In December 2023, I interviewed Dr. Karen Stewart for an article about Doki Doki Literature Club’s influence on the games industry. Dr. Stewart is a professor of Interactive Media & Game Development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a professional focus on researching romance games. In addition to DDLC, we also discussed trends she’s noticed in the visual novel genre and her experience developing her own game, Leap of Faith.

 

JF: What it is about visual novels that appeals to creative writers, specifically in regard to the interactivity of the genre when compared to other forms of literature?

 

KS: I think it's a bunch of things. The first is the breadth of the story that you can tell because you can have multiple routes and multiple endings. If you're sitting down to tell a story in a novel, you have a start and a finish and you have an act structure that you have to go through depending on the genre you're writing in, but when you start playing with visual novels, it's like, “I don't have to have one ending.” People get really excited thinking about the challenge of nonlinear storytelling. They think, “What can we do if our story doesn’t from point A to Point B to Point C? What if it goes in circles? What if it goes up and down?” That triggers a lot of creativity in people.

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Visual novels can also be really beautiful. Not only do you get a story but now you’ve got these beautiful illustrations as well. I study romance games, so you get cute boys and cute girls. The vision and the story come alive in a way that they wouldn’t be able to in other media, and I think that really inspires people, too.

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JF: You mentioned your experience with romance games - Doki Doki Literature Club is a romance game on the surface and that was part of what made it very shocking when it turned out to be more of a psychological thriller. What changes have you noticed in the visual novel genre and, more specifically, the romance genre since the release of Doki Doki in 2017?

 

KS: I think there were three games that changed the way that people really started thinking about the potential of a visual novel: Doki Doki, Hatoful Boyfriend, and Dream Daddy. Originally, people had thought, “Oh, I know what a visual novel is; a visual novel is just the same sort of game over and over and over again.” Then, these three games came out and it was like, “Wait a minute. These visual novels are complex or they're funny or they're weird or they’re a different kind of experience.”

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The timing was really good, too, considering where social media and Twitch were at that time. All of a sudden, there was a place to have conversations about these visual novels and to watch other people play them. That combination really got people thinking about the genre in a new way - both the visual novel genre and subgenres like romance.

 

JF: Yes, Hatoful Boyfriend and Dream Daddy were both referenced by the VN developers I interviewed a few weeks ago. I found out the artist from Dream Daddy is also the lead artist on their game, The Office Type.

 

KS: Small world! Again, those are the three games that students almost always reference when they first come to me about wanting to start developing visual novels.

 

JF: One thing that those games have in common is that they’re all indie projects. It seems to me that the visual novel genre primarily exists in the indie space. How do you think that affects the perception of these games? How does that independent background affect the audience and the developers and which visual novels become popular?

 

KS: So AAA* visual novels do exist, but you’re right, a lot of them are indie. One of the things that I really love about visual novels is that anybody can make one; the barrier to entry is pretty low. You could just sit down and get Ren’Py­­­­­** and with all the free assets out there you can start plugging and playing and learning how to make a game really quickly. That’s great as an educator but also as a fan. When I was younger, tech was just not as accessible, so I love the fact that there are 13-year-olds sitting in their bedroom making visual novels. Whether they’re good or not is sort of irrelevant. They can put them out on itch*** or wherever and then when they get to college, they’re already making games.

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Visual novels also have all these weird, messy, indie game jams where people are teaching each other how to create games. With romance – otome**** – games in particular there's young women teaching other young women how to code or how to draw sprites or how to translate something from Japanese. When you reach the game journalism level of critique, I think that's where people often get dismissive and snarky, like, “Oh, is it even a game?” and, “Oh, you're just liking boys” and all the things that they say to dismiss these games. But if you look underneath that, the community aspect is super cool. One other thing about the romance genre is that if you don’t like the romance, you can just go make a game that fits the type of romance you want to explore. That allows for some really wonderful indie games to rise to the surface and they’re usually pretty accessible to play on your laptop or your iPad or wherever.

 

JF: When it comes to educational games or ‘games for a purpose,’ a lot of them are either visual novels or text-based games, like Twine*****. Why do certain creators – ones who are trying to convey a message or a moral – gravitate to these genres?

 

KS: Again, I think it goes back to the idea that the player’s choices can have consequences that lead to different endings. People who are looking at serious games or who are trying to have an educational purpose can explore the outcomes of a character’s choices. Like, you could make a game about a college freshman and put them in a dorm room and then have them face different social situations. Creators see the potential of someone playing that game and maybe practicing some of those things before they encounter them in real life.

