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Doki Doki Literature Club Redesign Controversy as a «mise en abyme» of Certain Culture War Issues
I saw a small-scale controversy on Tik-tok (ugggggh, I know right?) recently. First let me give the background. Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) is a knock-off visual novel, in the same way that California Champagne is a knock off of Champagne. Visual novels are the video game version of anime and manga and as a consequence, they can only be produced in the Japan region of Asia. They are not really video games, but more like something in between a manga and an anime delivered in .exe format on a computer. The only dynamic element they have is a tradition of branching choices, which anime and manga cannot do.
Anyway, it is not that important that DDLC is a knockoff, except that it provides some background for the type of people who like it. The art of this knockoff is quite faithful to the real deal, but the story is not. I have never played it and am not planning on it, because I am a snob, but from what I have gathered, it's like the anime girl version of Depression Quest. It also features a lot of annoying deconstructive quotes like, «these girls are like if you took all of the traits that make someone human and just took the cute bits» said by the player character in the middle of it. Quite rude for some foreigners to do, no? Kind of like making something in California called Champagne but you somehow criticize the concept of using Chardonnay grapes and making it have gas in it while you're at it, while taking the alcohol out of it for tee-totaling Americans. Almost like it's a product of hatred for the original thing.
Well, it will turn out that you will of course get a lot of fans that hate the fact that it comes in a wine bottle. The wine bottle of DDLC is that the characters look like cartoon, moe, teenage anime girls. They have round faces, big eyes, cute mannerisms, and wear bows and and school uniforms for most of the VN, as is customary.
Here are some examples of official art from the game.
Now, what if they were designed to look like real girls? Obviously they would look like this, right (edit: this is one of the original redesign posts)? Well no, because they obviously look like cross dressing men here. The fact that those redesigns look like men is now being denied by real girls who look nothing like those men.
I can only describe this as gas-lighting. And it perfectly parallels the way gender discourse from the left happens in the broader culture war. Transgenderism of course is the biggest gas-light of them all, but feminism broadly is filled with some of the most bald-faced untruths of any political ideology. Many feminists believe women aren't mentally different from men, and can beat men in fights, for example. On the trans issue, we are supposed to believe that people can be born the wrong sex, that sex doesn't exist, that there is, in a meaningful sense, more than two sexes, and that sex changing operations are good for people. To me, these claims are about as credible as the claim that those redesigns look at all like 16 year old girls with two X chromosomes and not cross-dressing men. It is hard for me to understand how blind or dishonest one must be to really make those claims.
To add to the debating about whether Western visual novels are actually visual novels, or if they have to be Japanese...
Trends for video game genres are largely driven by technical limitations, not just by creativity, and for the purpose of technical limitations, VNs count among this. Japan's domestic PC market in the 80s and 90s was dominated by the domestic PC-98. These systems were designed with rendering Japanese text in mind, and because of that, required much higher resolution displays than comparable Western computers. However, their actual processing performance was no better. Turns out this is the exact combination that leads to Visual Novels, which are well-placed to take advantage of the combination of big displays and comparatively weak processing power by focusing on exquisitely detailed, static sprite art.
Western developers skipped this stage of technical limitations and went for WRPGs for their branching-choice games instead. Early ones driven more by gameplay than plot, and once the graphics caught up there was no need to dump the gameplay in favour of artwork by then.
As for whether they were drawing the DDLC characters as crossdressing men, when it comes to anime, crossdressing men are often just drawn identically to women anyway.
A lot of the late 80s / early 90s western games had self limited graphics because the artists were apparently incapable of using custom palettes and the companies had outdated ideas about common graphics hardware. See eg. Sierra games of the late 80s, many of which had basically CGA level graphics even though EGA had been the norm for many years by then and VGA had been fast becoming the de facto standard (and everyone upgraded their PC every 2-4 years, so having to support particularly old computers just wasn't a thing).
Huh? I don't think this is right. Sierra was one of the companies pushing graphical standards in games, from EGA to VGA to FMV cutscenes. Even King's Quest I (their breakout hit) was released in EGA on MS-DOS systems in the mid-80s, so I'm actually not sure what game with "CGA-level graphics" you're referring to.
If they had been, they wouldn't have released multiple games using CGA based graphics engine by the time VGA was available.
