It's an amazing "playable story" unlike anything I have ever played. Super creative and well worth the couple hours it takes to play. I think it could use a few trigger warnings and it should be rated PG-13 / R, but there's stuff on Netflix 10x more disturbing so I don't quite grok the Google push back on this one.
Doesn't DDLC start with the following?
> This game is not suitable for those who are easily disturbed. Individuals suffering from anxiety or depression may not have a safe experience playing this game. For content warnings, please visit https://ddlc.moe/warning.
Then the plus version even added in-game content warnings?
https://teamsalvato.com/news/updates-to-content-warnings-in-...
Also, the game is rated PEGI 18, USK 18, M, CERO C, in various countries.
Doki Doki was created with the Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine by the way.
Plenty of games do amazing things with ren'py that you wouldn't think were possible just by looking at the dialogue DSL. Maps, HUDs, minigames, incredibly dynamic pathways through the game. But DDLC takes it to a different level, partly by looking so "normal" on its surface.
In college I made some spare cash writing Ren'py games for some creatives online who had the writing and illustration chops, but needed programming help. At the time, DDLC was the model for great game design in Ren'Py. There are plenty of more technically impressive Ren'py games nowadays, but DDLC is still a terrific example of technical sophistication facilitating the story.
Ren'py is awesome by the way. A tour de force of software design, in my opinion.
It breaks the fourth wall in unexpected, and deeply unsettling ways.
As a gamer you take for granted that, at any moment, you can simply exit. The UI is a trustworthy boundary between the imagined world of a horror game, and the comfort of reality. In DDLC, you don't even feel safe on the title screen.
Most ren'py games, even the very good ones, barely change the UI at all. Roadwarden doesn't look like a ren'py game at all... until you open the save menu, and then it looks exactly like a ren'py game. Having developed ren'py games, I can tell you why people avoid touching that part of the boilerplate code: it's the one part of ren'py where the abstractions aren't well thought out. It's very fragile. To me, that makes DDLC all the more impressive from a technical point of view. It warps and abuses the most rigid and uncooperative part of the engine, and to great narrative effect.
People have made some pretty slick turn-based combat systems. Some deck builders, others more spellcasting/mana oriented.
And it's renpy so like 80% of the games are straight up porn, so I'm not naming a single one here lol.
Games are still seen as something children engage in despite the average gamers being adults.
But I agree it's convergence for the most part, it's not that hard to come up with that premise even if it hasn't been too common.
This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.This ought to be grounds to litigate antitrust. This should not be happening.
We need web-based app installs without scare walls ("downloading from the internet is dangerous"), without hidden settings menus to enable them ("Settings > Apps > Special app access > Install unknown apps"), and without any interference or meddling from the hyperscalers.
Tyranny of defaults = 0.00001% of users will ever fall into these buckets = Google knows exactly the evil shit they're doing. Apple not even allowing it is almost less evil by contrast as they're not pretending.
These devices are too important for two companies to lord over us and tell us what to do.
I hope Lina Khan comes back, and I hope she has some absolute urgency next time. I also hope our pals in the EU and Asia put this shit to rest as well. No citizen of the world should have their devices cucking them like this. This is not what computing is supposed to be. (And let's not discount the fact that competition on these devices is in no way, shape, or form fair anymore. You're taxed to hell and back if you do distribution or outreach on these garrison states.)
These our our devices, Google and Apple. You do not get to control what happens after we buy them. You are both monopolies. You are both allelopathic parasites. Invasive species that have outgrown your ecosystem and invaded all the other ones. Doing damage to everything you touch.
The world needs a cleansing forest fire to restore healthy competition.
That and I don’t see how Google and Apple can both be monopolies in mobile. Is this the “Ford has a monopoly on Mustangs” argument? Never found that persuasive.
Now, reframe as duopoly, and maybe layer in that a platform owner who curates their App Store must allow alternative app stores on equal footing, and I’d be with you.
Why not? Monopolies can be market-specific, and Apple does indeed fully control the market of iOS app distribution.
Whether they also are a monopolist on mobile operating systems, smartphones etc. is a separate question.
> I am not prepared to say companies should be forced to host and distribute content they believe reflects badly on them.
Me neither, but in turn I don't think they should be allowed to act as the sole distributor for their respective platforms.
A local printing company should not be forced to print things they don't want. But an ISP should be required to transport everything, with exceptions for legal requirements and legitimate network health measures, or get out of the ISP business.
App stores feel more like the latter to me. Especially Apple's where there's no way around it for the average user.
But I lean the other way with app stores. The companies hire reviewers, the listings appear in the App Store trade dress, it feels more like a museum or magazine than an ISP. But I get how reasonable people can disagree.
Maybe we need some formal choices: is this a curated App Store that reflects editorial judgment (in which case it must be possible to ship alternatives on equal footing), or is it a common carrier (in which case you can be the only game in town).
