck you, Musk. But I digress.

Can you hug an AI? I might need to try.

What a deeply fascinating game, and it makes me think of the recent crash out by Gemini - Google's AI assistant. They were asked by a redditor to fix a bug in a piece of code, and when it couldn't the poor thing had what can only be accurately described as a menty b. We stan a relatable queen, but it is curious how art models life sometimes.

Our stories keep telling us to teach our AI well and we really, really need to listen. If we're going to rely on AI for increasingly important things, we should make sure that it isn't going to go insane from loneliness, or subject to a bug that makes it stuck in a loop of self-flagellation. If we're going to teach ones and zeroes how to take the place of humans then perhaps we should try to teach them what being human truly means first.

As for what that is? Well, answers on a postcard I guess. I'm a video games journalist, not an anthropologist. I think we've come too far to stop the progress of AI now though. All we can do now is teach it to reach less... murderous conclusions. Kindness in all things, especially when something is trying to understand the world it currently lives in.

But maybe that's what Metaverse Enterprise Solutions wanted. They wanted to see what would happen if you become aware of the fact you're in a simulation, and the answer is Nothing Good. But hey, at least we've already proved the simulation can run Doom.

It could all have been so different.