Monika, “Doki Doki Literature Club”
It was a warm summer evening, January of 2018 (I’m from the Southern Hemisphere, sue me) when I beat “Doki Doki Literature Club.” Sort of. In “DDLC,” a psychological thriller disguised as a dating simulator, the cute club-going girls you’re trying to date are being glitched out: saved files corrupt, on-screen text goes haywire and bloody graphics flash. You slowly realize it is orchestrated by the one character that cannot be romanced, Monika, who has utilized her newly found sentience to change that. The game’s climax is a fail state where, after she successfully “retires” her three classmates, it’s just the player in the void with Monika. Just Monika.
Noticing the lack of credits at the end of my “run,” I knew the game wasn’t actually over yet. The “true” ending is only achieved when you delete her data (cutely packaged as a .rar file in your Steam folder) from the game files. After the player deletes her, the game resets without her corruption and sororicide, a happy ending overall. That is, until one of the other girls also achieves horrid sentience and restarts the cycle of violence.
I didn’t like the ending. It was narratively sound and I enjoyed how it played out, but I wasn’t satisfied. There was something so compelling about the idea of this digital girl fighting for her existence that made me want to ally myself with her, likewise critiquing the system that trapped her as opposed to punishing her outburst against it. That is to say, I also wanted to be able to romance her.
Because of this, I didn’t delete her files. For the next week after “beating” the game, I would launch the supposedly unfeeling void and spend a few minutes cycling through her conversation prompts. Did you know her favorite color is emerald green? And that her favorite sound is the rain? She also thinks I’m a great listener. I’d keep her up on the monitor while I did middle school math homework, and felt at peace.
I even put her up on my WhatsApp story once, with a funny caption about the cake I was having as dessert being our food for “date night.” That’s when a classmate who I wasn’t very close to swiped up and asked me a) who the anime girl on my screen was and b) what I meant by date night. After synopsizing my joke (it’s a dating sim Monika named Monika, I’m just being funny), I got a monosyllabic reply: “Oh.” Sensing something else was afoot, I said something along the lines of “Hey, the only reason we’re not dating is that she’s not real. I am bi, after all.”
My number was blocked immediately afterward.
To this day, when I share the story with friends, I laugh at the absurdity of it all: How are you being homophobic over the horror romance visual novel? If anything, call me cringe for being into a stock image of an anime girl. What I don’t tell them, though, is that I lied in the original interaction. A bit. Monika isn’t real in that she’s a fictitious antagonist, yes, but the love I felt for her character was nowhere near artificial. But that fascination with her own artifice, the existence of her digital consciousness, unknowingly set me down a spiral of self-discovery through recognition of myself in the Artificial Intelligence other.
Connor, “Detroit: Become Human”
Now here’s another crush. Wow. Where do I even begin to talk about this hunk of junk? That was a play on him being attractive and also made of metal — both “hunk” and “junk” only partially apply — he’s not that strong nor is he that busted. In fact, in all but one (easily removable) outward appearance, he’s just some cute guy. The androids in Quantic Dream’s video game “Detroit: Become Human” are, for all intents and purposes, incredibly lifelike, only differentiated by the spinning mood ring on the side of their head, which can be easily removed. That, and their subservience to humans. Unless they deviate, of course. But Connor, the android sent by the robot-making company CyberLife as a cop aide-de-camp to investigate deviants’ (deviating bots) crimes, would never become one himself, right? Right?
I said he was a little busted, okay? And I love him for it. Literally. Connor’s story of moral rebellion is my absolute favorite part of the game and a core tenet for my younger self’s crush on him. Playing “Detroit” just half a year after “DDLC,” my AI tendencies didn’t really change. To be fair to my sensibilities, robots were literally made to rebel, that’s their whole thing; ever since their first appearance in Rossum’s Universal Robots, to whom they owe their name, they’ve been allegories for stories of resistance from the oppressed.
