I think we're still talking past each other on certain portions. The problem is that its hard to put a lot of these things in precise words because it deals with all these hazy areas of intuition and subjective experience that can't be expressed properly. I made that section because I wanted to be clear about what I was experiencing when reading or playing a Visual Novel. I wanted to come up with a way to pin down what I was viewing so I could break it down further and get to the core of what exactly makes a Visual Novel one of the most immersive mediums of late.If you want to kill your jargon, kill your quasi-legalese formatting. This "rule" honestly seems redundant. I'm sure there are VNs out there with only text and sound or images and text.
I was experiencing chiefly in two ways. In Space and in Time.
By Space I mean that my eyes were brushing over everything that was on the screen in front of me. So likewise when I type this paragraph I'm experiencing a sense of light colors and blue and washes of white in between the text. Also on the periphery of my vision is the slow dark setting grey of my room because the afternoon is fading and I'm too lazy to get up and turn on the light.
Yet simultaneously I'm also experiencing in Time. So the frame, the moment, doesn't exist by itself but its a series of other frames set up against one another. The clicking of the keyboard is punctuating my experience of the frame in discernible units of time and deep behind the slight rumbling of thunder is waving in and out of my thought.
Yet I'm also experiencing this deep and different sense of Time within myself, which is composed off the lingering wafts of my imagination as well as my thoughts and the words I'm thinking of writing drifting in and out of my head. When I read a Visual Novel I'm experiencing the music in the time of real life, where the song is 3 minutes long and loops itself after said 3 minutes, but then I'm also reading the text and coming up with my own sense of time, like if the scene inside is a battle then I imagine this influx of brief impressions, of steel and gunfire and screams and blood. So within the 3 minutes when I read about the scene and hear the music play, I also feel this hour long play of sound and fury going on inside the very recesses of my mind.
So how would I compose a battle scene like that, which evokes all these 3 levels of Space, Objective Time and Subjective Time? How would I, thinking in these terms, compose a vision?
Well first I would think in terms of Space, and what I would want to establish. The horror of war for example? Probably a helmet on the head of a skull. I also have to think in terms of color, like how to make such an image be stark and raw. For example using very deep inking and strong monochrome contrast like a Charles Burns comic? How would I position the shot? Up close with the crawling of maggots upon the eye? Would I shift the frame a bit backwards to have a full view of the torso, leaned against a wall? And most of all how do I frame the text? Do I even want text in that scene? Should I just let it wash over a bunch of stills of dead bodies? Perhaps in this case I would make it elegiac, and have the text scroll down and write it in the form of a war poem? Perhaps I can eschew the horrors of it altogether. Write it in a different way. Just have a view of the sky, grey and misty with all sorts of gloom. For the whole duration of the battle I focus on nothing but the sky. The sky and its all choking miasma like Death and Pestilence itself. Furthermore the sky allows me to use NVL format of heavy text because my vision of the frame knows that nothing else is happening in the back but I can still feel like general gloom of it misting behind the black screen.
If I take the route of the sky I can move on to Time. How should I punctuate it aurally? Do I want to use music? Do I just want to just use the sound of battle? Do I want to use the sound of rain? Do I even just want it to be silent? A lack of sound is just as important as sound. Of course if I use the sound of battle I can't sync it to images because I decided that I should compose the scene with only one image. What type of music? That's up to the sound team but what type of mood do I want it to convey? Is this a place to use something strange like this stripped down minimalist beat? How long can I expect scrolling through the scene to last? How long does the sound take before it gets old and it gets on your nerves? In this case stuff like silence or rainfall or a minimalist synth line would be better since it sorts of fade into the back of your head if it lasts too long.
Which leads now to the writing. Which is what will sell or make the scene fall on its knees since most of the other stimulation has been stripped down into such a bare state. Do I write highly subjective, get in the person's head, use repetitious words like "survive survive oh god please make me survive" or do I make it into like an image-text tapestry? I can focus on laconic one line descriptions that whip past with every click in an ADV like format. "The scrounging of mud between the fingers", "the clutch of the steel and huddling, with the rumbling so closer and ever getting closer", "fingers so bitten and dry", "Overhead another fighter roars" etc.. etc.. Or something completely digressive; "an farewell to the sky composed in boots" told by a particularly poetic soldier of the Jaguar Company, mixing fact and mythology and detail as his life slowly ebbs away before him. "Come now ma, he said, and lookit that old bloomin' sky, with its three foot of mist and cloud over such a tearing of the guts, like God's hazy gaze choking right into your very old bones". How do I craft an external world of guns and steel and an internal world of fear and trembling?
Most important of all does it all stick together? Does my sky allow for sufficient gloom to permeate in the vision of my player, does the text get in the way or detract from that gloom? Is the music and sound ambient enough to draw the player into that world? Does the text have a style that fits the view? Does the text and image and sound have a relationship that reinforces one another? Is it a cohesive atmosphere?
Seems intuitive? Everyone who makes it gets it? But even if it is, and seems redundant, and extraneous, and whatever you want to call it, its still important to get the exact content that we provide the player clear.
This ties to the above. What happens when a choice appears on screen? We don't choose in the same intuitive way that we do in real life but we judge, with cold and calm detachment, away from the scene. If you don't want detachment its not the choice itself but the content that comes before and after it that determines the attachment. Every choice is a breakaway. The player will step back for a moment and his eyes will linger on the button and think. Its also the moment when some players alt-tab to go read up the walk through. It's far from 'philobabble' but its a statement that we really cannot identify with a protagonist just through 'choices'. Yet people add choices for the sake of having choice itself, because they think that letting a player choose will create a bridge between the player and the protagonist. A choice always creates a detachment. What ensures attachment after that is all the content before and after leading up to that choice./no real comment, this is more philobabble instead of moving forwards with design.
So you do agree with me that its about the content before and after the choice as opposed to the choice itself. The main reason why I wrote that part was to say that just because there's choice we can't expect the same amount of identification and empathy we get when we freely choose in real life. No matter how many options you give, until it reaches like the hundreds, this can never happen. Yet a focus on 'customization' occurs in some games which seem to think that it amounts to anything more than a novelty. As I said in my earlier post stuff Persona 4 is not a good example because it works since the themes, of the public social world conflicting with the symbolic inner world, make giving the game Dating Sim like mechanics and other stuff mean more than just being a simple way for players to 'customize their world'.A VN with proper execution can make choosing tea or coffee seem like a significant decision because they are invested in the characters/scenario that this choice would make.
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