"In Your Reality": Cute Girls, Violence, and Your Computer in Doki Doki Literature Club

Speaker: Peter Spearman (CHAT Dissertation Fellow, PhD Candidate in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies)

Doki Doki Literature Club (Doki Doki) is a game that wants to fool you. It wants you to believe that it is something that it is not and cannot be. While the game might appear to be a harmless Japanese dating simulator, the disguise quickly gives way to a surreal horror game that accesses players information and eventually destroys itself. I argue that this American-made game uses a faux-Japanese façade to shallowly mask a larger internet aesthetic and uses its meta-setting on the player’s computer to critique techno intimacy and call attention to the potential effects of violent virtual behavior online. The analysis relies on interviews with other players as well an analysis of my own experience of play. This talk explores the tension between the low stakes of Doki Doki as a game and the graphic, violence to which players bear witness and remember viscerally before considering what must come after the game’s final error message.

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