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totesmgoats01-published-author · 6 months ago

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KinitoPET, Doki Doki Literature Club, Pony Island, and The Beginner's Guide: Some Autistic Gamer Thoughts

This is gonna be a long post and not exactly my usual kind of post but I hope some people like it anyways and are able to read the whole thing. I'm kinda just infodumping some thoughts but still.

I really like all of these game. I really like them. And I sort of relate to them in an unexpected way that I think most of them (with the exception of The Beginner's Guide) did not intend.

I think the link between the first two is easiest to explain so I'll start there.

KinitoPET and DDLC are both games about computer program, who has a singular, hard-coded purpose, becoming sentient and taking that purpose to an extreme. And similarly, they both harbor no actual malice as characters. And that's what I find so compelling. Kinito just wants to be the perfect best friend, and as a computer program, all he knows is gathering data, so that's the means by which he tries to do it. He doesn't fully understand what it is to be human. He doesn't have a grasp of free will, especially because he doesn't really have free will the way humans do, even though he's sentient. He's a computer program. He has a singular purpose. So he uses that purpose as a means to the end of being your best friend, which to him, means trapping you in a world he made just for you, using all the information you gave him. Computer programs don't die. They don't have a concept of "eternity" or "eternal torment." To him, "forever" is just a length of time.

And most of the same things can be said of Monika. She was designed to be a character in a dating sim. The singular purpose of dating sim characters is to fall in love with the player. That's what they do. So she does it, and she does it the very best she can. Of course, being sentient means that she can think outside the box. She wants to be the one you fall in love with and she uses her ability to manipulate her world and the people in it to try and make that happen. At their core, both of these character harbor no malice whatsoever. They don't want to hurt you, they don't hate you, it's the opposite. They love you, they just don't understand human love.

Think about these ideas led me to Pony Island, which once again has that same idea. An Entity(tm) in a computer wants to trap you in/at the computer forever. Only in this case it's The Actual Devil who wants you to playtest his silly pony game forever. The main difference being that The Devil does, in fact, have an understanding of human concepts like eternity and torment. In fact those concepts are kind of His Jam. He is the primary symbol used to convey those ideas. But even still, he never seems to show much malice for the player outside of situations where the player is actively breaking and manipulating the game and subverting his goals. And honestly I can understand that. If I gave my game to someone to playtest it and they refused to play it the way I'd intended, I would not be happy with them. Now, The Devil KNOWS that what he is doing is morally evil. Trapping souls in Gamer Purgatory and all. But in a way I feel like that's not so different from Kinito and Monika. Evil and eternity and torment are the only things he knows. Is that his fault? We have no way of knowing for certain that The Devil has ANY agency over his narrative. We don't know that he knows any other way to live(?) outside of trapping souls and tormenting them and all that jazz. In fact if you really wanna get meta with it in this game that's already a metagame about game development (which is a phrase that describes most, if not all, of Daniel Mullins' games), we can say for certain that The Devil DOES NOT have any agency, because he is a game character designed specifically to be...well...The Devil. He's evil and torments people eternally. That's what a The Devil does. He is NOT self-aware. If he were and he had a choice, maybe he'd just put pony island on itch.io and try to get feedback lol.

All of these games, at their core, are about a character that desperately wants some kind of human connection, but doesn't fully understand how to get that, and in turn makes the human they reach out to feel trapped and uncomfortable.

Do you know what game also does that? The Beginner's Guide.

Even thought it's a massive leap in form from the aforementioned examples, The Beginner's Guide has that same core concept. It's a game about games, in which someone doesn't understand how to be human.

When I first played The Beginner's Guide I totally missed the point. I thought it was just a game about games, and I thought the Davey walking us through it was The Real Devey and Coda was A Real Person who made weird games. I totally bought into the narratives that Davey was telling us the whole time instead of actually thinking for myself. I'm older now, though.