That's not EGA. That's a tweaked CGA text mode which is why the resolution is only 160x200 (with a fixed palette) instead of 320x200 and why the graphics look like ass.
King Quest IV was the first KQ to use EGA graphics. By the time KQ V (AFAIK the first sierra game to use VGA) was released the graphics could have looked like this on a run of the mill new 286 PC (without animation obviously). I should know because the only reason our first PC (bought by my single mother in 1990, so far from being high end) couldn't handle 640x480x256 mode was that the particular Triden 8900 chipset had a hw bug that made it require a multisync monitor.
By 1988 common PC tech (VGA) allowed up to 320x400x256 resolution (or 640x480x16) - not that almost any game took advantage of it (I remember Scorched Earth did in 91-92 and that was written by a lone hobbyist). It took forever for games to switch to using 640x480x256 resolution with Warcraft 2 being one of the first (1995).
You can see similar stagnation on the sound side where almost every game was composed by people sitting in their ivory tower studios for hardware that almost nobody had (Roland MT-32 & later General MIDI) and then degraded with anemic results on the hardware people actually used (Soundblaster). On those rare occasions the game devs and composers had a clue, the results were legendary (the second originally composed for amiga but the only difference is in how grungy the sound quality is).
Ps. If we want to get technical, this level of graphics were strictly speaking possible on 1983 PC hardware (I recommend muting the video, it sounds like ass). Compared to that Kings Quest 1 graphics look like something a first grader might draw. What was that about "pushing graphical standards"?
From the Wikipedia page for King's Quest I:
Not to mention that the screenshots you linked are distinctly labeled CGA and EGA (and include the comment "Very impressive graphics for its time")...
And VGA was absolutely not common in 1988 (it wasn't even invented until 1987, and it certainly took longer than one year to become highly adopted). The first VGA game I ever played was The Secret of Monkey Island, which was released in 1990. Wing Commander and King's Quest V, other major VGA releases, were also in late 1990. It's insane that you're linking to a screenshot of a 1998 game (when friggin' Pentiums were already obsolete) as an example of "what was possible" on a 286. You also can't compare even the contemporary demoscene (let alone modern retro demos) to game graphics of the time - it wasn't until Id Software's era that games started to catch up technically. Note that this had nothing to do with artists being "incapable of using custom palettes".
I'm guessing you're younger than me and didn't grow up in this era, which is why you're muddling the timeline so badly...? It was a different world. What was technically possible had little to do with what games actually looked like. (Note that game logic was also a significant part of the CPU's load, cutting into anything you could do with graphics.) During my childhood, Sierra games were the best looking games I ever had access to. If you want to argue this further, please give even one example of a contemporary game that looked better.
(Can't comment on the sound side. I was not an audiophile.)
If you look at them, the EGA image uses the same low resolution blocky graphics as the CGA, just with a different palette (same as in the Tandy version I believe). That limitation was present throughout all Sierra games made with their AGI interpreter until they finally moved to actual EGA graphics with SCI in Kings Quest IV. Of course even those were much lower resolution than what EGA was capable of.
It was common enough that not only were there multiple super VGA adapters on the market but that the industry recognized the need to standardize them in late 1988. Hells, there was even a ”laptop” with vga by 1988 (My mom used to take it home from work occasionally on weekends, so that was my personal hands-on introduction to PC and programming - in addition to playing games at friends’). And besides, we're talking about "pushing graphical standards in games".
If Sierra had actually pushed graphical standards (as opposed to persistently catering to the lowest common denominator), by 1988 the games could have looked like the second and third images here. First is original low res game graphics, 2nd is how it could have looked on VGA, 3rd is how that could have been displayed on EGA without requiring any additional storage and the 4th is Nano Banana reimagining of the original that was used to produce 2nd and 3rd images by downscaling to 640x350 and dithering to 16 color images with a fixed palette (not even optimized per screen) - all images upscaled to 1280x800 for ease of comparison and avoiding aspect ratio problems. In fact the games could have looked like the 3rd image by 1985 as far as the hardware was concerned (EGA was released in late 84).
