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What I Learned From Creating an Overhauled “Game of Thrones” Board Game, Part 1

Back in November 2018, I decided to do a total rules overhaul for the Game of Thrones Board Game, which I titled A Board Game of Thrones: A Game of Thrones Board Game as a joke. Beginning with a single ten-hour brainstorming session that ended around 3 AM, I started laying out everything I wanted to do with the new game.

One of the driving factors of the project was the fact that the original game didn’t capture what made the HBO show so enamoring: the “Influence Track” seemed like a really shallow representation of Houses jockeying for subtle advantages over one another, possessing the Iron Throne wasn’t that big of a deal, and the majority of the gameplay revolved around your armies. Instead of feeling like you were playing as Littlefinger or Tywin Lannister, you were just a military general.

To me, Game of Thrones was like watching smart people play 4-D chess: while the wars were being fought abroad, characters were throwing wrenches into their enemies’ plans at home, too. A lot of this didn’t make it into the original game’s territory-control aspect. Sure, players could backstab one another and broker deals, but it wasn’t enough for me.

After about a month’s worth of work, I’d created a 10,000-word rules doc that introduced everything from brand-new Battle and “Scheme” cards to new Houses and army mechanics. From there, I tinkered with the project bit by bit, figuring out what new material components I needed to make the game work. After returning to it months later, I cut out about 3,000 words’ worth of mechanics from the rules, paring down the game to be more streamlined and intuitive.

Finally, I had the first playtest with some gamer friends of mine. The setup was messy, some of the mechanics needed fine-tuning, and we only made it through three game rounds in 5 hours, but by the end, I heard exactly the kind of reactions I was hoping for:

“Oh, so that means…man, this is cool!”

“That’s really interesting…wow…”

“This was fun! Tell me what you’re doing this again!”

For a very complex, high-investment, five-hour game that didn’t even end with anyone winning, it was a great first reaction. Here’s what I learned from the whole experience, from brainstorming to playtesting.

THE DESIGN PILLARS

At the heart of the original Game of Thrones Board Game was territory control: you build armies, you capture territories, and you fight other armies. My first task was retooling this aspect of the game so that it was one element among many that the player had to manage, partly inspired by this exchange between Tywin and Tyrion Lannister:

Tywin: You really think a crown gives you power?

Tyrion: No, I think armies give you power [but] Robb Stark had one, never lost a battle, and you defeated him all the same.

This exchange made me think about how clever rulers had to juggle multiple aspects of power, not just managing armies. The new pillars of the game became:

  • Territory control (creating and moving armies and capturing territories)
  • Kingdom management (managing resources and public approval)
  • Sabotage (damaging other players’ resources and game position)
  • Socializing (making deals, threats, and alliances between players)

Many of these pillars are the same as the base game, but were reimagined to more closely fit the spirit of Game of Thrones (or, at least, my favorite parts of it). I won’t cover all these pillars in depth here–instead, I’ll start by introducing some of the major framework changes I made to the game and my thoughts behind them.

Changing the Victory Conditions

One of my first decisions was to forego the original game’s victory condition of capturing a certain number of Strongholds scattered across the map and change it to capturing and holding the Iron Throne to gain victory points. This, in theory, meant that everyone’s attention would be focused on a single geographic area: King’s Landing.

This kind of King-of-the-Hill victory condition caused a dramatic shift in how the game was played. In early drafts of the redux, it meant that players (like Houses Baratheon and Lannister) who were closer to King’s Landing had an incredible advantage, while distant players (like Stark and Martell) seemed constantly at a disadvantage. It also created a negative gameplay loop:

In the early iterations of the redux, one player started the game controlling the Iron Throne. Simply capturing the Iron Throne from that player was enough to grant victory points, and holding the Throne for each Round after would grant a continual (but smaller) amount. This incentivized geographically close players to bum-rush King’s Landing and fight for the Throne, while the more distant players would follow in their wake, capturing vacant territories on their way to King’s Landing, taking the Throne from the current holder (weakened by the previous fighting), then fighting among themselves.

