Rules on the Visual Novel as a Medium

[netravelr]

Skimming this thread, I've seen the phrase "meaningless choices" thrown around a few times. I'm curious to know what exactly this means?

I think that sometimes in vns, a few extra choices are fine, even if they don't have a huge impact or affect the ending at all. If we learn something new about the story, world, or characters along the way, would it still be meaningless? After all, it's not necessarily the ending that is most important, but how we got there.

This. In the Persona series on the main storyline there are a lot of choices that have minimal to no difference in how the story plays out. However, those choices give the players a feeling like it's "their" story and that they're playing it the way that they want to.

[Caveat Lector]

What about choices that don't quite have an impact on the main story itself, but on how you characterize the protagonist and how this plays out in a resulting epilogue?

[raistlintg]

There are also choices only made to add an extra difficulty, because the player is confronted to a lot of combinations and doesn't really know where the important choices are.
I find this trick rather annoying and unfair.

[Enigma]

There are also choices only made to add an extra difficulty, because the player is confronted to a lot of combinations and doesn't really know where the important choices are.
I find this trick rather annoying and unfair.

I can agree to this. With a few excpetions (crime dramas being one) I don't think VNs need any difficulty at all.

[SundownKid]

Skimming this thread, I've seen the phrase "meaningless choices" thrown around a few times. I'm curious to know what exactly this means?

I think that sometimes in vns, a few extra choices are fine, even if they don't have a huge impact or affect the ending at all. If we learn something new about the story, world, or characters along the way, would it still be meaningless? After all, it's not necessarily the ending that is most important, but how we got there.

This. In the Persona series on the main storyline there are a lot of choices that have minimal to no difference in how the story plays out. However, those choices give the players a feeling like it's "their" story and that they're playing it the way that they want to.

I was also a little miffed about this myself. I put quite a bit of effort in adding choices to let the player have different "kind" or "tough" reactions to different things with the dialogue for that scene changing, but the responses I got were that the game had no effort in the choices because the choices didn't affect things going forward in a major way until the end. I'm sure if there were no choices, the same people would say there are not enough choices. But, given the length of the story I just didn't have time to write 2 or 3 stories at once.

[TrickWithAKnife]

Anything you do is bound to annoy someone.

I have a lot of choices as well. The vast majority won't affect the end of the game, but will change what happens during the game. If you play my game just to see what the ending is, then that's your loss. I'm taking the characters on a journey.

You can either strap in for the ride or play a dating sim.
What you can't do is try to claim there is anything wrong with this design choice. Rules are an illusion.

[Donmai]

Rules are an illusion.

This. Nothing more to say.

[czxcjx]

1. Content must be prioritized over systems. (Does choice really matter or contribute anything good to the story which I am trying to tell? Does adding a mini-game add to the overall vision?)

Except in order to be able to execute our story as a game, we first must learn how to work with the system itself. I agree you should have a good story to add first, but if we decide that yes, we do want choices if they are an integral part of our vision; and yes, we do want a mini-game for whatever reason...then we sort of kind of DO need to learn the programming skills required for that. In that case, once you know what your vision is and how you want to achieve it, then learning how to use the system should take priority. Even kinetic VN's still require a very basic level of programming knowledge--maybe somewhat less complex than a branching VN, but still some knowledge. I run up little joke "projects" on Ren'Py from time to time just to experiment with the engine and get the hang of it, and it requires going through a lot and lot and LOT of traceback errors before getting it right, and I ran into difficulties even with the kinetic "projects".

1.1.2. An end that can be easily continued is not an end but an interpretation.

What does that mean? An ending that could be continued...kind of like an open ending? An ending that doesn't explicitly spell out certain details but instead leaves them up to the imagination? That's still an ending, technically. I mean, the "read the manga" endings from badly done manga-to-anime adaptations are awful, but if we're talking about the kind of ending that gives the story closure but at the same time leaves enough open ends for a potential sequel or for the viewer/reader/player to fill in some of the blanks, that's still an ending.

