Book chapter
Decoding Legal (Un)certainty in Doki Doki Literature Club!
Law, Video Games, Virtual Realities: Playing Law, pp.111-130
TechNomos: Law, Technology and Culture, Routledge
2024
Abstract
Doki Doki Literature Club! (DDLC) is marketed as a cutesy, romance visual novel. As the game progresses, the narrative is disrupted by sudden violence, character deaths, and technological glitches that plague all aspects of the game space – a disruption that reveals the game’s actual genre to be a subversive, psychological horror. But where DDLC truly gains its momentum is through its call to act beyond the confines of the code and the illusory freedoms that attend those metaleptic breaches.
Examining the shifting zone of uncertainty within DDLC, this chapter considers the law’s fantasy of stability and consistency through the power of code and the anxious subversion of that fantasy to horrific effect. Additionally, it reflects on the need to persist with the image or social understanding of law as ‘certain’ and ‘contained’ even within spaces of play, visible in the player reaction to DDLC’s ambiguous boundaries around its content.
Details
- Title
- Decoding Legal (Un)certainty in Doki Doki Literature Club!
- Authors
- Ashley Pearson (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
- Contributors
- Dale Mitchell (Editor) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and SocietyAshley Pearson (Editor) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and SocietyTimothy Peters (Editor) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
- Publication details
- Law, Video Games, Virtual Realities: Playing Law, pp.111-130
- Series
- TechNomos: Law, Technology and Culture
- Publisher
- Routledge
- DOI
- 10.4324/9781003197805-7; 10.4324/9781003197805
- ISBN
- 9781003197805
- Organisation Unit
- University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; School of Law and Society; Sexual Violence Research and Prevention Unit
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99749698302621
- Output Type
- Book chapter
Metrics
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