No matter the outcome, the game would become a constant cycle of mustering troops, marching on King’s Landing, deposing the weakened player holding it, and gaining victory points (as demonstrated through simulations I played against myself). If for some reason a bid for the Throne failed, that player was usually left lagging behind in VP for the rest of the game.

Ironically, the situation resembled Daenerys’ description of the ‘wheel of power’ in Westeros:

“Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell…they’re all just spokes on a wheel. This one’s on top, then that one’s on top and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground.”

To solve this, I implemented three new gameplay elements:

  • Fortifications
  • NPC forces occupying the Throne
  • Heirs
  • Removing the ‘capture’ bonus

First, I gave certain territories (including King’s Landing) Fortifications, which differ from the original game’s Fortifications. In this version, some territories cannot be captured unless they are attacked by a certain number of army Units. I set the minimum amount of Units to capture King’s Landing at 8, meaning players would need to either band together or muster a very large army over the course of several Rounds.

Second, I set up NPC-controlled Targaryen army Units in Crackclaw Point and King’s Landing at the beginning of the game and put the non-player Targaryen faction in control of the Throne. This prevented a player from starting the game with the Throne and created more barriers for the players to gain the Throne in the first few turns. Having to raise a large army to break through the Fortifications and then having to fight a large group of enemy Units required more planning and resources, and encouraged players to be more strategic.

Third, I made new rules so that each player started the game with three Character cards called Heirs. Upon capturing the Iron Throne, a player had to choose an Heir to become King or Queen, and upon losing control of the Throne, that Heir risks dying in the coup. If all three of a player’s Heirs die, they lose control of almost all of their territories and resources and have to build themselves back up from almost nothing. This disincentivized the constant cycle of gaining and losing the Throne, which would cause players to quickly burn through their Heirs and lose everything.

Finally, I removed the victory points for simply capturing the Iron Throne and instead granted the victory points to the player when they took and held the Throne for one full Game Round. The idea was that it was easier to take the Throne, but holding onto it took more skill and deftness, which is what I wanted to encourage in players.

This combination of factors was designed to make assaulting King’s Landing (and gaining victory points) much more of a strategic endeavor, one that would require careful planning and canny decision-making, as befits the spirit of Game of Thrones.

As for the geographic isolation of certain Houses, I’ll speak more about that later.

Revamping Territories and Resources

One of the keys to making the game more multi-faceted and true to the book/show was enlarging the resource management aspect of the game. To do this, I changed how players gained resources to build and support their armies (which I renamed “Units”): instead of capturing territories that had Supply markers on them, every territory produced a certain amount of Food, Gold, and/or Steel.

This immediately made the economy and resource management more complicated, since players had to keep track of three resources, each with its own use:

  • Food was mainly used to support Units
  • Gold was mainly used to build Units
  • Steel was mainly used to upgrade Units and build Warships

Because each territory provided different resources, players had to think more carefully about which territories were most valuable to them: did they need more Food or Gold next turn? How many Units could they build if they captured (or lost) this territory?

The design challenge of attaching a certain amount of resources to each territory was made easier by organizing them into Kingdoms. Instead of starting the game with most of the map unclaimed by any player, I decided to give each player control of a Kingdom (consisting of 4-5 territories each) right at the start. This meant that I had to figure out the amount of resources each player should start with, then divide these resources among the Kingdoms’ territories. Instead of distributing resources among territories randomly, players could reliably expect each Kingdom to have a Gold-producing territory, a Steel-producing territory, etc.

However, this resource management element would create difficulty when it came to strategizing and playing the game, due to the number and complexity of the material components. I’ll talk more about that later on.