1.2.1. Any moment where a player must choose is a choice, regardless of whether the consequences of the choice are similar.

Doesn't that go without saying, though? I'd also think most people around here would know that audio and visual cues are important, too.

I'd like to put forward the idea that defining the rules for VNs may be counter-productive in some cases. Innovation happens when people think outside the box.

Same here. While it's true that we should have a basic understanding of the box we're stepping outside of, we do that by examining the genre first (the box), rather than defining it by the absolute rules of the medium (the factory the box came from). And hey, sometimes "blind meaningless creativity" can actually produce something good! Also, I really, really don't like the idea of calling any kind of creativity "meaningless". When it comes to discussing the genre and typical plot elements of said genre, or how VN's differ from other mediums, it's best to discuss them as a means of seeing what people think of them and what we can do with them rather than trying to use them as absolute strict guidelines.

A. This is something that's basically been going on in the Film Industry with the whole idea of Auteur Theory. Basically if you want to make a film who exactly holds' the creative vision of the game? Generally people have in arguing in favor of director over others like screenwriter or actor since he envisions the project directly in terms of cinematography and since the key of a movie is the composition of shots over dialogue or plot. Likewise if you want to grasp the very core of Visual Novels as a medium you have to ask yourself who directs the game? Scenarist, Artist, Sound Team and Actors or Programmer? My basis for questioning this is to question the cause of the various perceived faults in the medium, mainly on the issue of choice and gaming elements within Visual Novels. Is a Visual Novel like Kamidori Alchemy Meister a Visual Novel? Yes you can say its a Visual Novel but No you can also define it as a strategy game with visual-novel elements. Is Persona 4 a Visual Novel or is it an RPG? Why is this important in the first place, it sounds like plain semantic wrangling? It's important because you want to make clear who has the leverage over the elements of the Visual Novel and who makes it stand. I think seeing Visual Novels as games, as in system oriented, is what leads to an overt and almost self-destructive attachment to choice systems and features. Same reason why seeing Games as Movies, which is what huge studios do all the time, leads to them to make arbitrary morality route choices and boring quick time events. Of course you have the shining examples like Telltale games but these are basically studios that have a cohesive vision, knows whose in charge, and knows how to deconflict the different aspects of the stuff they make. Telltale games care about stories overall so they give premium over content than anything else. The Mass Effect series didn't know whether it wanted to be a game or to tell an epic story, which led it to try to mix the two and develop the Renegade Paragon morality system as well as made them overload on too many choices because they wanted to expand their world too vastly and by the end it became too huge a mess that they couldn't wrap it up in any proper manner. Romeo Tanaka has generally been known as the Shakespeare of the Japanese Visual Novel and most of his games has been known as masterpieces mainly due to the writing. Key tried to hire him for Rewrite but they basically mixed him along with about 5 other scenarists until his voice was drowned and he only dictated some parts of the VN which are generally considered to be the best moments. So you have to ask, in a Visual Novel are interactive features important or is the quality of the writing and art more important? I'm not saying scrap being interested in programming but I'm saying that know what you're trying to create. If you write a Visual Novel you should, more than anything else, care about the quality of the writing and the images, as they're basically the foundation to everything else.

B. I mean that an end SHOULD be an end. An end should be known as the last say. A direct end of the journey for everyone. If you quick reload to last choice and continue from there then that isn't really an end but just another facet of the ongoing story. But people don't realize this so they put a lot of bad ends which just, more than anything, break the immersion in the game because you're drawn back to the title screen and have to click your way back to the last choice. But if used properly this can be a very useful narrative tool. If you write a 'bad end' like its an ending, with a bad closure, then since it isn't really a bad closure it adds almost nothing other than irritation to the game. If you want to throw your player back to the title screen on purpose you should leave him with a question and leave him thinking about that 'end' he just saw so that when he returns to the main arc it'll have added something to the overall plot. Breaking immersion has been used as a narrative tool in various experimental theater like Brechtian theater and especially the films of the French New Wave but the way bad-ends do it is wrong.

