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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Censorship Report: Monika Wins

Engadget reports:

Google has removed popular game Doki Doki Literature Club! from the Play Store. According to Dan Salvato, who led its development team, and publisher Serenity Forge, Google told them the visual novel was removed because it violated its Terms of Service in its depiction of sensitive themes... Its free version, which came out first, has been downloaded at least 30 million times, while the paid “Plus” version has had at least one million downloads. The visual novel has repeatedly made Engadget’s lists of favorite games over the years.

Doki Doki Literature Club, typically abbreviated as DDLC for everyone's sanity, features a nameless and voiceless protagonist invited to the titular book club by childhood best friend and cheerful optimist Sayori. There, he meets the blunt and emotional Natsuki, the shy and dour Yuri, and the president of the club, Monika. Okay, you get the picture, this is a visual novel with an M17+ rating, is it just another one of those skeevy skirt-chaser simulators, pulled for the standard reasons?

... not quite.

[spoiler warning]

DDLC starts out looking like a shovelware relationship builder, but at the end of Act 1, Sayori's hanged herself, and then after a long moment with the protagonist trapped in a room with the corpse, the day resets, except there's only four members of the club now. There's no sign Sayori ever existed, and the game seems increasingly broken, with causality like 'who introduced the protagonist to the club' no longer needing or having answers. The other club members seem weirder, with Yuri's slightly gothy mannerisms have exaggerated to Charles Manson fangirl levels, up to and including stabbing herself to death. Natsuki goes from mild tsundere to making Evangelion's Asuka seem well-adjusted, and disappears, too.

Monika's happy to see you, though. As a side effect of becoming president of the book club, she's become aware she's in a game and of the player being a separate being from the player character, and indeed finds it painful when the game is turned off or when she's sidelined. Which was a bit rough, since she's meant as a side character that just facilitate the other three girls; their deaths and deletions reflect Monika's unskilled attempts to make a romance route for herself that never existed. Eventually, it turns into a suicidal cosmic temper tantrum, where Monika taunts the player about her own character file.

That is to say, it's less erotic and more psychological horror.

It's not exactly a great game, in my opinion, even by the low standards of RenPy (later converted to Unity) games: the main gimmick goes a little long, the contrast between in-game and metafictional psychological horror can get a little jank, and the characters are pretty shallow even before Act 2. But at the time of original release, it was a moderately clever take on a field that had been swamped by extreme gore, jump scares, and/or bad Puella Magi imitators. In particular, it had a nuanced (if somewhat overcome by the metafictional components) take on mental health, depression, and the need for connection.

So it was a bit of a thing in fandom.

There's a possibility that Google and Serenity Forge will be able to come to some agreement, but as funny as getting Nice Boat'd in the middle of a sleepover would be, the most plausibly disagreeable scenes are pretty central to the story. At minimum, I doubt the game will be back without some censorship. And the Android environment, for better or (much more common) worse, is an extremely common one, so that's not a small hit to the author's reach.

It doesn't matter that much, since the game's still available on Steam, direct download, the Nintendo eShop, iOS store, yada. For now. Hell, you can even sideload an APK. Kinda, for now. And it's just one game, just as every other case was just one game. We don't - and won't - know whether this was just one pointy-headed content reviewer, some broad Karen-led whisper campaign, or a government regulator calling in the implication. It's not even that noteworthy for its 'tameness': while DDLC is relatively low on sexuality, it is still pretty mature from a violence and language perspective, and other marketplaces have been willing to pretty aggressively censor tame or tamer sexual content (oh no not a nipple). Conservatives have clearer-cut and more permanent examples of overtly political censorship.

But I highlight it to repeat an old point: you might well not be interested in most cases of censorship, but censorship as a movement will eventually be interested in you. Its very ability to salami-slice out stuff you don't care about is what makes it able to crush the singular you whenever your turn comes.