Public Approval and Crises

When watching the show, I noticed how much the Noble Houses worried about the peasants rising up during times of war: because armies are expensive and resource-intensive, a war necessarily meant taking food out of the mouths of the common people. In the base game, however, it’s never really a concern–all your resources go straight to your armies.

This quote from Olenna Tyrell sums up the threat of neglecting the people:

“The people are hungry for more than just food. They crave distractions. And if we don’t provide them, they’ll create their own. And their distractions are likely to end with us being torn to pieces.”

To emulate this aspect of kingdom management, I introduced the Public Approval and Crisis mechanics, which incentivize players to divert resources away from their armies to take care of their Kingdoms.

The system works like this: over the course of the game, the players may raise their Public Approval Rating, which gives them benefits like drawing an extra card each turn or collecting extra resources each turn. One of the main ways Public Approval can be gained is by dealing with Crises, which randomly arise each Game Round and demand a certain amount of resources to solve (for example, a Steel Crisis requires 200 Steel to resolve). If the player solves the Crisis  before the end of the Round, they gain Public Approval. If not, they start incurring penalties, such as drawing less cards, etc.

Forcing players to spend resources on things other than their armies (and gaining benefits/penalties for doing so) means the player’s attention is split between the battlefront and homefront, and benefiting one may mean sacrificing the other. The randomness of the Crises means players need to keep a certain amount of all resources saved up, or risk losing the support of the people. Those who properly curry the favor of their subjects find themselves in a much strong position overall, and become much more efficient and powerful.

Conclusion to Part 1

These are some of the biggest structural changes I made to the game, but there are a lot more to discuss–how battles are fought, the new Phases for each round, the process of conscripting and maintaining soldiers, and the Scheme cards all represent fundamental changes to how the game is played.

I’ll cover some of those in the next installment, along with my thoughts on their design! In the meantime, you can view the current version of the Rules (along with a material list) here.

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Onitama and the Lotus Gambit

My favorite tabletop game of all time is Onitama, a martial arts-themed, chess-like game by Arcane Wonders. I was so inspired by its simplicity and elegance that I wanted to incorporate it in a story of mine, and this became the catalyst for a concept I called “the Lotus Gambit,” as well as a playable, real-life variant for the game.

PLAYING ONITAMA

In Onitama, players control four “student” pieces and one “master” piece on a 5×5 grid board. Players can win by either moving their master to the starting place of the opposing master (the “Way of the Stream”) or by capturing the opposing master with any of their pieces (the “Way of the Stone”). Like chess, you capture a piece by moving one of your pieces onto the same square.

However, unlike chess, your pieces don’t have set movements. Instead, there are five cards with different patterns on them, each of which is named for a different animal. When you use a card, you move one of your pieces according to its pattern, then pass that card to your opponent. Players always have two cards in front of them, giving them some flexibility in what moves they can make.

One of the things that makes the base game so fascinating is that there’s two levels to it–there’s the position of pieces on the board, then there’s the flow of cards between players. Will you use a valuable card to get a better position, even if it means giving it to your opponent? What card will you get next? Should you make your big move now, or wait for a more favorable card to sustain your advance?

Onitama is a game of deceptively simple decisions. It’s also about predicting your opponents moves. The latter part is what really sparked something in me.

CLOCKWORK AND DARK WOODS

In chess, the first few moves on both sides usually follow predetermined formulas. There are whole books on opening moves, and experienced players are intimately familiar with the optimal ones for different strategies. This means that the game essentially moves along like clockwork for a while–entirely predictable.

Eventually, however, the perfect patterns are disrupted by a player making a move that was not entirely expected. From there, it’s not certain what the player intends to do next, and this is where analysis, prediction, and intuition takes over. This is also where chess crosses over from being a perfect mathematical equation to a contest between minds, where illusions, feints, and doubts are equally as important as the objective reality on the board.

In the words of Mikhail Tal: “You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.”

Tal seems to be expressing that victory in chess is achieved by understanding how to exploit your opponent’s mind, rather than simply making better moves on the board.

