Why I think DDLC is dangerous...

[Ace42]

Please note the title is not "Why I think DDLC should be banned" nor "Why I think DDLC is bad".

(Personally, I think the game is ingenious and a great work of art – but that isn't the topic of this thread.)

In 1774 the author Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther[en.wikipedia.org] – a tale of unrequited love ending in the protagonist's suicide that was a smash hit and set fashion trends across the continent of Europe.

It also led to widespread incidents of copy-cat suicide[en.wikipedia.org] across the continent, called "the Werther Fever" at the time, and giving its name to a psychological phenomenon called "The Werther effect" in 1974.

This provides an object lesson that suicides depected in fiction can inform the behaviour of people exposed to that media; and research into "suicide clusters" demonstrates how universal this phenomenon can be – with suicide rates spiking after a celebrity suicide, or if a newsworthy suicide makes the news and thus there is widespread exposure.

To be clear, the outbreak of suicides following the publication of Sorrows is not an isolated example or the only piece of information this post is reliant on; it is just a prominent and noteworthy one.

One academic to look at this issue is Dr Robert Cialdini; who notes that in these cases, the copycats closely resemble the original suicide demographically. He theorises that these are cases of "social proof[en.wikipedia.org]" – an ingrained / subconscious sociological phenomenon whereby people take cues from individuals (including fictional ones) that they identify with on some level, and adopt that behaviour as being "appropriate" for people like themselves.

I believe (and I am not saying you have to believe this, or you shouldn't enjoy this game, or anything) that several factors at work in this game exacerbate the the risk of depression and suicide in players suffering from mental health conditions, such as self-harming or suicidal thoughts.

Firstly: The game goes out of its way to make you identify with characters who are depicted as suicidal; inherently dangerous as social proof goes, and the game achieves this in a number of ways –some traditional to media, like simply monologuing their feelings to generate sympathy; some interactive, like having the player pick out the words they feel the NPC would be using in their poem - which places you firmly in the shoes of that NPC.
(Indeed, characters keep saying your poems sound like one another might have written.)

Secondly: The game repeatedly and graphically depicts suicide. The fact that there's a direct visual representation means that not only is there social proof of the course of action a susceptible person might take, but a direct example of how to emulate it.
In an abstract way, it is also arguable that the game provides visual metaphors for the protagonist experiencing mental illness, which can also feed into this.

Thirdly: The game deconstructs and suberts the "romantic" VN genre and its tropes. This is disociative for players; and if a player is reliant on this genre for escapism or for romantic or emotional comfort, it isn't healthy for them to be confronted with the knowledge that the characters in a VN are incapable of emotion, and only give the impression of caring for the player because they are programmed to do so.

This isn't a healthy message for people who are depressed and might feel that the people close to them "only care because they have to" out of a sense of responsibility (as per the first point made, Sayoyi expresses her belief that the PC only cares about her out of responsibility for her wellbeing).

And, of course, exposing the artificiality / superificial of VN dating games also ultimately denies a coping mechanism / bolt-hole to those reliant on those games as escapism.

Again, I want to repeat that I am not questioning these design decisions because I dislike the game. They are arguably integral to the whole point and efficacy of the game. I am not saying these themes shouldn't ever be tackled.

Mainly the point of posting this is to give some perspective to people here whose knee-jerk reactions to recent events are "my game's under attack" or "this is just like people blaming violent video games for real life violence" - when there's actually more to it than that.

But as I am getting close to the character limit for a post, I'd hope this suffices without the need for a whole heap of spoilerish examples from the game demonstrating the above; or having to explain just why these psychological phenomenon are pertinent and aren't just myths to be dismissed.

Also: I think the "content warnings" should be a bit clearer about what the content actually involves - even if it is spoilerish - and a bit more assertive too. All horror games have gore / scare warnings; but as I hope I've explained, this game touches with a unique issue in a unique way.

[JusticeDunn]

Except the game the father of the dead kid described responsible was a different game and DDLC was what was blamed

[Ace42]

Except the game the father of the dead kid described responsible was a different game and DDLC was what was blamed

Even assuming that unsubstantiated claim is factually correct, nothing I said was actually reliant on the incident which made the news.

[Rick25]

I do really think that people that kinda relates with the topics (they felt suicidal or someone they know has those problems) , they get affected in some way by it.
I personally just got through it without feeling bad or something (maybe because i dont relate at all with it).

