When I told my friends that I would be playing DDLC for my class, 75% of the time I would receive a spoiler. They were nice to the extent that though they wanted to list out what was amazing about this game, they made every effort to not directly spoil everything but leave hint for me to mull over. I found one description particularly interesting: “the characters know exactly why you are there and what you want to get out of them.” Confused at first, I came to see what my friend meant after finishing the whole game and why this game is a perfect example of a metagame.
This game presented itself as a typical dating sim for the most part. Four cute high school girls in suits warmly welcomed the player to their literature club. Through heavy dialogue and dozens of poems, player started to see their affection for the avatar, their personalities, and chose among them based on own preference. Everything revolves around the player and all the girls exist for the purpose of winning the player’s affection. This sense of dominance and pleasure gained from being the center of the game accumulated yet collapsed right at the end, when the player was coldly questioned by Monika: “Do you not feel weird about us? Who are we? Why do we wear Japanese suits yet speak English?” Players are pushed to the realization that characters in the game are aware of both their roles and our roles in the game. Rather than passively performing their duty, Monika challenges this traditional power dynamics between the players and the video game characters, questions the boundary between the real and the virtual, and criticizes the assumptions and norms that people take for granted in dating sim. DDLC is a game that reflects on the traditions of its game genre, thus making itself a metagame.
Nevertheless, DDLC is still a videogame, and Monika is still a character in the game with clear setting of what to say and what to do to act as if it breaks the fourth wall and acquires real human traits. It becomes a metagame not because of any actual change taking place about its medium, but by inviting audience to participate in an active interpretation process to arrive at conclusion about its metaness. Just like what our TA Yao said this past Friday, procedural representation uses processes to make explanation and it requires the active participation of the addressee to integrate the process. In other words, it is up to the recipient, namely the game player in our case, to define the metagame. Any game can become metagame by inserting it into a context.
I remember a term I learned from my first-year Media Aesthetic course—second order observation. It stands for a process where a person jumps outside of his own position and conducts observation both of himself and of the surrounding. It shares the same intention as our discussion of metaness as it is also intended to gain a deeper reflection through one’s active participation in a process, yet it more explicitly places the role of the observer at the center. One remark that I learned from this past Friday’s symposium on metacomics is that the gutter tells the reality, namely the empty space between frames allow people to reflect on what they see, and it is at the end of the day up to the viewers to construct what is real in their sense. We, the perceivers, are the center of this discussion, and everything can gain its metaness if we put it in certain context.