Imagine if you could anticipate each one of your opponent’s moves and their reactions to yours. If you could do that, then the game would be won from the start. But how could you know every single move, unless you knew that person’s mind inside and out?

FOLDING A PAPER LOTUS

This is something I’ve spoken about before, but I’m fascinated by the idea that no piece of origami can be folded perfectly. The closer you look, going all the way down to the microscopic, the more deviations you find from the ideal, “perfect” form. The closer you magnify those little flaws, the bigger they become in your perspective, until you start to see how each one is unique. And I’m enamored with the idea that, if you knew how, you could learn something about the person who folded that piece from those flaws, just like you can tell something about a person by the way they talk, or eat.

You could argue that deviations from perfection are what make us distinct personalities. The cracks in our souls manifest themselves in everything we do, and you only need someone with the right mind and eye to interpret those cracks, like a geologist studying a seismograph. Fortune-tellers and confidence men are experts at doing cold readings and picking up on someone’s emotional state, but what if you could go deeper, and gain insight into the core of a person’s being just by observing the folds they made in a piece of paper?

If you could go that deep, you’d be able to see the fundamental traits of that person’s personality and identity. And if quantifying a person’s identity is just a matter of measuring their deviations from perfection, then you could use that knowledge to create a model that would allow you predict what they would do in a given situation.

This is the central idea of “The Lotus Gambit.”

THE GAMBIT

In chess, one possible tactic is a gambit, in which a player sacrifices a piece in order to gain some kind of advantage. It’s up to the other player to accept or decline the gambit, depending on whether they think they can exploit the situation to their advantage instead. In my conception, the Lotus Gambit goes like this:

One person challenges another to a game of Onitama with the following stipulation: the gambit-maker will wear a blindfold the entire time and move their pieces without seeing their opponent’s moves. If they win, they get whatever they desire from their opponent. If they lose, their opponent can take whatever they want from the gambit-maker. Here, the “gambit” is taking place outside of the actual game and is used to lure the opponent into accepting terms that they would otherwise not accept.

From there, the gambit-maker asks their opponent to fold a paper lotus. When they are finished, the gambit-maker examines it, blindfolds themselves, and the game begins. If they win, the “gambit” is successful.

Now, you might ask “If the opponent knows the gambit-maker is going to be anticipate their every move, couldn’t they try to make moves that are the opposite of what they would normally do, or attempt to anticipate their opponent’s anticipations?”

Well, that might be a little more complicated, but in theory, a skilled gambit-maker would be able to anticipate that reaction as well (based on their knowledge of their opponent) and play accordingly. And if the opponent anticipated that anticipation of their anticipations…well, you can see how meta-games develop within meta-games, becoming infinitely recursive.

THE Seeker – A VARIANT ONITAMA GAME

Now, obviously you can’t execute the Lotus Gambit in real life (unless you really can anticipate someone perfectly), so how can you apply its principles to a real game of Onitama? Well, I created a variant of the game that allows you to get close to the spirit of it. The variant, called “Seeker,” is played like this:

One side has all of its normal pieces, but its “master” can’t move from their starting spot. The other side only has its “master,” but that master’s movements are invisible to the opponent. Instead, the player with the invisible master puts their master on a separate board hidden from their opponent and uses it to keep track of the master’s position.

From there, the game is played normally, with players choosing cards, passing them along, and attempting to capture each other’s masters. If the invisible master captures a student piece, that piece is removed from the board as normal. The player with the full set of pieces is the “seeker,” while the player with the invisible master is the “hidden.”

The seeker’s key to victory is anticipating the hidden’s movements by figuring out what kind of player they are and what kind of risks they will take. They need to pay careful attention to the cards used by the hidden to narrow down their position, but as the game goes on, the sheer number of possibilities can be overwhelming. Eventually, intuition begins to play a large role, and this is where the spirit of the Lotus Gambit comes into play: making moves based on your assessment on your opponent’s character.

