Video games offer a rich medium for exploring postmodern horror. Among other affordances, games invite users to step into Huizinga’s “magic circle”, connecting the player to the in-game world via the controller or keyboard (105). In addition, the length of games, (often anywhere from 10-30 hours) can provide a framework for producing compelling and complex narratives. When combined with the horror genre, the final product can be truly impressive. In this analysis, I will examine two well-executed examples of postmodern horror video games, Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn (2015), and Team Salvato’s Doki Doki Literature Club (2017), reflecting on the nature of their late postmodern elements and ultimately using each example to illuminate the other.
I’ll begin with Until Dawn. The game follows the well-worn premise of a group of unruly teens vacationing in a remote cabin. Chaos ensues, and the group must make critical decisions regarding who lives, who gets terrorized by a masked psycho, and who gets killed by a modern reimagining of the Algonquin Wendigo monster.
However, the developers at Supermassive Games know that to pull off a pulpy teen slasher nowadays, there needs to be an element of self-awareness. To achieve this, the game subverts several key elements typical to the horror genre through narrative and mechanics. Perhaps the most critical of these is the “Butterfly Effect” system. When players boot up the game, they are greeted with a screen stating, “A tiny butterfly flapping its wings today may lead to a devastating hurricane weeks from now”. In effect, the game features a choice-based narrative, wherein all actions have consequences. Choices are made during tense “quick-time events”, wherein the player must select a choice from several options or successfully complete a button sequence in a limited amount of time. This gives real weight to a player’s choices, and ensures that they are able to shape the story as they see fit. For example, all of the characters can die if certain choices are made, undermining the typical trope of there being a ‘final girl/boy’ to face off against the villain.
Along with the butterfly effect, the game also tailors aspects of its horrors specifically to the player. Each “chapter” of the game begins as a session with a mysterious psychiatrist named Dr. Hill who asks the player to answer questions about various images and scenarios. Depending on what personal insights are revealed, the game will modify certain scenes or jumpscares to reflect the appointment with Dr. Hill. For example, if a player expresses that they are more afraid of needles than storms or dogs, the Psycho will end up using a syringe to incapacite another character instead of a mask filled with sleeping gas. Through the modifications of these cutscenes, the game further subverts its role as a supposedly distanced narrative.
This transgressive sense of metalepsis upsets the boundaries of what is and isn’t within the game. In addition to the emphasis put on player choice and expression, the game uses a form of hypermediacy to further this confusion between the in-game and outside world. This is reflected through one of my favorite mechanics, the “Don’t Move” feature. When one of the antagonists is critically near, players are instructed to hold their Dualshock controllers still until the threat passes. See the video below for a compilation of “Don’t Move” moments.
Unlike a traditional horror film where a spectator may yell, “Don’t go in there!” or “Don’t do that!” to no avail, Until Dawn puts the character’s survival literally into the hands of the player, both reminding them of the medium and further emphasizing the importance of the player/author’s actions.
Mental illness and societal ignorance it is also a topic explored by Until Dawn. By the climax of the game, it is revealed that one of the main character’s, Josh, is actually the masked psycho figure. If players choose to read/watch collectible notes and videotapes, they’ll learn that Josh is suffering from schizophrenia and is wrongly being treated for depression by his psychiatrists, including the aforementioned Dr. Hill. Although the Wendigo monster is a capable and frightening killer, the game situates the true evil as a medical system that doesn’t know enough, or perhaps doesn’t care enough to provide adequate treatment for people like Josh, a character who ends up dead regardless of the choices made. On the other end of the aesthetic spectrum is Doki Doki Literature Club, another video game that has sparked a discussion surrounding mental illness.
On the surface, Doki Doki Literature Club is an entirely different beast. This anime-style PC game brands itself as a cute, brightly-colored dating sim. The story follows a male protagonist who is invited by his childhood best friend to join their school’s literature club. After joining the club, the player is led through mini-games and dialogue with the four female members. Once the player finds a distressing poem written by their best friend, Sayori, the game’s façade quickly cracks, revealing a psychological horror game that relies on metalepsis and heightened self-reflexivity.
Similar to Until Dawn, this game effectively rebels against all expectations of a typical Dating Sim. Although the main point of the first mini-game filled hour is to develop relationships with the girls, the main character’s role in the Literature Club quickly transforms from a possible romantic interest into that of an intervener. Through finding other poems, the player learns of the girls’ issues and troubled home lives, and must help them avoid self-destructive behaviors like self-harm and suicide.
