At what point is a game a game?
Doki Doki Literature Club made waves for deconstructing the classic visual novel, incorporating psychological horror into a genre known for its teenybopper romances. Created with renpy, the game itself offers no meaningful choices, simply guiding you through a surprisingly immersive experience. The vast majority of interaction is clicking to advance with the occasional multiple choice, which can put you on one of only a few preset paths. However, the paths converge, and there’s only one true story ro be found.
Is this enough to qualify as a game? The world seems to think so, numbering DDLC among lists of “indie games” and “horror games,” but what differentiates an app that tells a single story through clicking buttons from an ebook, where you read a story by clicking buttons?
In addition, if we follow the fun for this game, where is it?
Clearly it’s not in the game mechanics, as simple as they are. That leaves the story- but what constitutes a “fun” story? In fact, is the qualification of “fun” really enough when we consider a story-driven game, where the mechanics are all but useless? Or does this, in fact, mean that this isn’t a game at all?
Let’s deconstruct this further- what differentiates DDLC from a book? In fact, could we rewrite it into a screenplay?
The answer (and I’m unfortunately going to spoil you if you’ve never played the game) is no, because the game interacts with the machine you play on in a way that subverts your expectation of immersion. Specifically, it closes the game itself and forces you on a level above the game: on your machine, on the OS level. However, this meta-story still does not rely on player interaction- it’s a mechanic of sorts between the game and your machine, but takes no user input while running.
So DDLC must run on a machine or an integral moment in the game cannot exist, but can technology alone qualify an experience as a game? If we watch a youtube video in an oculus headset, are we gaming?
I don’t fully have an answer, but perhaps it lies in language itself- that there is no collective word for participating in an experience. Multimedia has allowed reading, listening, seeing, and engaging so seamless that perhaps having delineations themselves are a foregone conclusion.