Meanwhile, the hidden needs to choose their moves carefully to avoid being caught, while feinting their opponent into thinking they’re somewhere they’re not. The hidden thrives on playing mind games and exploiting their opponent’s assessments of them, which are expressed in their movements. They are everywhere and nowhere in their opponent’s mind, and that uncertainty allows them to exploit their opponent’s fears: “Have they made the expected move, or are they doing the opposite to throw me off? Are they expecting me to anticipate the unlikelier move?”

If the seeker isn’t careful, the game can quickly spiral out of control in their mind, all while the hidden capitalizes on the confusion.

Conclusion

In my mind, the Lotus Gambit (and the Onitama variant) aren’t about beating someone at a game through superior skill, but rather test one’s ability to understand their opponent. As many martial artists can tell you, sparring matches between experienced practitioners are as much mental as they are physical.

To take this a step further, consider what the Lotus Gambit means when it comes to being an invincible martial artist (or chess player): if you know your opponent and can anticipate and counter each of their moves before they even make them, the contest is over before it began. If your opponent recognizes this before or during the match, what can they do? They can’t defeat you, so all they can do is surrender.

In this way, someone who is invincible doesn’t have to fight (or play) anymore. They’ve transcended the contest or game, and when someone does challenge them without recognizing the truth of the situation, the invincible person isn’t really beating them–their opponent has provided them with all the correct moves to defeat them. And so the “game” collapses as the line between opponents dissolves.

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I’m Now a Professional Dungeon Master at Hex & Co.!

After a wildly successful two-week trial run with two separate groups of players, I’ve become a professional Dungeon Master at the Manhattan board game store Hex & Co.! I’ll be running four games per month, all set in my world and using custom content.

The current campaign is set in the city of Senkaku, featured in my story “Hypnotica,” and the main quest-giver is a version of Yute, from the story “Old No-Eyes” (he’s going by the name ‘No-Eyes’ in-game) Here are some photos of the paper material I brought to recent games:

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This is a hand-written paper contract that was offered to the players by No-Eyes. If you read the text carefully, you’ll notice some of the clauses are a bit…extreme. Essentially, if the players fail to fulfill the contract or betray No-Eyes, he’ll gain possession of their souls. A friend of mine sent the text of the contract to a lawyer friend of theirs, who pointed out that it wouldn’t stand up in court…

Next up is a sketch of No-Eyes (aka Yute), as he appears in the campaign. The helmet design is based on the sketches created by my friend, Joel Clapp.20190616_222553

This is another drawing of an NPC ghost boss, named Cokolo. Before his death, he was a poet and the author of the book Colder Winters, whose poetry is referenced in my stories. Cokolo is also referenced in “Hypnotica.”20190616_222516

These were scraps of clues discovered by players over the course of a session. One symbol is present on all three pieces of paper–a stylized goblet connected with a goat-headed ghost, Mendes (named for the Goat of Mendes, also known as Baphoment).

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This is the candle I keep with me for every session. The tradition started with my original D&D group, which had a little plastic Christmas candle. Our running joke was “We’re not a cult! We have a Christmas candle!” It was sort of a reference to the D&D Satanic Panic in the 1980s, where people though Dungeons & Dragons was turning kids to Satanism.

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This is a black origami lotus I folded for a session. Each of my first-time players was given a lotus, which had a secret word written on the inside.

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I’ll be posting more about my experiences as a professional DM, but that’s what I’ve got for now!

 

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I’m Writing a D&D Adventure for Nord Games!

Story time.

My old DM and long-time friend, Joel Clapp, let me know several months ago that Nord Games was looking for submissions for new D&D adventures, so I wrote up a pitch and sent it in, all excited.

