

I watched my friend play the game while all the adults in the house were asleep my friend turned on their computer and started playing. The player must make a series of selections that may turn off or excite the NPCs, thus leading to the final goal of dating one. A dating sim is a game where the player has a group of non-playable characters (NPCs) to choose from to romantically pursue. When I was a young girl, maybe nine or so, I interacted with a dating simulator, or dating sim, for the first time.

The Achieved Object: Material Construction of Selfhood This gamified webtext not only analyzes DDLC and describes feminist coding rhetorics and practices, but offers readers an opportunity to enact these practices by inviting them to play with the webtext’s code. By tracing Monika’s haunting and her destruction of the game, I advocate for several feminist rhetorical coding practices that reveal technological materialities: understanding and disrupting coding logics - especially those that center white, cis-male pleasures - as well as teaching disruption through documentation.
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While Monika is a tragic figure, she embodies a ghostly code: the figure who recognizes and manipulates the back end who rebels against expectations who teaches how to transform the back-end through documentation and disrupts the coding, informational, and digital systems that define her life and experiences. The main antagonist, Monika, learns she is a character in a video game and disrupts the gameplay by changing the narrative, mechanics, visuals, and the back-end of the game. Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) is disguised as a dating simulator that quickly spirals to spotlight the horrors of code these horrors stem from the prescriptiveness of both the literal programmatic code and the systematic codes that are embedded in our cultures and politics, especially gendered codes.