Is the game dangerous or something?
I dont really know, I would like to say no and people just overreact but i really dont know this kind of topics (Maybe because where i live, suicide is not something that happens frequently)

[Uroboros]

You cannot remove all potential triggers for those with suicide ideation, simply because they are too numerous and across too wide a spectrum to properly moderate. Anything emotive or that an emotional response can be derived from can potentially stir up someone with mental/emotional issues. I'm all for a more detailed content warning system (triggers, etc) but to call the game dangerous because of fringe effects is a little myopic, in the same way that hallmarking peanuts as dangerous would be.

Regarding your first bullet. The game doesn't go out of its way to make you identify with the characters. That is dishonest wording. It uses a normal array of characterisation, and the keyword minigame is token association at best. If anything the game tries to create a low-key sense of dissociation from three of the characters (more vital to the core tone, given the eventual emerging story), and quickly slips into the 'creeping offness' theme with barely a single pass of choices to establish the setting. None of the characters are actually suicidal, even though it does manifest as such due to the increasing and hidden efforts of one of the key characters. Suicide is the result, not a patterned tendancy or personal will towards it. For your point to have more credence, the characters would need to be far more established and fleshed out, and the events would need to be more personal so the player can become emotionally attached.. The game is perhaps five hours at a big stretch (my play reports as 3 hours and I did a lot of reloading trying to game the keyword minigame, and redeciding who to initially pursue). That's three hours to full completion. The game starts making its truer themes fairly obvious about halfway in. Think on that for a moment.

Regarding your second bullet. Your wording is again misleading. You should say twice not 'repeatedly'. Only one of which has any assumption of normalcy surrounding it, the other is abstract and obviously not a normal occurrance. People do not require 'examples' to perform or ideate it themselves, and to try shield grown consumers from what they already know will be fatal is a little ass-backwards. If this was a singular argument towards better notation of content then I would agree, but it reads entirely as an attempt to resensitise taboo for the sake of random discussion and pointless devils advocacy, which is a strange position to take when your approach then leaves other graphic violence critically untouched, and I feel as a whole would actually just serve to edge towards re-censorship of drama/horror genres. It's hard to take your post on base merits when your language leans on exaggeration for effect.

Regarding your third bullet. Content creators cannot be held responsible for the mental/emotional ills of every potential consumer. While I am all for better content signposting, there is a limit to how much moderation can be performed before it becomes an outright suffocation of artistic expression. Your arguments on what is 'healthy' for 'susceptible minds' was also used against subjects such as rock, metal and rap music, against radio fiction broadcasts, against television, and against any semi-realistic violence in videogames. If we restrain the content of entertainment media not around the age barriers we already put in place, and take it upon ourselves to moderate what should be produced rather than allowing adults (or respective guardians) to consciously moderate themselves, then we find ourselves on a dangerously slippery slope. Disassociation from normal tropes or genres is not a bad thing. Making a consumer discomforted is not a bad thing. Breaking illusions or playing with the fourth wall are not bad things. Depictions or discussion of suicide or abuse are not bad things, even with graphic detail. If anything it could be argued that touching on the subjects while constantly skirting it in a tasteful manner only creates a disconnect from its true, ghastly nature, which in turn can serve to romanticise the act and soften resistance against ideation.

If you must be hypothetical and reductive about what may upset depressive/bipolar people, then you must also speculate to the other extremes, or be victim to confirmation bias. So by the same logic, it is also not healthy for depressed people to have an entirely comfortable escape in which they can always retreat unchallenged. It isn't a 'healthy message' to assume other people entirely orbit around you and your problems, or lack complexity and hidden struggles. It isn't healthy for pleasant everyday things to saturate to the point that they lose meaning and eventually submerge fall into anhedonia, and gloss over the humane aspects of struggle that a player may feel (therefore feeling alienated from the fiction they use as a 'coping mechanism', feeling as though even there, they are abnormal). That contrast can still be felt even in fiction after all! Do you understand what I'm getting at? With a stretch you can find problems everywhere, because you simply cannot protect human beings from their own emotional responses, especially not when they are suffering from some degree of internal turmoil or mood disorder. The best media often accommodates for these variables in the consumers, and touches on them, highlighting the low points but also offering small sources of inspiration (rather than attempting to flee from it wholesale).

