User blog:AustinDR/So, Doki Doki....

So I was looking through some of my groups on Facebook, and I had received a notification in my newsfeed about a father accusing an online game of leading his 15-year-old son into committing suicide, alleging that the game was linked to his mobile phone, and he would receive notifications about it throughout the night. The game in question is called "Doki Doki Literature Club" which had actually released last year and has since been downloaded 2,000,000 times. While most of you may know about this game already, I'm sure there are a few who are unaware about the basic premise.

Doki Doki Literature Club! is an online visual novel revolving around four girls - Sayori, Yuri, Natsuki, and Monika - and your main objective is to woo the girls, particularly by writing poems using words that relate to each character. At first glance, the game seems pretty straightforward; just your run of the mill romance game. However, there is always darkness lurking beneath the surface. What may seem as just a romance game is actually in truth a psychological horror game delving into subject matter that is objectively not appropriate for children. Some of these topics go into depression, cutting oneself to relieve stress, and implied child abuse. Of course, that's nothing to the biggest reveal of the game being that Monika, the club president, is revealed to be fully aware of her existence as a fictional character in a game and as such, she deliberately was editing the script so that she could end up with the player while also amplifying the negative traits of her friends before deleting them.

Even though Stream already had a content warning on the game description, this was apparently not enough in regards to this situation. In my personal opinion, video games could be impressionable to a degree, but you cannot blame a game for the actions of the victim. When reading the article in regards to the game, the only thing that struck out to me was that the 15 year old boy most likely had a history of depression before playing the game. What I mean is that if the father knew that he was playing the game, and drawing the characters, it seems more that he's trying to shift blame from himself. I understand that parents can't be supervising their children 24/7, but if the boy really did have a change in behavior, it seemed that he should've taken precaution about it. As for the game, while it clearly didn't help that a potentially suicidal kid happened to play it, it is still not to blame for what one person did. That's the thing about suicide. There is no vindication with it, it is ultimately the person's decision. Sure, outside forces could manipulate the person's decision, but it nevertheless was put into action by the person.