Google is evil spyware and many of their practices would be illegal in a sensible country. They scheme for monopoly, they interfere with democratic elections through perturbing search results, they violate privacy by proactively spying on users and secretly handing over data to malicious parties, they outsource tons of their employment to foreign countries, and the list goes on. I hope this latest in Google's bad behavior drives people to alternatives.

they outsource tons of their employment to foreign countries

Truly despicable.

They're like a tick on a dog.

As an alternative to Google search, I recommend Kagi.

Kagi

I personally got a really bad feeling about Kagi after reading this thread on /г/privacy.

The first quote OP pulls might just be unfortunately phrased:

In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized... AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data...

But the second one is harder to dismiss:

We did not say we maintain anonmity [sic.], but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.

The anonymity/privacy distinction they're drawing here is gross. I honestly do not care about whatever official privacy policies they have up on their website. Their whole business model is built on trust, and I can't trust Kagi when the CEO himself says something like this. I know, here, Vlad's responding to a comment about Kagi being a paid service. But this isn't inherently antithetical to anonymity. VPNs manage. Mullvad accepts XMR and doesn't ask for an email address. Kagi does neither.

I'll quote in full (because it's, again, a really bad look for Kagi) this paragraph from a post (click for screenshots) by an ex-Kagi user who was active in the Discord sever:

And Vlad's attitude is also where Kagi's dedication to privacy falls apart for me. Generally, if someone brings up a security or privacy concern, Vlad's response is either "trust me bro" or "that's not actually important". He has repeatedly stated that he feels less than 100 people on earth need full anonymity in a search engine (he has never, that I could find, explained where he got this number or idea from). He believes that email addresses don't count as personally identifiable information, because you can simply use a burner account. If you say that you wouldn't want Kagi using information from your theoretical Kagi Email Address in your search results, and would rather have a Proton-style privacy focused email? He says that there's nothing to worry about, Kagi wouldn't do anything bad with your data. If you bring up "what if Kagi gets sold to someone else?" He says well, if they sold to someone who did something bad with your data, they'd lose all of their privacy focused customers, so clearly they'd never do that. Basically anything where you say "I don't want someone to have this data about what I'm doing in a search engine", his reply is "well, we wouldn't do anything with this information." A lot of questions about what information Kagi collects on people is met with either saying nothing (which isn't true, they connect your account to an email address for payments, since it's a paid service), or saying he isn't sure, or saying it doesn't matter because they won't use it anyway. Asking what data Stripe collects on them through Kagi, and more importantly what data Stripe sends back TO Kagi, also gets you a vague "I don't know" answer. He doesn't entertain any discussions about GDPR because he thinks they have nothing that applies anyway. Questions about what would happen if the government tried to force him to collect information about users are just brushed away with "well we'd simply close the company", although he also notes that he has no problem with criminals being caught through their searches and doesn't want criminals using the platform.

But the second one is harder to dismiss:

We did not say we maintain anonmity [sic.], but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.

According to the thread you linked, that statement is about payment processing, not about the privacy of what you searched for.

Indeed, as I said:

I know, here, Vlad's responding to a comment about Kagi being a paid service. But this isn't inherently antithetical to anonymity. VPNs manage. Mullvad accepts XMR and doesn't ask for an email address. Kagi does neither.

My point is that you don't have to collect this data in the first place. You don't have to "know everything" about your customers. VPNs have a working anonymous monetization model. Which matters all the more here because the CEO seemingly does not understand very basic GDPR laws and can't be trusted with personal information.

Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII.

But how, exactly, is Kagi determining which emails are "random" and which are personal? They can't possibly know this. And yet, as far as I can tell, Vlad has said this thing about emails multiple times online.

Seconded. I pay for it and it's worth every penny. It's the only thing I've found which is on par with how Google used to be.

I recommended that here recently too. It uses Google’s API, and it’s worth paying for. Otherwise I recommend Startpage to people.

So, this is where we're at, huh. Things that were basic and readily accessible have been ruined to the point to get anything worthwhile, you have to pay money for it, now.

The future is absolute dogshit.

(Yes, yes, I get it, if you're not paying money for it you are the product blah blah blah. Atleast allow me a moment to scream to the heavens when I witness how far we've fallen from greatness.)