The adventure was a dark re-imagining of a masquerade party, where a troupe of elves descends upon a small town and replaces all of its citizens with their own “actors,” who look and act just like the townspeople. Only one real person is left: a beautiful damsel who ends up telling any stranger who’ll listen that everyone in her town has been replaced by impostors. Mind games ensue, and the adventure culminates in the party entering the Fey realm to face the insidious, cruel elf Queen, the not-so-subtly-named Titania.

Rejected.

The next pitch was a Lovecraftian horror adventure at sea, where the players are shipwrecked on a sprawling ancient city carried on the back of a giant, soul-eating crab.

Rejected.

Finally, I had a long talk with the Lore Master and Editor, Andrew Geertsen, who was patient and kind enough to write me an essay-length email telling me the same thing a lot of fiction editors say to writers: I’m buried underneath a mountain of generic, run-of-the-mill submissions. If you’re submitting something, make it unique. Make it something that forces me to sit up and say “Wow.” And make sure it’s a story that needs to be told.

He also gave me an idea of the kind of submission he was looking for: high adventure, something epic, with memorable characters. After several months of brainstorming, revisions, and fastidious attention to the submission guidelines, I submitted the pitch for “The Scuttling City,” an adventure on the high seas that saddled the players with a wizard sailing a flying ship and turned my Lovecraftian crab-city into Bathyala, the holy city of the merfolk (which is still carried on the back of a giant crab).

I’ve already turned in the first draft (which is 65 pages long), and now Andrew and I are working on the revisions. It’s my first professional game-writing gig, and I’m super excited to bring it all the way to publication!

Cheers!

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“The Crownless King,” “Old No-Eyes,” and a New Review!

Announcements!

First, the final chapter of “The Crownless King” (Part 4) is up on The Fantasy Hive, marking one of the darkest and most heart-wrenching endings to a story I’ve written in years.

Second, “Old No-Eyes” is up on Beneath Ceaseless Skies and it’s received its first review from Charles Payseur, an SFF reviewer and blogger, who nails the key theme of the story:

…to be immortal is to face the infinite, and to face the infinite means to annihilate the self. It’s an idea that means complete destruction in some ways, because a person cannot touch upon true infinity without being destroyed by it. They become no one, an absence, one with the universe. It shakes necromancy because the necromancers are egoists, are selfish and cruel. Not that Yute seems to have gotten over all of that. But he has become that which necromancy was point to, which means he is the realization of a goal that perhaps was never meant to be reached. The horror falls from the growing realizing that this group has [planted] the seed for their own destruction, and from the horror of what Yute has embraced on his way to immortality—true immortality. Dark, heady, and very much worth spending some time with!

Third, I’ve got new articles up on The Portalist and SyFyWIRE–one on what ‘serious’ fantasy writers can learn from Terry Pratchett and one on the real-life science behind giant robots!

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“Old No-Eyes” Will Be Published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies on August 2nd!

After submitting “Old No-Eyes” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies way back in April 2017, it’s finally being published in two weeks!

Thanks to Scott Andrews, the editor at BCS, “Old No-Eyes” ended up becoming even better over the course of a few months of edits (and a lot of emails back and forth). With “Hypnotica” and “The Crownless King” serialized on The Fantasy Hive, this will be my third story released to the public, which is really exciting. Each of the stories takes place in the same secondary world, though at different points along the timeline: “Old No-Eyes” takes place in the same city as “Hypnotica“ (Senkaku), and reveals a few more hints about Togorun, who was mentioned in “Crownless King.”

“Old No-Eyes” centers on Yute, a disgraced immortality scholar who returns from exile to meet with an old colleague named Tenza, who has asked for his help in decoding a forbidden book called the Nokizi. The story introduces readers to some of the major elements of my world, especially immortality and fractal mathematics.

I’m super proud to finally have this story published, and I look forward to unleashing Yute (one of my favorite characters) on an unsuspecting world.

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New Articles on the Fantasy Hive and The Portalist!