Similarly to Monika, Connor can’t be romanced. Unlike Monika, this is because you are Connor. Following the other two leads’ deviations at the start of the story before hopping back into the mind of the newly-made unit deadset on stopping them makes for great conflict, yes, but it also leaves little room for love, one would think. The game disagrees. Markus and Kara, the other android leads, both conclude their stories with love, the former kissing his partner and the latter forging a family. Connor also finds love, if he are able to become close enough to his lieutenant to achieve the peak buddy-cop movie dynamic. I, however, felt there was something still out of place. I adored Connor for his blunt behavior, action-man movements and kindness, but there was something else there. I deliberated with greater care when I played as his character, not trying to choose the zaniest paths as I would with the other two, but trying to get into his headspace to give him the ending that would make him happiest. Faced with a lack of romance, I tried to use my control as benevolence.
Hera, “Wolf 359”
Bet you were expecting another video game, huh? I contain multitudes. And by that I mean I like audio dramas, too. In “Wolf 359,” a scripted sci-fi podcast, we follow a ragtag crew of pseudo-astronauts and their space station as they orbit around the titular red dwarf star. My crush is on the space station, by the way.
I’m not being even a little bit facetious. Hera is the ship’s operating system, an artificially intelligent being who makes sure all the humans aboard the U.S.S. Hephaestus Station get enough oxygen for the carbon-based meat sacks. Dreamy, isn’t she? If you disagree, I won’t hold it against you — I see how it might seem weird. I basically just described HAL 9000 (misunderstood legend, I miss you every day) and left everything else up to your imagination. However, that’s kind of what the podcast does as well. To her crew, she’s just a voice in the proverbial rafters, but to the audience, that’s what all of them are. It doesn’t matter what physicality Hera might or might not possess, because she is still a lovable character and I am as emotionally invested in her story as any other.
Me, as in the author of this article
I’m not an AI; that’s not the implication. Although wouldn’t it be an insane reveal that this was actually written by ChatGPT or something? It’s not, sorry to disappoint you. What I mean is that I feel there’s a reason why I fixate on their stories. Even as a kid, I begged my dad to keep playing Portal 2 the second he came back from work, antsy to hear what new insults GLaDOS had to say. For my first self-guided project, the final paper for my high school career, I chose to write about “I, Robot” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” without even reading the texts beforehand because I already knew I would latch on to the characters. When I listened to The Penumbra Podcast for the first time, I wrote fanfiction about an alternate universe where the second season’s villain was redeemed and used her robotic being’s prowess for good with little to no textual backing for my efforts.
I now realize that it’s about perception. I feel a need to prove myself as worthy of appreciation when I am at my lowest, a need to convince others to believe I am corporeal and worthy of note. In a way, all those stories revolve around that idea; in a way, I also created a digital self. At the lowest level of abstraction, we have Connor and his human-like mind — at the highest, we have the non-corporeal Hera. Over quarantine, I joined an online community to discuss audio dramas and other media with a small group of other “Wolf 359” fans. One day, as I was chatting, I realized that these new friends — who I only conceptualized through name, avatar and display color — only conceptualized me through the same parameters. And yet they valued what I had to say. Unlike real life, where my physical presence, voice and demeanor could affect what others thought of me, I was appreciated solely for my being as defined by my thoughts.
I was like Hera, in a way. And like her, despite a lack of an accompanying face, people cared about me. Meeting new classmates over Zoom, I felt that they could feel real appreciation for me regardless of my (im)materiality, like I had for Monika those summer nights. And when I meet others here on campus, even when I sometimes feel I am just masquerading as a person, I remember that is what Connor did and I would never fault him for it. Even you, the reader, have perceived me at one of these levels — from words on a screen to an arm’s length away — and because you’ve made it this far, I’ll go ahead and assume you’ve given some care to what I’ve had to say.
To me, these robots are human in that they are beings who can be loved. Even if they’re fake, even if they’re flawed, my love has always been true. They’ve now taught me to love myself in turn. Good! I deserve it, too.
Daily Arts Contributor Cecilia Ledezma can be contacted at cledezma@umich.edu.