In Dungeons and Lesbians, you play as “yourself” as a character. The story is told in second person, often used in the choose your own adventure books, with enough closed-world attributes to keep you in the story. However, in Dungeons and Lesbians, the narrator sounds like they’re talking to you instead of just narrating what you do. Not only does this make for an interesting text-based game, but it also institutes the narrator as a subtle character. The voice becomes passive aggressive, for instance, when you choose your own name instead of the one given to you by the narrator.
This reminds me of a much longer game, Stanley’s Parable, where the main interest in the game is the narrator speaking to you. While this game is included in the meta-game talk, there is also a focus on the narrator, specifically the narrator as a character. Even without a name or body, the narrator serves as both a companion and another character in the game, talking to “you” as the player. Games like Portal and Portal 2 also do this, although GLaDOS has a physical body and is much more of a literal character, her disembodied voice functions in a similar way. In any of these games, one of the most memorable aspects is the narrative voice. How is this different from books, where narrative voice is the focus, or movies, where voice over is prominent? One reason, again, is the interactivity. In Stanley’s Parable, being addressed as the player (or the mute and laregely personality-less Stanley) is one and the same. In Portal, although GLaDOS is clearly talking to Chell (often with contempt), Chell is nonverbal and the player can step into her shoes (or Long Fall Boots). Therefore, it feels like GLaDOS is talking to you instead. You feel in conversation with the narrator, even if you can’t talk back. This cements the narrator further as a character. In Dungeons and Lesbians, while slight, you can interact with the narrator through decisions or typing in your name, effectively creating a conversation and adding a level of interaction to the visual novel format, usually limited to simple choices, especially in Butterfly Soup. The narrator as a character pulls the player into the novel in a way specific to video games.
You bring up an incredibly interesting point, and how we see the use of the literary device apostrophe, in which a subject who cannot respond is being addressed, is utilized within video games. Typically, this shows up within soliloquies or letter writing in plays/novels, but video games create this unique medium that has a level of interactivity within the conversation. Although it may not be much like seen in Butterfly Soup, it still makes a noticeable difference and represents another staple of video games that cannot really exist outside of the medium; thus, justifying the artistic split and analysis of the two.
I think you raise a really good question about how we can being thinking about focalization within video games. When players interactively immerse themselves into a character/avatar, there seems to be an interesting divide between the actions/mechanics of the game being focalized around the player, but the narrative of the game being focalized around the character. I think this was also brought up in our discussion of rouge-likes, but your post has me thinking about the difference between a player saying “I died”/”I made a mistake,” versus character’s in-game acknowledgement of actions or events, like in Until Dawn, where Mike talks about being too slow to save Jessica.