In case you haven’t seen them, here’s a rundown on some of the new articles I’ve written for the Fantasy Hive over the past few weeks. Most are about magic systems (like the pieces on D&D and Warhammer), while the one with Wicker is a Tales From the Tabletop story about the time I threatened a city with anthrax zombies in D&D.

I also put out a new listicle about the tech in William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the Portalist, with another listicle coming up on Earthsea soon!

Magic and Mayhem: Welcome to a World of Pure Imagination

Magic and Mayhem: The Genius of Terry Pratchett’s Magic

Vancian Magic and D&D

D&D 3.5: Wicker the Necromancer Learns about Epidemiology

The Magic of Warhammer 40K

Evil and the Tao of Earthsea

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Doki Doki Literature Club and the Abyss

This past month, I interviewed for a job at a game company and had a gushing, energetic conversation with four staff members about how much we all loved the game Doki Doki Literature Club, a Japanese dating sim that’s taken the internet (and numerous awards) by storm.

Soon after, however, I had a long Skype conversation with my Ma. My Ma and I always have deep conversations, so to lighten the tone she asked what I was doing for fun. I got excited and told her I was watching a playthrough of DDLC, which was…

I stopped and realized how insane I was going to sound.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a game about madness, suicide, horror, and nihilism. It’s about wiping people from existence. It’s about manipulating people’s deepest, darkest desires. It’s about twisting love into horrifying parodies of itself. It’s about chipping away at reality until doubts begin to gnaw at your soul.

So why did the thought of sharing it with someone fill me with unironic, exuberant joy?

The Genius of Doki Doki Literature Club

DDLC is different from horror games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Dead Space, where the excitement among gamers comes from the thrill of a good, scary time surrounded by blood and monsters. We know where we stand with those games—we’re the squishy victim in a universe made of razor blades, and the fun comes from surviving.

Dating sims are not that. There are no sharp edges in them, because dating sims are meant to be dollhouses where the player is in control, and all the characters exist only to titillate and excite them. The fun comes from forgetting (for a while) that this is a game and losing ourselves in the fantasy. There have been some fucked-up dating sims (e.g,, the murderous professor in the infamous fever dream called Hatoful Boyfriend), but the vast majority of them play upon the knowledge that the player is here for some light, romantic fun. It’s hard to find a more ephemeral genre than the dating sim.

…which makes it doubly disturbing when you play through DDLC and start watching the game break down all the comfortable walls between you and the game. Then the chilling realization hits you: DDLC isn’t just three steps ahead, it’s gotten so far ahead of you that it’s been patiently waiting for you to catch on from the beginning.

But that kind of detached, cerebral appreciation for a well-crafted story isn’t what I felt. I doubt it’s what anyone felt their first time, because even as the game breaks the fourth wall again (and again [and again]), the emotional core of the game comes from truly caring about the characters, even after you acknowledge (in your mind) that they’re all fictional. I cared about Sayori and genuinely, genuinely wanted to help her, just like I wanted to show Yuri that she could be herself and help Natsuki become more comfortable with the idea that someone could be her friend.

DDLC doesn’t provoke a golf clap from those who play it, even after all the tricks are revealed. It provokes a white-knuckled fear, a creeping anxiety that breaks into wide-eyed, nihilistic emptiness deep down in your soul.

So I return to my original question, and the strange position I found myself in when Skyping with my Ma: if Doki Doki Literature Club is a truly disturbing nightmare of a game, why did I feel so much joy at the prospect of talking about it? Where did this sense of life-affirming exuberance come from?

The Abyss

I think there’s an argument for catharsis, that playing through a game that evokes such strong emotions is sort of like a release valve for all the stress, sadness, and anxiety we have pent up within us. For me, though, I think the answer is different—it has to do with gazing into the abyss.