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But I think sometimes people get overly excited and think that everything can be gamified and the whole world will learn something just because it's a game without understanding game design and game development. I tell them, “You can't just make a game and expect people to get something out of it, you have to make a good game.” And a good game has to do all these things like have player agency and immersion and the assets have to come together and create some sort of aesthetic experience, so I think it's sort of a tricky thing. For example, when I tell people on campus what I create, I always hear, “Could we do this?” and I say, “Yes, yes you could. But you also have to figure out how to do it well.” But there's potential in it because it's storytelling and there's multiple perspectives in the story which is cool.

 

JF: One of the major themes within Doki Doki Literature Club and especially in the conversation surrounding it was mental health. Why do you think that depiction of mental health connected with so many people, even in a game that has graphic, disturbing content?

 

KS: I think it’s the age of the primary player base. Young people are dealing with a lot of things. There's a lot of questions about feeling isolated and lonely, there's a lot of questions about anxiety and depression. COVID didn't help. COVID exacerbated a lot of those unsettling feelings. One of the wonderful things about games or about any kind of really good story is that there are themes that can really resonate when they're with the right audience. Coming back to social media again, now people can go online and say things like, “Wow, this game was messed up but there was this part to it that got me thinking,” or, “It's something I related to,” and other people can share that and talk about it.

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People can be dismissive of dating sims and romance games in particular because they seem fluffy, but I find that those stories generate a lot of discussion outside the game about good behaviors and good relationships and healthy things to do and things that are okay in a game but not in real life, etc. [Doki Doki] was a good example of both men and women playing a game and going off into social media and talking about it and finding those connections with other people.

 

JF: You already touched on it a bit in this previous answer but I wanted to know if you had anything more to say about how DDLC subverted the conventions of dating simulators and of the romance genre.

 

KS: In the writing classes I teach, we talk a lot about genre because genre is important. It helps your audience know what to expect. Tropes are not a bad thing. Tropes give people a lot of satisfaction because it's the things they love about the stories that they love. So, if you know and understand where the tropes are you can then subvert those tropes in smart ways, and that's what Doki did. It set itself up, it played into that expectation and then in some really smart ways it subverted those tropes and people didn't reject the story because it was done well.

 

JF: Something I also find interesting is that even when people are ostensibly being tricked by thinking that this is a normal dating game when it’s actually something very different, the fandom still engages with the characters in a similar way to how they would engage with characters from a normal dating simulator.

 

KS: Not everybody's going to pull that off. It’s tricky because you can lose people pretty easily when you start changing things.

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JF: Could you talk a little bit about the premise of Leap of Faith?

 

KS: It’s an otome game, so it does follow the genre structures and tropes of a reverse harem romance. The story revolves around Faith, who's a college student, and when she's trying to save a historic home in her little village in upstate New York, she ends up encountering a secret organization of time-traveling women who work to educate people about history and preserve things and meddle in a lot of ways. She ends up sucked back in time and she meets all these different characters that are from the Revolutionary War period who all live in and sort of revolve around this one house.

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So it's romance and it's fun, but it’s also a way to explore the history of the region and look at the different narratives that revolve around historical events. We have dominant histories but we have histories of people we don't hear as much about or the histories of the people who are the losers of wars versus the winners and so we play with that as a theme throughout the story.

 

JF: What went into the decision behind the Revolutionary War setting? Was that your decision?

 

KS: I was studying otome games - playing them, writing about them - and then at one point I decided to try building one because that's what one does when one starts getting into games. I wanted to make something as a scholarly inquiry to understand why otome games are just so popular. It’s like we were saying with Doki: people love these characters, people get really attached to these games. I really wanted to understand that fandom more and how the story design in particular contributed to this.

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When I started building the game, there was an initiative at my old school where they were asking for faculty to start involving undergraduates in their research projects and there were some grants that were provided to be able to do that. So, I thought, “Well, I can do that. I'm sure there's people who want to build games that I can bring on as research assistants.” One thing led to another and I ended up creating something called Gamer Lab, where every semester there would be four to six slots and undergraduates could apply to be part of it. If they were selected, they were trained to do archival research, historical research, and game research. The reason that we ended up settling on a Revolutionary War story is that we wanted something that was local to the area that we could study and make sure that the game was historically accurate. It turned out that the Burning of the Valleys was a major historical event in the Revolutionary War that happened right where the school was and there was also a lot of history about the Native American populations that were in that area and how that affected the war. So, there were just a lot of important events related to the revolution that were right there and we decided that would make a good time travel story and a good romance story. Also, from an academic perspective, when you say that you're doing historical research with students, you can get funding, so I was able to write some grants to bring the project together.

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We have all the background art and the characters and the music and about one third of the scripts. We’re at a stage now where, because we have Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people represented, it’s important to involve someone on that level. We had things lined up to do that – to bring in a sensitivity reader and make sure there’s ethical representation – but COVID happened and I changed schools, so we have to straighten that all out again. But once we do that, Leap of Faith is really close to being able to do something with it.