C. All these seem very arbitrary right? A choice is a choice. An end should be an end. The problem is that these are foundations that go unnoticed by many creators who seem to have an intuitive grasp of what a choice or an end is. What is a choice? If you define it its when the player is actually committed to ruminate over an action. It's a break in the plot to give a moment of contemplation as to the personality of the protagonist and the personality of the player and to commit an action based on these two elements. Which means it should be a rising up of who you are as a person and the context you have been revealed to so far. If the choice is 'go out with Heroine A, B or C' then all that rises out of you is a consideration of the aesthetic value of the three heroines. If Telltale Games makes a choice between choosing to save one of two people from a zombie horde then a lot of things will come into play based on the context. Some will make the choice base on which character they like better, others will make the choice based on which characters they think will be more useful in the context of a zombie apocalypse. Furthermore, the act of choosing is more important than the consequences of the choice. If the choice loops back to become meaningless its still a choice. What does this mean on the part of the player? It draws attention to his essential powerlessness. I think I went a bit more on this in an earlier comment. But when should choices be made to have similar consequences? 'Meaningless' choices are very dangerous weapons because they draw attention to the illusion of your Visual Novel though they can be used to put forward a very powerful message at certain moments. Control wrestled away from the player to make a point.

Rules are an illusion.

This. Nothing more to say.

D. Whenever a person posts something like a definitive route or a definitive way, especially with regard to creativity, the first reaction one gets is to work in opposition to everything that is said. Aristotle's Poetics for example, which dictates how a play should be crafted, has basically been flouted by every playwright ever since its creation. Yet somehow people still draw attention to it by making plays in the style of 'greek tragedies'. Why do people like Bertolt Brecht or Aristotle write manifestos and try to figure out a 'theory' to creation? Why is aesthetics even a field of philosophy when most people agree to it being something ungraspable, unfinalizable and completely intuitive? Because the very fact is that even though people can say "Rules are Illusions", which is a very Stirner-esque creed, the fact is that finding categorizations and foundations can crystallize certain important ideas and create guiding lights to follow for making great stuff. Everyone, at the very core of their soul, knows that they can create everything they want. Why is it that most people who get into the medium, with the knowledge that they can create everything they want, still stick to conservative 5 heroine branching path structures? Because that is what they want to make, despite being given the full gamut of possibilities out there. That's why people create theories and manifestos in reaction to a status quo. They want to draw their attention to faults and orthodoxies so they reorient the line. Tell a person he can make anything and he goes for the most intuitive and easy route in the world. Get a set of theories to question his base definitions for what he thinks the medium is and that is when you have true 'thinking out of the box'. Of course you can have your vision of 'Rules are Illusions' but even a true Anarchy must be clearly defined. Modern and Postmodern philosophers have been trying to destroy the rules for basically about a hundred years already.

[TrickWithAKnife]

What is the purpose of this topic?

[czxcjx]

Skimming this thread, I've seen the phrase "meaningless choices" thrown around a few times. I'm curious to know what exactly this means?

I think that sometimes in vns, a few extra choices are fine, even if they don't have a huge impact or affect the ending at all. If we learn something new about the story, world, or characters along the way, would it still be meaningless? After all, it's not necessarily the ending that is most important, but how we got there.

This. In the Persona series on the main storyline there are a lot of choices that have minimal to no difference in how the story plays out. However, those choices give the players a feeling like it's "their" story and that they're playing it the way that they want to.

By meaningless choices I mean choices that have little consequence to the player. I'm talking like a choice like "Would you like to drink tea or coffee" as opposed to "Would you save your girlfriend or your mother". If you choose tea or coffee you can't expect much from it other than a comment about the drink. If you make a choice between characters the least you can expect is the other character will be gone for the entirety of the game. Of course some people can make choice systems where choosing coffee or tea matters in a large way. Then it depends on whether a plot where the choice between coffee or tea matters is a good plot or not.

