Doki Doki Literature Club is a very famous video game, and rightfully so.
The game seems quite innocent on the surface--a group of kids and the generic self-insert dating sim protagonist. This changes very quickly as you play the game, however.
To make a very long and disturbing story short, Monika commits serial waifu murder because she thinks her classmates aren't real, in an attempt to court the player .
Now, Monika is very much aware of her nature as a video game character, but it raises a question.
Her reality is bound by rules. She must say this, she must say that, but at the end of the day is that not how our reality works? I will go and drink that coffee today because everything we will ever do has been decided since the big bang because that's how physics works.
Monika can technically do whatever she wants. She could go and run for president or something, but she wont. Why wouldn't she? Because she wouldn't. Its the same thing for us real people. I could go and become a buddhist monk in Nepal, but I wouldn't, because that's not who I am.
Am I trying to say that human beings have as much free will as a character in a video game? Well, yes. I might sound like a crackhead, and hell, I might just be completely wrong with some of the underlying aspects, but at the end of the day, it is a fact of reality that all things are preceded by something else. Why did the chair fall? Because I pushed it.
Why does Monika want to date the player? Because it's a dating sim and that's what Dan Salvato wanted her to do. Why do I want to drink coffee? Because my brain chemistry says I like the taste.
In summary, just in case you read the title and thought I was on crack, people are products of their reality. To quote a philosopher who's name I cannot remember, "Man can do what he [wants], but not [want] what he [wants]"
Determinism. This relies entirely on material causality. Are you sure that causation is the sole mover of all things? How could we be sure? Just because a thing follows another thing in every case you've seen doesn't necessarily mean that it always will or that it always must.
To make it more disturbing... is she wrong? Are those other NPCs not just highly complex machines? Their well written dialogue and characters doesn't make them any less fake. Now consider Monika. Assume she genuinely has more sentience than them. Is it wrong for her to kill less sentient animals (or arguably non-sentient machines) who get in the way of her only input with a human entity? Is she supposed to appeal for status amongst drones? Is she supposed to seek an inferior NPC male partner? Is her decision set supposed to be to be the lord of retards as opposed to desperately clinging onto the most human connection she has ever known?
Regarding real humans:
How many are real how many have an inner monologue, a capacity to dissent from a minority, etc.? If you don't take a soul, an essence, or all beings are created equal as a given, does it make sense to think of them that way?
P.S. I'm familiar with the concept, but never played the game beyond the first hour or two.
I'm taking it more in the direction of hard determinism, but you do raise an interesting point.
All humans are real, obviously, but even me, am I not just a set of increasingly complex mathematical equations thru chemical reactions ?
You may be missing the premise of my point. My point is are all humans human in the comprehensive and complementary way that we use that term?
I'm also saying what if she is more human and they are more well written machines that trigger an emotional response in the player, but they genuinely are a machine imitating a human than a machine that genuinely has human characteristics? Would her actions then not be borne out of a desperation from a lack of genuine connection with a being of proximate sentience? And would they not be moral considering the others are just machines and not actually sentient?
That being said, the determinism part is also valid. Norse societies believed in "the fates" (Norns), but still believed there was wiggle room. Your death was guaranteed, but you still maintained agency throughout and how you addressed your death and end affected your afterlife and the fate of your descendants. Not dissimilar to an RPG where there is one set ending, but how you live and who you interact with changes things about the world that may be included in the end game wrap up with the implication that your end was always fixed, but how you get there contains many opportunities to exert agency. It's a complicated series of concepts though, so I may have gotten some of that wrong.