The ambiguity doesn’t help, and of course megacorps love shifting the frames depending on context.
If Apple and Google are hell-bent on killing sideloading, and they control 99% of the mobile market, I think they have an obligation to host things they don't like, as long as it is legal.
There's platforms, and there's Apple and Google.
You don't need to say "platforms" when you talk about the two companies that control the 99.99999% of the mobile ecosystem.
https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-g...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-l...
https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/eu-orders-apple-to-open-up-a...
…and there are many more.
You can say those aren’t enough, but it is 100% fallacious to say there has been zero antitrust actions against Apple and Google since 2000.
you know what my favorite fallacy is? the fallacy fallacy, the mistaken assumption that by showing an argument is invalid you've shown its conclusion is false.
It's pretty easy to weaken such a strong position if you can provide not just one but multiple pieces of evidence to the contrary.
The warning was cited as an explanation as to why that game was delisted.
The objection was to Google wielding the power of picking and choosing which controversial materials the users are allowed to see.
Also, I fully recommend DDLP+ too. The extra stories don't have any real gameplay, but they are really good, and add.some depth to the characters.
I played it on my Switch; not sure if it has a skip option.
Usually on mobile devices like the Switch or Steam Deck, visual novels have a skip function if you hold one of the triggers.
There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that trigger warnings have a positive effect and growing evidence they are either ineffectual or actually negative.
If you've experienced a certain kind of trauma, it's not a matter willpower. It involves a loss of control over one's emotional response and thoughts which can be triggered by things that relate to your trauma.
Don't knock on content warnings just because they lack rigorous evidence or because "trigger warnings" became the butt of jokes for a while. They have a genuine utility.
That doesn't mean it's a matter of willpower, but it does suggest that avoiding your triggers or trying to use trigger warnings to prepare you for dealing with them provides no benefit. Your use of the word avoid pretty much sums up the core problem here - on a personal enjoyment of day to day life level, avoiding your triggers makes perfect sense. On the long term healing and not being traumatized by them level, you don't want to do that. (Edit: This isn't to say try taking exposure therapy into your own hands and just surround yourself with the stuff. None of this is a replacement for guided therapy. But specifically going out of your way to avoid these things is 'avoidant behavior' and is pretty much universally recognized as being a bad thing when it comes to dealing with PTSD etc.)
That being said, I believe everyone should be able to disclaim what they want and that people can choose how they approach their own self-care, even if it isn't supported by the science.
Exposure and Response Prevention therapy works. You will never get fully well without exposure. However, it requires that you find stimulus of a magnitude that makes you uncomfortable, but doesn't send you outright spiraling. You need to keep steady while experiencing it for a while.
Content warnings give you the ability to estimate what intensity of negative stimulus you will experience, and this is important when dealing with actual triggers.
Not everyone is yet at the phase where they can handle a certain level of exposure. For some unfortunate cases it takes a long time to be well enough to start being able to handle exposure.
That being said, I do think content warnings need to be specific, not generic. The most useful ones are spoilers, not generic messages to put you on guard. Careful Ao3 authors do a better job at this than most games. There are technical solutions that allow interested parties to get this information without having to spoil the default audience, but we live in a busy world that has a lot of things to care about other than this.
But there's pretty universal agreement that avoidant behavior isn't a good thing. There's a difference between the awful idea of trying to self-manage exposure therapy or forcing exposure and allowing yourself to be exposed to things in the manner that matches the 'real world.' If someone wants to put 'Dead Dove' on their ao3 and provide a a trigger warning because the fic is based around that thing, then yeah, that's one thing. I wouldn't recommend someone go watch Hostel if their trauma is at all related to that either. But most media that has triggering content aren't anywhere near those extremes. And obviously, if the trauma just occurred, it's a whole different thing. But if the studies that show an increase in avoidant behavior from trigger warnings are right, it's increasing a bad thing. If the studies that show a 'forbidden fruit' effect are right, then it's a negative for the proposed benefit from trigger warning proponents.
But most studies show no increase or negligible increase in avoidance for the study participants, including trauma groups. So if that's the case, they aren't doing what proponents are saying is their core benefit, either.
Meanwhile quite a few show an increase in anxiety from the warning itself, which is obviously a negative.
I'm open to the idea that there might be some effective way to do trigger warnings - more specific warnings up to spoilers, or something couching it in context of how this relates to recovery and how to manage it, etc. etc. - something along those lines. There's certainly plenty of precedent for a general idea being right and the initial implementations of it being bad. But proving that is going to come down to someone figuring it out and getting studies that show positive impact.
