YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG players have caught on to a dialog section included in the game is actually ripped straight from After Dark, a book from novelist Haruki Murakami. The dialog is word-for-word as it appears in the book, which lead some players to believe that the content was plagiarized. When Ackk Studios was approached about the matter, they offered up the following explanation.
“YIIK does intentionally contain allusions to After Dark by Haruki Murakami! That book was an influence on the game and we wanted to pay tribute to it.”
The team went a bit deeper than that, explaining the whole thought process behind the included lines.
“The ‘Proto Woman’ character speaking the words from the novel is part of a distorted reality being presented to Alex; they’re not a character from the regular, grounded reality Alex believes he knows. A regular person would have been written to speak with the intention and knowledge that they were quoting a book. Instead, the role ‘Proto Woman’ plays is more like a pseudo ‘narrator’ of After Dark.
The idea is, Alex has read After Dark, and his fondness for the novel is seeping into his reality with vocal and physical manifestations calling his attention back to the passages of the book now living in his subconscious. In that context, we thought it would not be in-character for ‘Proto Woman’ to cite that their words hail from Murakami’s novel, since they don’t have the awareness that their words are actually an excerpt from a book.
Also, it was our intention for Alex to be utterly bewildered by the things that he’s seeing and hearing all around him. Certainly the YIIK player might realize these are words from After Dark, but we thought it would be difficult for Alex to consciously realize in that moment that he was listening to a direct excerpt of the novel.”
While we often see other pop culture tidbits referenced in games, it's not usually in the form of directly-ripped quotes. Going one step further, neither the book or its author are attributed anywhere in the game.