It's pretty patronising TBH. It is not 'exposing' the nature of videogame characters as unreal, as we partake in fiction knowingingly. Poking the fourth wall does not ruin all forms of immersion and escapism in media, only within the individual piece. If someone has the capacity to be personally hurt by this game for these reasons, then that is not something they would have been able to escape just by having this game signposted with an indepth content nanny system; they would need to avoid it in all media, and to do so they would need to be aware of said unreality to even seek to moderate themselves away from it. Individuals who have such sensitivities do exist, but I like to think that the majority have properly trained caretakers to perform these duties for them, so that we don't need to go full Jack Thompson on behalf of the rest of the adult population. If we step back from that and only try to consider those who are emotionally vulnerable, even then we would simply find ourselves muting all colour from media lest is evoke any emotional response. Even if you attempt to create a singularly positive or uplifting experience, or create a caste of entirely welcoming non-challenging characters whose hardships are coddled away from all drama, it can still create a painfully jarring vacuum when someone with emotional issues completes the game and finds themselves with no option but to return to the real world.

I'm sorry but your attempt at 'perspective' really just comes across as devils advocacy for the sake of it. It's an old take that gets repeated every other time a 'video game leads to a death', albeit to your benefit with more elaboration than usual. I hope you don't take this as a shortsighted attack on yourself but you really haven't brought up anything that hasn't been brought up before, and it really gets stretched thin.

[KeyBrute]

Getting out of bed is a riskof death. In short, DDLC was intended for a mature audience as Dan Salvalto warned in in the beginning. Heck you can say call of duty make people violent. Games can alter thoughts and emotions but anything you see in the outside world can too. Any game can be dangerous, even TNT in Minecraft can make some kid a pyromaniac.

[xae-chan]

ace42

A nice bit of scholarship. And I am aware of "the madness of crowds"; however, if you peruse some of the 4354 topics in this forum, you will find people who were totally unmoved by the tropes. They see "discount Undertale", no motivation for Sayori's choices, even "My Meadow" is not recognized as a sign of depression.


some say, guys, this game is not scary or disturbing. One hated Monika so much he spent time opening and closing the game repeatedly to torture. Then he admitted a friend told him, she was supposed to be a sympathetic character. He might have understood that on his own, if eh'd read the poems and duaglor - but no, he was just your usual clickthrougher gamed wikth no idea what a VN is. But he got to play sociopath for a day so ... benefit, I guess.

And did you consider the structure of the game forces the [player] to commit murder? So everyone who plays through the game to a real ending has blood on his (or her) hands.

Also, many depressives have played this VN here (I hesitate to call it a game, more like an experiment) . A few cases of new OCD, generally involving Yuri.

Maybe DS is not as good as Goethe, or times have changed. A lot. I could more easily feei suicidal having to read the Daily Mail.

[Ace42]

Originally posted by Uroboros:

You cannot remove all potential triggers for those with suicide ideation, simply because they are too numerous and across too wide a spectrum to properly moderate.

Nirvana Fallacy; no-one's talking about "all potential triggers".
Also a strawman; no-one's mentioned "removing" anything: Bright blue letters absolute top of the post: "Please note the title is not "Why I think DDLC should be banned""

but to call the game dangerous because of fringe effects is a little myopic, in the same way that hallmarking peanuts as dangerous would be.

The dangers of peanut allergeries are real, quantifiable, and this is why peanut allergies are taken seriously in the food-preparation industry, both as a matter of best practice and legally.

The game doesn't go out of its way to make you identify with the characters.

A misreading of the game's narrative: There's points in the narrative where the game explicitly states that you've taken on Sayori's role in the group dynamic.

I didn't want to flood the post with a redundancy of examples, but if you take your time to play through it again with a more critical eye you should be able to note that numerous times throughout the game in a variety of forms the game asks you to draw parrallels between characters and yourself - not just in normal characterisaiton, but in terms of the metanarrative too.

Note that, by the end, this parrallelism isn't just with your avatar, but with you being referred to directly by your Steam username and thus the player as a person.

It uses a normal array of characterisation, and the keyword minigame is token association at best.

You're confusing form and function.

If anything the game tries to create a low-key sense of dissociation from three of the characters

Would only be true if the game effected a reduced emotional connection to these characters; which I think is the opposte of what it is trying to do.