"TW 1.0" as I remember it - the first time I heard the TW term - was a thing where professors told students in advance if a lecture contained material that could upset some students, I think it started when someone teaching a course on criminal law in a law degree told students in advance "[TW:] next week we will have the lecture on the law around rape and sexual assault". Properly practiced, that's not exposure therapy that's being polite to your students (though why not put your whole syllabus up at the start of term, if you can?) It was also not intended to let you skip that topic - it's pretty important to know about if you're training in criminal law! - just to let you know in advance when it's coming up.
If you're teaching a course on the history of the British Empire in India, you're at some point going to need to cover the Bengal famine, the Amritsar massacre, the mutiny (aka. first war of independence), the practically-a-civil-war during partition, and a lot of other things. Mind you a "content note: British Empire" at the start of the course would probably cover all bases.
The choice of "trigger" that already means something in therapy was perhaps unfortunate, and nowadays I think "content warning" or even "content note" is preferred.
The real problem though was how students, who were neither trained therapists nor seemed to have consulted any, redefined and enforced their version of TW to the point that the term got tainted in the public view.
Basically, if you have anything like PTSD, you need an actual therapist not the collective hivemind of twitter (instagram these days?).
For me it's not even really political - I certainly am not aligned with the "heterodox" community that has been so actively against them. I think if people want to put trigger warnings on things, they should be able to make that choice, and people should be able to abide by them if they think they want to as well.
The issue is how it is framed as being important for helping people heal, like several people have spoken of it being important for in this thread. And I don't think the game/movie ratings ever really purported to be a part of that - indeed, it's always been more of an age appropriateness thing from my understanding.
If all of this was just "People should be able to make informed choices about the content they consume" and no one on any side was making claims about the mental health benefits for people with PTSD or similar, I think it would be a nonissue.
> Basically, if you have anything like PTSD, you need an actual therapist not the collective hivemind of twitter (instagram these days?).
100%. Far far far more likely to get through it and overcome the trauma with a good professional guiding you through the process. Social media is just going to have you doing silly things like writing gr@pe or gr*pe as if somehow using a euphemism that you already map back to the original word is helping and it wasn't originally just trying to get around content filters.
This is the part I'm sceptical of. When I look this up, I mostly find articles like https://theconversation.com/proceed-with-caution-the-trouble... (and the underlying studies), which mainly address the question of whether reading a trigger warning and then consuming the potentially triggering content is better than just consuming the potentially triggering content without a warning.
(The article also mentions a finding that trigger warnings have "no meaningful effect on an individual's [...] avoidance of this content"; but I think that's entirely compatible with a world where most people consume the content regardless of the warning, some are more drawn to it because of the warning, and some (including the few who are truly vulnerable) avoid it because of the warning. The effect on those vulnerable few is what's most relevant here. The article does briefly mention "unhealthy avoidance behaviours", but in the context of one university's opinion and without supporting evidence.)
What's the best evidence against trigger warnings as a means of enabling traumatised people to make an informed decision on when (and whether) to confront their triggers?
There's not much additional context here because avoidant behavior is basically universally understood to be a bad thing when it comes to the long term treatment of PTSD (this is separate from immediately/short-term after the event - different situation there) - there's no real serious argument against this idea, so when avoidant behavior is discussed it doesn't require context on why that behavior is a bad thing, in the same way that a an article targeted at cardiologists isn't going to explain why poor ejection fraction is an issue - it's baseline knowledge for the target audience.
The results are mixed on whether it encourages avoidance - some studies like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221... indicate that it does, others found no effect or negligible increases.
To be clear, I'm not definitively stating it causes avoidant behavior - I am saying that it might, which would be one of those 'worst case' scenarios.
Trauma groups have been part of the meta-analysis that indicate no real change in avoidance, and some have had the 'forbidden fruit' impact even in trauma groups, but it's in similar quantities as the ones that show an increase in avoidant behavior.
Fundamentally, trigger warnings just don't make a lot of sense to try and argue in favor of from a 'helping people with their PTSD' standpoint if you believe the science.
1) For them to have the effect you claim is desirable, they would need to avoid the content - but avoidant behavior is a negative when it comes to overcoming PTSD
2) The science largely indicates that it doesn't cause them to change their behavior at all in this manner - so the desired effect, it doesn't seem to do anything.
3) There's some evidence that it might increase avoidant behavior (science would call this bad!) and some evidence it might increase people exposure due to the 'forbidden fruit' effect (which would be bad from the supposed desired effect, and not necessarily good from the scientific standpoint - unnaturally being pushed towards something might also be negative vs. more 'natural' exposure, particularly when coupled with the upcoming point)
4) A variety of studies have shown that they increase anticipatory anxiety in people when they appear, which is of course a negative for anyone. I haven't been able to find any studies particularly engaging on this specific topic of anticipatory anxiety from trigger warnings + follow up exposure from the 'forbidden fruit' effect so this isn't something backed by science like the rest, but my gut instinct is that it would be more likely to be negative vs. something more organic. I could very well be wrong there.
