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It requires the player to not only find and press a switch hidden on the wall of Poniko’s house (one of very, very few things in the game that can be interacted with in a meaningful way), but also - as Uboa has only a 1 in 64 chance to appear - to do this over and over again. Because of its ubiquity in the fandom, it’s easy to forget just how hard it is to trigger Uboa’s appearance. The distorted, shadowy figure is many people’s first introduction to the games, appearing without warning in Poniko’s house like a creepypasta come to life. Such “events” are scattered throughout Yume Nikki, but none are as well-known as Uboa. It’s a moment that seems designed to prompt the player to post a screenshot online, to send a copy of the game to a friend asking “is anyone else seeing this?” The “Famicom Glitch” is probably the game’s most obvious example of this legacy in the game itself: interact with a random tile of wall in a remote location and an empty dialogue box will begin flashing, the room’s tiles becoming increasingly disordered and corrupted until Madotsuki’s dream abruptly ends. Rather than being “released”, notes Julie Muncy, “ surfaced”. The game was itself marketed like a rumour: a lost forum post, a file buried on a disc sent with an obscure magazine. Yume Nikki inhabits both the world of pre-Internet schoolyard rumours and the thriving forum communities that grew up around the RPG Maker series.
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The result seems uncanny, unfinished: a glitched-out game on a broken cartridge.Īs long as there have been videogames, there have been players trying to find things lying just beyond the walls, a hole in the familiar into the unknown. NPC houses either open into Escherian mazes (the FC Basement) or appear in the middle of vast, unearthly oceans (Poniko’s House). The player economy, of “kill monsters, get money, buy items, increase stats” is left dangling, Madotsuki buying drinks to buff hp she’ll never need with money that doesn’t matter. Whether it’s an obsession or simply all she has left, the centrality of videogames to her conscious mind takes form in her dream world, the mental detritus of these play sessions appearing everywhere.įamiliar building blocks like vending machines and lampposts are scattered around like lost thoughts. Playing NASU on her Famicom is one of the only things protagonist Madotsuki can do while awake. But doing ignores that Yume Nikki is a game – at least in part – about videogame fandom. It’s easy to see this community as an accident, something spontaneous. This dissonance between isolating games and the community that creates them can be seen most clearly in Yume 2kki (Yume 2kki Team, 2004), perhaps the most famous fangame, which still maintains a surface conceit of being ‘about’ a hikikomori (a Japanese term for someone who completely withdrawals from society) while at the same time existing as a group effort, a feat of community collaboration: protagonist Urotsuki’s dream world is stitched together from the imaginations of dozens of different fans. And yet, these games still start with a character alone in their room. Many of these reference other community creations – a room where the player can try on the clothes of each fangame's protagonist, a gallery of images from other dreamworlds – which only adds to the feeling of being part of a collective. To understand Yume Nikki - to even have the words to describe it - you have to understand its community.Īll videogames have a fandom, but the members of Yume Nikki’s community are more like co-authors spawning an entire new genre’s worth of fangames. The silent NPCs are almost always (including within this essay) referred to by the names given to them by the fans, as are the many, many surreal locations. The infinitely looping, empty environments are so difficult to navigate that most every player will have to consult a guide to make it through. Ironically, the aspects of Yume Nikki that supposedly make it such a lonely experience are what ultimately force the player to immerse themselves within the game’s fandom. All we have is the experience of playing it. There is no plot to analyse, no explicit narrative to interpret. It’s a “warm-hearted” game, according to one of the only details given by creator Kikiyama. But I’m not so sure anymore.įor one thing, Yume Nikki comes with no mission statement. It’s how people normally talk about the game, and I picked up the habit. She can only go to bed, to sleep, and to dream. If she has family, friends, a life outside that door, we never see it. Yume Nikki (Kikiyama, 2004) is a game about a girl who can’t – or won’t – leave her room.