Suicide is the result, not a patterned tendancy or personal will towards it.

False; Monika states outright that she is exacerbating, not creating, Sayori's depression, Yuri's obsessiveness.

For your point to have more credence, the characters would need to be far more established and fleshed out,

You seem to forget Yuri talking about how characters have depth, which can be explored through the act of reading, that goes beyond the superficial representation they have on the text.

Direct literary criticism which refutes your point...

and the events would need to be more personal so the player can become emotionally attached.

The idea that people aren't emotionally attatched to these characters is unsubstantiated. I was emotionally invested in them.

The game is perhaps five hours at a big stretch (my play reports as 3 hours and I did a lot of reloading trying to game the keyword minigame, and redeciding who to initially pursue). That's three hours to full completion. The game starts making its truer themes fairly obvious about halfway in. Think on that for a moment.

Mine says 5, and I didn't reload at all and I'm a fast reader. I think maybe you skimmed it, and thus had only a superficial experience.

You should say twice not 'repeatedly'.

Wrong again. We see hung Sayori on multiple different occasions - as jumpscares in the background, as the "true ending" when she gains self awareness, in glitched form overlapped with the main narrative all on top of the initial reveal. Add to this Yuri's suicide which you are forced to sit with for AGES before the game progresses. Add to this Monika's "virtual" suicide occuring in real time due to your actions. Add to this the number of replays you might have to go through to try and reach the "good" ending through experimentation

the other is abstract and obviously not a normal occurrance.

Irrelevant. Social proof suggests the efficacy of media in encouraging suicide is proportional to similarities with the susceptible individual; not reliant on those similarities being "non abstract" however you may choose to quantify that.

People do not require 'examples' to perform or ideate it themselves,

Strawman. No-one said they do require this. We're talking about dangers, and exacerbating risk factors is quite literally a danger.

and to try shield grown consumers

Big blue letters at the top of the OP...

Content creators cannot be held responsible for the mental/emotional ills of every potential consumer.

Strawman.

there is a limit to how much moderation can be performed before it becomes an outright suffocation of artistic expression.

From my OP: Again, I want to repeat that I am not questioning these design decisions because I dislike the game. They are arguably integral to the whole point and efficacy of the game. I am not saying these themes shouldn't ever be tackled.

Sounds like you're just white-knighting the game at this point...

Your arguments on what is 'healthy' for 'susceptible minds' was also used against subjects such as rock, metal and rap music,

Red herring.

Disassociation from normal tropes or genres is not a bad thing.

Ipse dixit. In the context of people killing themselves, and something potentially being responsible, it clearly is a dangerous thing...

Making a consumer discomforted is not a bad thing.

Why are you using the word "bad"? Big blue letters, top of the OP.

If you must be hypothetical and reductive

You mean "literal, and referring directly to known psychological phenomena."

Do you understand what I'm getting at?

You're trying to argue against a sound psychological position with a cobbled together defence of "but, come on man, it's a good game" - a point I already covered in big blue letters top of the OP.

[Ace42]

Originally posted by KeyBrute:

Getting out of bed is a riskof death.

By that argument there should be no laws of any kind, because everything is equally likely to kill you as soon as you step out of bed...

Heck you can say call of duty make people violent.

False equivalence.

even TNT in Minecraft can make some kid a pyromaniac.

I laid out the psychological principles at work in this case. They don't apply to CoD, or Minecraft; so you're engaging in whataboutery.

Originally posted by xae-chan:

some say, guys, this game is not scary or disturbing.

Not everyone reads about a celebrity suicide and thinks they should do that themselves. Doesn't mean that there isn't a danger of media triggering the werther effect and causing unnecessary deaths in people who *are* susceptible.

And did you consider the structure of the game forces the [player] to commit murder? So everyone who plays through the game to a real ending has blood on his (or her) hands.

The werther effect doesn't apply to murder and is thus out of the remit of this discussion.

Maybe DS is not as good as Goethe, or times have changed. A lot. I could more easily feei suicidal having to read the Daily Mail.

I think it's safe to assume plenty of people read Goethe without committing suicide, that doesn't mean the werther effect doesn't exist.

[Mithost]

Please stop making threads on the topic of recent news stories and their implications for DDLC and video games as a medium.