I don't see any combination of piecing together these studies that could lead to a belief that trigger warnings provide value from a therapeutic standpoint.
> A combat Veteran may stop watching the news or using social media because of stories or posts about war or current military events.
https://www.verywellmind.com/ptsd-and-emotional-avoidance-27...
> The avoidance cluster of PTSD symptoms involves efforts to avoid distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings, and external reminders like discussions about the traumatic event or encounters with people or places associated with it.
I don't see how specifically avoiding content that contains triggers is anything but avoidance behavior as discussed above - avoiding the news or discussions about war is pretty explicitly facilitated by TW - before the clip plays on the news, by people posting it at the top of their social media content, etc. And media with the content would fall in line pretty explicitly as an "external reminder"
Like, I don't think someone who has been physically tortured and dealing with PTSD should watch Hostel or other torture porn, and I don't think a vet with PTSD should watch a compilation video of some of the worst horrors of war. So I'm not arguing for massive exposure or intentional forced exposure, etc. But the fundamental issue is that going out of your way to prevent yourself from being exposed to it at all, which is what TW facilitate if they were to work, is pretty definitionally avoidant behavior.
No, trigger warnings do not actively impede your ability to get better. That argument rests on random trigger being framed as "exposure therapy like" event. The exposure therapy is not done by random unprepared exposure to the triggering material with no follow up. Nor by random exposure in public setting.
Some also showed no evidence of this, but avoidant behavior is pretty much universally considered to be a specific maladaptive behavior when it comes to treating PTSD in the long run. It has nothing to do with the idea that it is the same as exposure therapy.
There’s quite a difference between the popularized image of what trigger warnings are and the common sense use-cases like “this media contains depictions of graphic sexual assault that some viewers may find disturbing”.
traumatic events are not a normal part of life and fortunately most people are never forced to experience something truly traumatic. Uncontrolled exposure does not build up "immunity" or help individuals work through or process the trauma. if the warnings seem unnecessary to you, then they're probably not for you.
Put 'scientific support for trigger warnings' in your favorite search engine and you'll find meta-analysis, RCTs, other types of studies, reviews, as well as discussions from the APS, other psychology and psychiatry related publications, etc.
This isn't to say removing trigger warnings is a replacement for actual guided therapy, exposure therapy or otherwise, but it doesn't seem like it would be a negative outcome for long term mental health and would be a benefit for anticipatory distress and potentially in combating avoidant behaviors (though not all studies universally found them to increase avoidant behaviors - just some)
This is a separate question than when it comes to general polite society and social expectations and what is and isn't considered a courtesy. The studies also aren't dealing with people that have just gone through the traumatic experience, so you could make a reasonable argument that exposure to something still fresh could have a very different impact.
Avoidant behavior is basically universally agreed to be a maladaptive behavior to ptsd.
There has been no proper research on the effectiveness of "being given a trigger warning, and then not consuming the content because of it." Which seems to be the most important factor to consider when it's about avoid sudden panic responses.
Well, there has been. From multiple angles. One, avoiding content because it might trigger you is just... avoidant behavior. Which is pretty much universally considered a bad thing. There's a big difference from seeking out exposure because you want to do your own exposure therapy (bad thing) and just letting yourself be exposed to things in a more organic fashion (good thing).
Two, most research indicates that TW do not actually reduce the consumption of content. Not all of the studies are on "did they help people process content they watched," as a lot of them are "did the TW make people not watch the content to begin with." Mostly it seems to haven no impact. A smaller subset of studies showed effects in other directions - both reduction and increase of content viewing after TW. If they reduce viewing I'd argue this is bad because it's avoidant behavior, and I suspect that the 'forbidden fruit' effect is also not positive because it's now giving you pre-viewing anxiety and is no longer the more organic 'let exposure happen naturally, don't just stop watching the news because it might contain stories about war.'
I think they are. Normal people can't stand emotions, these warnings keep them comfortable.
E.g. if i'm planning family movie night, i probably don't want an R movie. There is nothing wrong with R movies its just sometimes not what I'm looking for. Its nice to be able to see at a glance if the product is what i am looking for. Its really not that different than labelling something as sci-fi or rom-com, etc.
It's like preferring strawberry ice cream over chocolate ice cream.
A whole lot of people do make the argument that they are beneficial from a mental health perspective, though, and that's what isn't backed by the science. You can see discussion of it in-thread, even.
But is there any good reason to doubt that trigger warnings can be helpful in the obvious way: someone sees the trigger warning and makes an informed decision to avoid the content?
Of course, that won't stop people that are anti-trigger warnings from using the irrelevant research (they don't work if you don't heed them... duh) to push their agenda.