The Narrator and the Noise
The Use of Statistical Bias in a Minigame to Emphasize a Thematic Outcome in Act 1 of Doki Doki Literature Club
January 20, 2020
Introduction
Doki Doki Literature Club (henceforth known as DDLC), developed by Team Salvato,1 is a visual novel video game that initially appears as an average Japanese dating simulator, eventually shifting into the horror genre and being supplemented with meta-elements that affect the game’s interface and audio.2 Such conventions have propagated inquiries by scholars, such as David Neri (2017), who comments that the “deliberate breaks in the 4th wall” humanizes the characters.3 While this observation is noteworthy, the simple minigame that DDLC employs is of particular interest.
During Acts 1 and 2 of the game, a minigame called “Poem Game” occurs. For 20 rounds, the player chooses a word from a list of 10.4 Selecting specific words grants between one to three points toward Natsuki, Sayori, and Yuri–if a character finds a word to be most affable, their jumping animation plays to indicate that they have received the most points. As with a typical dating simulator, the character that receives the most points will grant additional scenes with said character. While other scholars comment that this minigame is used as essentially a red herring,5 what they have not explored is how this poem minigame is used in the context of the plot from a numerical standpoint. Particularly, whether the distribution of points is geared toward a specific character and how that may affect the interpretation of the game’s themes.
As such, the focus of this study is to determine the existence and extent of statistical bias towards any of the DDLC characters with respect to the points distribution of the Poem Minigame. The results of this study show that the bias is towards Sayori (2.180 +/- 0.819 vs. overall mean of 1.962 +/- 0.839), who is the first character in the game to experience a traumatic outcome, suggesting that the statistical component of the Poem Minigame–whether intentional or not–attempts to gear the player towards her to accentuate further the emotional impact of her death in Act 1.