Not only did I grow up in that era but by 1991 I was writing VGA graphics code, so I was familiar with what the hardware had been capable of with reasonable effort since the introduction of VGA (at least for paid developers who had actual budget to buy hw documentation books etc). Obviously I wasn't writing anything professional level, but did know enough to use the magic spells
mov ax, 13h; int 10handxor ax, ax; mov dx, 3c8h; out dx, al; inc dx; rep outsb(If you know you know and if you don't you may not be qualified to judge the topic in the first place).Sure, for an action game. For adventure games like the ones Sierra made? Not even remotely because they essentially had no running logic until you typed something in the parser or changed screens.
Defender of the Crown from 1987. Note the lack of fugly blockiness.
Falcon, also from 1987. Not that the graphics are pretty as such but at least they aren't a horrible blockfest.
For VGA graphics, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade from 1989 - over a year before Kings Quest V.
A-10 Tank Killer, also from 1989.
But like I said earlier, "A lot of the late 80s / early 90s western games had self limited graphics because the artists were apparently incapable of using custom palettes and the companies had outdated ideas about common graphics hardware." The problems were industry wide and it took until the mid 90s before parts of the industry started really pushing the envelope, Doom being one of the early examples.
Oh, believe me, I very much know, and your elitism is hilariously cringe. "I coded in mode 13h, you ignorant plebes wouldn't understand what good graphics are."
Going to ignore your technobabble (though the screenshots are fun), because it's irrelevant if there were no actual games being produced looking like that. Thanks for at least moving on to some examples, which (of course) look nothing like the first half of your post. I'll give you Defender of the Crown (though you picked a static screenshot - the action screenshots don't look that good), which does outclass anything Sierra had until KQ4. Falcon and A-10 Tank Killer? Meh. As for Lucasfilm/Lucasarts, I agree wholeheartedly. They were also a company that was pushing graphics standards in games - I did mention Monkey Island, after all, and I sadly missed out on Indiana Jones and Loom. Of course, when Sierra caught up, it also produced absolutely gorgeous games like Gabriel Knight and King's Quest VI.
So I'm genuinely putting some effort in here, trying to parse through your tech snobbery and find some interpretation that matches the reality I experienced. I think your point is that the games industry as a whole wasn't using graphics hardware to its absolute fullest in the same way that the demoscene would (a few years later). And I can agree with that! It's pretty amazing what you can get old tech to do with modern knowledge (and no need to attach it to a playable game); hell, there are C64 demos that blow my mind.
It doesn't change that Sierra was at the forefront of graphics in the games industry, and you're absolutely wrong that it's because the artists were stupid and lazy. Tools didn't exist, market pressures did. Art, design, and playability (and being able to support what you sneeringly called "the lowest common denominator") mattered more than raw graphics (this was the era when the underpowered NES was dominant, after all). Sorry, but if you were there in the 1980s you wouldn't have upended the industry with your brilliance, any more than you would have been a king in the 1300s. It was a different world and you're not smarter than everybody who was living in it. Even if you did code in assembly (gasp)!
I'm not nearly as versed in the technical side as you, but my impression from reading this blog is that you're sort of both right? It's just that the 1980s were such a rapid time for PC tech development that it really depends on which particular year you look at. At the very start, in 1980, Sierra made a splash simply by having graphics at all, when there weren't a lot of computer games for sale on the Apple II, and the few that existed were either text adventures (still limited even in how much text they could have) or something like a port of breakout with very limited graphics. You could do better with arcade cabinets or video game consoles, of course, but those were specialized machines, not a general purpose PC. In that world, the graphics of [early Sierra]](https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/the-wizard-and-the-princess-part-1/) really stood out, and it took some skilled hacking from Ken Williams to make it work.
But then Sierra turned into a real company, with pressure to steadily release new games, so they stopped trying to push the edge in graphics and just churned out varients of more or less the same game, using their tried and true EGA-based engine that the made for the first King's Quest in 1984. Which looked nice enough when it first came out, but quickly aged, so their main claim was being easy enough to work with that non-hackers could make games, and they could sell to a wide audience.
But then at some point that formula stopped working, and they had to really double down again on graphics with their VGA games in the early 90s. Which weren't exactly a huge technical breakthough- the tech already existed to support it, and would have been even better on the Amiga- but they did a great job of just hiring skilled artists to make the pixel art look amazing, even if it wasn't super high tech. So then they got a new lease on life as a company making relatively simple, easy, family-friendly games which looked gorgeous but were also easy to run on less expensive computers.
Would you agree with that summary of the timeline?
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