Everyone wants what they want. Nobody ever wants to pay for it. You end up paying regardless, one way or another; even with Google. Yeah it’s a minor annoyance, but I have no problems paying for Kagi. The benefit I get is much greater than the cost.

Yes, yes, I get it, if you're not paying money for it you are the product blah blah blah.

You can't really just fast talk through that point though, at no point in history was Google a charity. They were never offering free search because they just believed it was the right thing to do for humanity. They've always believed they were getting something valuable out of the exchange, either immediately or in the future, and that the trade as it used to be became unattractive for one of the parties is not some sort of decadence, just an evolving situation.

At least with a straightforward transaction as with Kagi, it's very clear what they're getting, and as long as they keep getting that the deal is unlikely to change.

So? The point was that Google, despite being a service expecting return, was still good. That's what allowed the entire fiction to function - you got an actual good product that searched the interweb while google got to collect advertising info and revenue.

Now google search has just devolved down into pure advertisement where businesses quietly pay google in the background to make sure thier results are at the top, regardless of wether you want them or no. If you want anything comparable(presumably), you now have to pay upfront. ...except, going by what people are saying in this thread, no, it's not all that and a bag of chips for various reasons, which makes it doubly-insulting.

Everything gets worse, nothing gets better. You can't even pay for better anymore.

Like I said. The future is absolute dogshit.

From an artistic standpoint, censorship of this particular game is quite bad. It is one of few games I know about that manages to pretend it is haunted in a way that works alongside both gameplay and storytelling. I think the fiddling with game files, while brief, is reasonably well done and shows promise as a mechanic for future games. The placement of secret messages in the files, and the fact that deleting characters kills them and changes the gamestate is interesting. Removing it from the store means that it is less likely for future devs to see it and get inspired. Which is a shame, since I would like to see the boundaries of the "haunted game" genre be pushed.

Of course, DDLC is old enough for everyone interested to have played it at this point, but it certainly does seem unnecessary and like a step in the wrong direction for such a large platform to remove it. Especially when many other horror games still exist on the platform.

Unfortunately the mobile and console versions of DDLC compromise pretty heavily on the game-file fiddling aspect. You still have to go through the same motions, but via a clunky, restrictive in-universe file browser implemented in Unity rather than your actual computer. It sucks a lot of impact out of things by reminding you that you're playing a somewhat clumsily-written horror game, in a moment that was originally pretty immersive and clever.

I almost think it's a net good to take down the mobile version of DDLC, if it directs more people towards the superior original PC version. (Of course, that's definitely not why Google took it down, and Google's actual reasons are probably bad enough to merit opposing this move regardless of its immediate effects.)

Not just the mobile and console versions - the paid PC version, too. I would add that when Dan Salvato made the paid version, he would have been well-advised to flesh the file manipulation mechanics out instead of leaving them exactly as shallow but also making them clearly fake. Even the original, good DDLC release suffers considerably, I think, from how easy it is to sequence break with it, including accidentally, and how poorly the game is built to handle your going off the rails with it even though it is literally textually supposed to be "the game going off the rails". Compare and contrast how, say, Portal remains a very linear game even after you "escape the test".

While this certainly reflects badly on Google and raises the cultural temperature on censorship in general, I don't think it'll directly reduce availability of the game all that much; as far as I know, Google was never a major provider of the game in the first place. In any case, the developers already repeatedly cucked to censors years ago both to appease their friend circles (by making the disclaimers around the game increasingly heavy-handed and adding trigger warning settings plainly incompatible with the nature of the game) and to get the game access to consoles (by slightly toning down miscellaneous scenes for bespoke console releases).

as far as I know, Google was never a major provider of the game in the first place

The game wasn't available on Android (or iOS) at all until four months ago. I remember it doing pretty well when it came out -- I think it hit a million downloads -- but not nearly as well as the original Steam/Itch release back in 2017.

Not about the censorship, but I love the Yahtzee review of DDLC and wanted to share it.

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