Medium, Genre, Content

[nickgreen]

I wrote an essay about visual novels for Medium, a fairly new blogging platform that was just recently opened up for public use. It's a bit of a long article but I do hope you all would give it a read. In it I tackle some preconceived notions held about visual novels by the wider gaming world and stress the importance of understanding the distinctions between medium, genre, and content. Thanks!

[Samu-kun]

Intellectual, as always, Mr. NickGreen.

I've generally occupied the opposite camp of your position, but your points are well argued. My perspective has been that visual novels (or eroge, as they call it) are just too deeply entrenched in contemporary Japanese sub culture to apply Western post-modern/critical/deconstruction theory on it. It's an academic exercise in deconstruction, but doesn't really explain why we call Japanese eroge "visual novels" and why we try to desexualize and modify it based upon largely Western (or our home culture's) norms. Treating visual novels less as a gene and more as a medium doesn't produce visual novels more unique or less archetypal, just stereotypical in ways you already accept. Even making a Dadaist visual novel just makes it more stereotypically Post War Paris and less stereotypically current Akibahara. I'm not sure how much more you can develop any medium. You can just make it more stereotypically X instead of Y, if X is more of your thing than Y.

I definitely would recommend people who want to make visual novels to give your article a read for a well argued perspective.

[mugenjohncel]

I already read everything in there and to compensate for my poor English comprehension I read it for the second time and a third time just to be sure I didn't missed anything... while everything in there had good points... out of stubbornness and for no apparent reason... I will still continue to use the term OELVN (Original English Language Visual Novel) for as long as I'm still breathing... also EVN sounds extremely lame

"POOF" (Disappears)

[LVUER]

A good essay, really. I enjoy reading it. I also recommend for everyone to read it

[gekiganwing]

Unfortunately the thought that visual novels made outside of Japan are inauthentic is still widespread. I think it is crucial to remove the precept that culture of origin is determinate in defining medium because it sets up the false belief that the use of a particular visual style belongs to a single culture and that any other use is inauthentic or not real.

Most but not all of the video games that I enjoyed growing up were Japanese in origin. I'm still a weeaboo... At times, I have attempted to use terms such as "OEL video game" to describe other products. But that was just me being pretentious...

Anyway, I believe that if any media format is genuine, then it should be viable no matter when, where, why, or how it was made. Should paintings be only considered valid in one nation? No. Should television be considered automatically terrible unless it's in one specific language? No. Should comics be limited to a particular art style or type of story? No.

Let's continue to use honest reviews and criticism. As opposed to reviews that are just pats on the back, or reviews that are unjustified, out-of-context, bitter rants.

In the end, describing visual novels as content rather than medium ends up pigeonholing them into propagating limited typologies and limits creators by making it financially unviable to experiment with other possibilities.

Let's start by thinking outside the romance game box. And then let's continue by thinking about other possibilities:

* What genres are under-represented?
* What art styles would mesh with your story?
* Do you want to emphasize gameplay or writing?
* Do you need on-screen character images?
* Can you use 3D polygon graphics outside of combat scenes?
* Interactive comics?
* Can it be quite short? Can there be frequent choices?

Consider what people have made outside this forum. What can you learn from The Stanley Parable or The Wolf Among Us? Can you gain new insights into romance games by playing Passage or ICO? What can you gain from reading gamebooks other than the Choose Your Own Adenture line? Also, look to flawed games and then try to rethink them.

[TrickWithAKnife]

Schools and Japan are the VN equivalents of pop music: Some people truly enjoy experiencing slight variations of the same content, over and over.

If people want to see other types of game, it's up to us to provide them, and to be supportive of other developers who are trying to break the mold.

[qirien]

Great article! I sometimes have trouble explaining what I'm making to non-VN-playing friends ("It's like a choose your own adventure book, except it's on the computer, and in some ways it's a video game? Set in space? Focusing on romance?").

It would also be interesting to look at how the first-person POV of a lot of VNs affects the type of stories that are often told with it. For example, are stories with brooding, introspective protagonists more prominent in VNs than in video games, because it's easier to show their thoughts? When your protagonist does not have to be an awesome killer (as in most action games), does that change the types of stories people tell?