 

JF: Is there a specific place you were planning on publishing it?

 

KS: I don’t know exactly. If it makes any money, I have to think about it differently because of my academic position. Even if it only made a little bit of money, I'd like for that to go towards funding another game, but I have to figure out the rules and how to make that work on this campus. If it really isn't something that can be a big release, then it could just go on itch.

 

JF: Were there any difficulties in having students coming on and off the project all the time? How did you deal with training such a disparate group of developers and researchers?

 

KS: That’s something that I worked hard to make as seamless as possible. It wasn't like everybody would leave and it would all be new people; it would rotate, so the students who remained were good role models and teachers for the new students who were coming in and then they would become the role models and teachers for the next group. So, there was a lot of peer teaching and that model worked really well.

 

JF: Would a student sign up for a specific role on the project – like as an artist or a researcher or a programmer, etc.?

 

KS: The school that I was at before didn't have a game program, so in a lot of ways we weren’t set up for the students to be artists and developers. Students were brought on solely as research assistants in a lab development setting. Either I built the game or we raised money and we would hire somebody to create assets. The students would write the job calls and review the portfolios and help select the artists and go through the proofing process, along with research tasks.

 

JF: At that previous school, which didn’t have a dedicated game design program, what was exciting or difficult about setting up the VN development from scratch?

 

KS: It’s like how we were talking before about why people like visual novels: you can make them with low resources. You don't have to have super fast computers, you don’t need to be working with gigantic files.  Even running Unity, you still need some heft to your equipment. But you don't need that with visual novels; you can do a lot of it with Procreate on an iPad and a laptop that can run Ren’Py. You really can.

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The administration on that campus wanted to offer game studies but they didn’t think they could do it. A lot of what I was demonstrating was that you can actually do game development without needing all these bells and whistles, and that was exciting for people to understand. People who have never built a game have all these weird preconceptions in their heads, right, so if you’re working at that administrative level in a place that doesn’t have an established program, you often have to help them see what game design could look like.

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We also did an installation of the game on campus. We set up six computers in a space the library gave us and turned the whole room into a game room. There was a big opening reception and a ton of people showed up for it and were like, “You can do this!?”

 

JF: What was the catalyst that made you want to dedicate research to the otome genre specifically?

 

KS: So, back somewhere around 2014 or 2015, I was stuck in bed with the flu and all I was doing was playing games on my iPad. An ad for an otome game kept coming up over and over and I was like, “This game looks so stupid. Why does it keep showing me this game?” and I think I just got mad enough at seeing this ad with this terrible music and eventually I said, “Fine, I’m going to download this stupid game and then maybe the ad will go away,” and four hours later I was still playing this game. It wasn’t what I thought it was and I’d never played anything like it before, so I started Googling – because I’m a teacher and a researcher – I started Googling and discovered that around that time there was a big recession in the game industry and a lot of the Japanese and Korean game companies were testing certain genres in the US to see if there were new markets for them. Otome games were starting to come over and people were picking them up and loving them. In Japan and Korea, they've got thousands and thousands of titles because they've been producing them since the 90s, so they just started bringing them over and I was watching this fandom blow up in real time. So, I started studying them and looking at the fans and that whole cross-cultural exchange in games which, like I said, is really exciting. Then, I started analyzing them and doing rhetorical and thematic analyses. One thing led to another and now I’m at WPI, building visual novels with this amazing games program, so it’s been a good progression.

 

JF: And finally, the last question that I’ve been asking everyone who I’ve talked to: I know your focus is the one specific genre, but do you have any general advice for students looking to enter the game industry?

 

KS: Portfolios matter, so even if you’ve only made small games, small, finished games are better than partial, unfinished games. Being flexible is also important because it used to be that people specialized in one thing, but I think the hiring trend now is that a lot of places need you to wear multiple hats, especially if you look at anything that’s not AAA, so AA or even indie. At least understand how an artist works and how coding works and how story works, even if it's just to have conversations with people.

I always tell my students, “There’s a ton of people graduating and looking for jobs but these places are looking to hire you, not a generic person, but you.” You’re the resource, so whatever it is that's unique about you, don’t be afraid to stick that out there. If you're really into humor, for example, lead with that and tell them that you know about humor. And then network, network, network and meet people because that’s how it gets done.

 

* – AAA: An industry term for big-budget video games

** – Ren’Py: A free game engine focused on the creation of visual novels

*** – itch.io: A popular online storefront for selling games, especially indie games

**** – Otome: A genre of visual novel in which a female protagonist typically develops a romantic relationship with one or more men

***** – Twine: A free game engine focused on the creation of text-based games