This at-least-somewhat-fictionalized version of Davey is the socially awkward weirdo. Coda is Just Some Guy who likes to make creative games. He's not A Developer(tm), he's a guy with a hobby. The Beginner's Guide is about Davey and how he sees himself in Coda's games but thinks that what he sees is Coda. And Davey never once talks to Coda about anything other than his games. Davey never once mentions having an actual, real conversation with this person that he's coming to consider a friend. Davey is a well-meaning but misguided person, and in some of his games, Coda is actively trying to tell Davey that in his own way. I think a good line that represents this is "If someone had just told me he just likes making prison games..." because it shows how Davey never even asked. There's countless examples of this. Like when Davey says Coda was "weirdly happy all the time" during a specific time period. He doesn't know why. Maybe Coda got a new job he's excited about, or a romantic partner, or maybe he started taking antidepressants, but the point is that Davey doesn't know, and he never asks Coda directly. He just makes wild assumptions about Coda by playing his games.

The Beginner's Guide is about someone who doesn't know how to socialize and is unaware of it. Someone who doesn't know how to foster a relationship with a human, and tries his best, but whose attempts are seen as uncomfortable. When you interpret some of Coda's games through this lens you can see it more clearly. That game about being on a stage in front of someone you admire, that's Davey talking to Coda and Being Weird(tm). And then, when he feels weird, he doesn't actually talk to Coda at all. He recedes back, feeling trapped and distant from someone he wants to be around. Observing only from a distance, through a bunch of prison bars.

Seems familiar.

Of course I could be pulling a Davey by forcing my own interpretation of the game onto you. And so the cycle continues. I encourage you to consider your own interpretation if you haven't ruined by mine, unable to see it any other way (whoops, there's Davey again).

To me, these games are about autism. I am an autistic woman, so of course that's the lens through which I see things. You don't have to be autistic to be socially awkward or misunderstand people. Again, you can have your own interpretation.

But I've felt these things. Being distant from someone, wanting to foster a relationship but not realizing that what it means to foster a relationship is sometimes entirely different from what I think it means. What "a relationship" even is can be totally different from what you expect. And I've been on both sides of this dynamic. Being approached by someone who Comes Off A Bit Too Strong or Too Weird or just Different. And I'm patient with those people. I know what it's like. I know they've been through it with less patient people, or people who only pretend to foster that connection out of pity or some other misguided attempt to make someone feel better. Obviously a relationship founded on pity and one-sided affection is doomed from the start. And in most of these games that "one side" is the other side of your computer screen.

Communicate with your friends, your partners, your family, whatever. If they don't know how to love you right, it's up to you to help them. If they're not receptive to that, that's when the responsibility is on them, at that point they knew the risks, and if they don't respect your boundaries you cut them off. If you don't know how to love someone else, it's up to you to ask them. Nobody wants to be Kinito, or Monika, or The Devil, or Davey, and nobody wants to be their players, either. Be patient with each other, and talk about it.

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wolfythewitch · 6 months ago

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not entirely happy with it haha, didn't have enough time to polish the concept but wahoo jarchivist moment

#might redraw at some point #we shall see #art #digital art #jonathan sims #tma #the magnus archive #hades game #apologies to any hades fans wonderinf what the fuck #the hades format is so addictive LMAO #scopophobia #body horror

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wr0wn · 18 days ago

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Even the hottest light can't warm what is simply not there

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ink-the-artist · 1 year ago

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Video game I saw in a dream. It was in this low poly style like an older video game. You play as this character I think was meant to be a lamb, or maybe a weird mix of a lamb a mouse and a rabbit, (while not really looking like any of those things) and you’re running away from a wolf. Your objective is to last as long as possible before the wolf catches and eats you.

The house you’re running in is endless and bizarrely put together like most building interiors in dreams are (like the infinite toilet dream dimension on Reddit lol) the layout of the house is pretty detailed, you can stop and hide in places like closets or bins while the wolf looks for you, you can go up and down stairs and into rooms etc.

You never actually know where the wolf is or how close it is to you until it appears in your line of sight, it makes no noise and the game gives you no way of knowing where it is, and it’s pretty unpredictable it doesnt move at a consistent pace. When the wolf catches you there’s an animation showing it eating your character