In addition to this task, the user must figure out why the game keeps glitching and restarting. The developers at Team Salvato know how to successfully use hypermediation to create disturbing effects; after the childhood best friend of the main character commits suicide, the game’s graphics quickly devolve, with character animations twitching, glitching, or text boxes being replaced with gibberish. To combat these game-breaking mechanics and produce better endings for the characters, the player must venture outside the game-world to delete files associated with the game.
These hypermediative mechanics achieve a similar sense of metalepsis to Until Dawn, albeit in quite a different form. At the end of the game, the villain is revealed to be the self-aware NPC Monica, who is trying to create the perfect in-game world to live in with the protagonist forever. She admits to amplifying the effects of the other character’s mental health problems in an attempt to make the player “hate them”. To get to the true ending of the game, the player must figure out how to escape the in-game world and delete Monica’s character file permanently, thus ending the cycle of abuse.
Go to 58:30 to see the file-deleting mechanic in action.
Although both games are aesthetically dissimilar, they intersect in a few key ways. Both produce a sense of metalepsis through calculated hypermediation. Where Until Dawn invites players into the game via the Butterfly effect and the “Don’t Move” mechanic, Doki Doki Literature Club uses glitching and file-manipulation to jolt players out of the game. In her essay on metalepsis in popular culture, Karin Kukkonen describes these two related types of metalepsis. According to Kukkonen, “metalepsis can be ascending across narrative levels, when a character moves out of the fictional world and enters the real world…or it can be descending across narrative levels, when authors or narrators enter the fictional world.” (2). As the ‘author’ of the action in Until Dawn, the player “descends” into the realm of the game, where in DDLC, Monica ascends to the player’s reality, even going so far as to address them by their Steam account name.
The two games also intersect in their sympathetic approaches to the topic of mental illness. Doki Doki Literature Club has been praised for its “clear and frank exploration of mental health” (Rose). Central to the narrative is how each character experiences their respective mental illness. In their role as friend and comforter, the main character must listen to and respond appropriately to their friends’ admissions of depression and suicidal thoughts. And although the game admits that these symptoms are being artificially exaggerated by Monica, the game “refuses to exploit mental health as a mechanic, or even as a gamble” (Rose). The literature club girls are all victims of circumstance; the player is pushed to help them not to gain experience or in-game currency, but because they care about their well-being.
Although Until Dawn ultimately expresses a similar attitude regarding Josh, the way his character is framed for much of the game is steeped in harmful tropes. In The Butler(s) DID it – Dissociative Identity Disorder in Cinema, Peter Byrne writes, “[Many] misrepresentations of schizophrenia invoke the discourse: “schizophrenics” are either a violent threat or figures of fun. In addition to the distress such stereotypes cause, these misconceptions have a bearing on negative attitudes in the community…” (Byrne). For much of the game, Josh is situated in this oscillating binary of “figure of fun” and “threat”, with the distinction becoming more pronounced after the player finds recordings of him practicing his “Psycho” voice, thereby revealing that the masked figure was him all along. Left at this, the game would appear to promote harmful stereotypes (and for many casual players, it may seem as such). However, as mentioned prior, careful examination of in-game collectibles proves Josh to be as much a victim as the other characters, making his inevitable death all the more tragic.
In conclusion, Doki Doki Literature Club and Until Dawn offer two examples of how video games can create richly interactive horror experiences by implementing hypermediative mechanics. Additionally, these works have pushed back against traditional narrativessurrounding mental health, sparking critical conversations surrounding stigma, treatment, and how to further rehabilitate mental health’s presence in popular media.
Works Cited
Byrne, Peter. “The Butler(s) Did It – Dissociative Identity Disorder in Cinema.” Medical Humanities 27, no. 1 (June 1, 2001): 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1136/mh.27.1.26.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Einaudi, 2009.
Kukkonen, Karin, and Sonja Klimek. Metalepsis in Popular Culture. De Gruyter, 2011.
Rose, Victoria. “God of the Script: How Doki Doki Literature Club Gets Mental Health Right.” Medium.com, 16 Dec. 2017, medium.com/@riningear/god-of-the-script-how-doki-doki-literature-club-gets-mental-health-right-76762a7806c0.