I think there’s something wonderfully freeing about staring into the abyss, because the ultimate home of the abyss is within ourselves—that deep-rooted emptiness that we try to fill with things like careers, accomplishments, and pleasures. It becomes exhausting to keep fleeing from it and blocking it out, pretending that I really am all the things I present myself to be. When things threaten that image of myself, my instinct is to repair the damage before I lose everything and have to face the abyss, which has always been there. But if I’m being honest with myself, truly honest, I know that image of myself is a fabrication.

DDLC is about tearing away illusions: the characters, the gameplay, the plot are all fabrications, except for Monika (according to her). As Monika strips it all away, I’m forced to examine what was real: my feelings, my desires, my actions. Why did I act the way I did? Why did I feel the way I did? Why did I want to romance one character instead of another? And when it all comes crashing down, what kind of person am I? Everyone in DDLC loved me, even Monika, but only I know my thoughts. And as the game shifted, only I remain the same. Who am I?

Beneath all my desires and actions is the abyss.

I don’t imagine ‘the abyss’ to be an unavoidable force for entropy, lethargy, depression, and self-destruction. If anything, it’s the on part of myself that I think I need to understand better. After I’ve spent enough time gazing into the abyss, I gain a clearer perspective on life: I get a better sense of what’s important to me and what are just distractions or my own illusions (something Yuri deals with). After touching that immovable sense of nothingness at the core of my being, I feel free, even energized. It’s like I’ve let go of all the things that were weighing me down.

The feeling reminds me of two quotes. The first is from Jacob’s Ladder:

“If you’re afraid of dying, and you’re holdin’ on, you’ll see devils tearin’ your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freein’ you from the world. It all depends on how you look at it.”

I think undergoing the small ‘death’ that comes from touching upon the abyss does something like that: it frees you of the self-destructive things you’re holding onto and shows you that you don’t need them, and they don’t define you. At the same time, it illuminates the beautiful things in your life…only, you realize that every part of life suddenly seems beautiful. As Franz Kafka put it:

“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”

Your Reality

Doki Doki Literature Club is a terrifying, disturbing game. It’s upsetting, sometimes even disgusting. But instead of doing all of that for the sake of shocking people, I feel like the game’s intent, as Yuri says, is to change the way we see the world, if even if it’s only a small change. I think it accomplished that for me. It changed the way I looked at stories, at life, and what is possible with writing.

This is my experience. Maybe other people felt the same way. As to its widespread popularity, I have this to say:

Anime and otaku culture have become synonymous with modern “internet” culture, which seems preoccupied with deconstruction, nihilism, and exploring the darkest depths of the human experience, all while maintaining an ironic, irreverent attitude. I think Doki Doki Literature Club speaks the language of the lonely young men and women who have invested more and more of their lives in an intangible world of video games, websites, and increasingly elaborate memes. These are the same people who embrace meaningless and absurdism while constantly pushing away the acknowledgement that they’re not happy with their lives and are escaping into fantasies rather than dealing with their problems.

DDLC tears down the comfortable, familiar fantasy of a Japanese dating sim and starts crossing over into reality, leaving the player nowhere to escape to or hide. You’re not playing an idealized avatar anymore, you’re you dealing with a situation that has spun out of control and left you heartbroken, frightened, or disturbed. In this sense, DDLC takes a fake experience (dating fictional anime girls) and creates a real one (reflection upon the nature of DDLC’s fantasy, and reflection upon oneself), all while giving a strong enough framework to make sense out of it all.

That unexpected encounter with reality is powerful, and I think it resonated with a lot of gamers. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the name of the ending song to the game is “Your Reality.”

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‘Hypnotica: Part 1’ Is up on the Fantasy Hive!

hypnotica chris mahon fantasy hive

The first part of my short story “Hypnotica” is up on the Fantasy Hive here! The next three parts will be posted over the next three Mondays, ending on January 29th.

My column on magic, “Magic & Mayhem,” is also debuting tomorrow, January 12th. The first column is titled “A World of Pure Imagination.”