The problem is that until Visual Novels have reached the level to actually have the same complexity as those really open-world games like Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft or EVE Online, the 'feeling like its "their" story' is always an illusory one. It's seen more as a novelty and a feature than anything else, like one of those games where you can customize how your character looks. By nature of having a story you already place the player within a bound so its less a 'freedom of choice' and more a 'personality test'. The aim should then be not to make a lot of choices in itself but to see the act of making a choice more of like the guilty/not guilty hammer of a judge. It is a direct question posed by the creator to the morals and personality of the player. The main thing about a choice is that it always has consequences and these consequences are completely out of the hands of the player. Unlike Persona games ,which has interesting gameplay, plot and style anyway, the idea of a Visual Novel is that you're not making a game with lots of 'features' but you're telling a story. If you give the player a lot of choices that have almost zero consequences then that's getting your priorities wrong, unless your story was about nihilism and the lack of meaning or something. If you have as much other great content as Persona games then maybe you can afford to throw in a bunch of extra choices, though by the very nature of making a person choose each choice he makes breaks the flow of the game.

[czxcjx]

What is the purpose of this topic?

As with the point of any discussion on Aesthetics, to try to see what the goals, limits and potentials of a medium or art form really is and should be.

I seem to have hit your bad spot or something because it seems that this topic is just made to question the artistic credibility of creators, which you seem very hostile towards. I don't think that was my intention even though its bound to seem to some people that if a person sets up a set of theories or anything then it seems like people who don't follow these theories are invalidated as artists. The point of this topic though is not to create aggressive knee-jerk reactions and hostility but to really ask what are the key components of the medium, what are its aspects, what are limits and what are potentials. Definitions and rules are set, people react and question these rules with meaningful retorts, new definitions and rules are set. Shaking up and questioning the small foundations lead to new ways of seeing and creating, even though this may seem like an arbitrary exercise meant to piss people off.

[TrickWithAKnife]

I love to analyze stuff more than actually trying to make anything

Is there a name for that?

The problem with CHOICE is that it means NOTHING content wise and is rather a shoddy way of WISH FULFILLMENT to get the girl in each path.

Only in some cases. Of course people will take this comment personally.

This is another example of prioritizing the SYSTEM over the CONTENT which is a great flaw of all Visual Novel creators out there.

Oh? All of us?

Another great sin of Fate/Stay Night is to completely efface the image by having the text entirely cover it, which kind of misses the point. If you want to maximize on the emotional content and the form, the art can NEVER be effaced in such a way.

NVL creators are doing it wrong?

If you want to have so many choices then DO NOT MAKE IT A CHOICE but rather an INTERPRETATION.

I'll have as many choices as I feel are suitable.

TrickWithAKnife wrote:
I'd like to put forward the idea that defining the rules for VNs may be counter-productive in some cases. Innovation happens when people think outside the box.

Except that blind meaningless creativity more likely hampers innovation and experimentalism.

Not following rules certainly does not mean we are engaging in blind, meaningless creativity. It means we are trying not to make something generic.

An end is an end, neither bad nor good.

Bad ends are probably one of the worst inventions in Visual Novel history since more than anything it breaks the flow of the game.

It's up to the creators to decide what kind of end(s) they want to include. They certainly shouldn't be told what they are doing is one of the worst inventions in VN history.
Some players enjoy them.

Likewise if you want to grasp the very core of Visual Novels as a medium you have to ask yourself who directs the game? Scenarist, Artist, Sound Team and Actors or Programmer?

I've never heard of Scenarists, a Sound Team or Actors in a VN. I have heard of directors. In smaller teams, the person funding it has control. In teams where there is no money changing hands, the direction is decided as a group - that's why people try to find team members with similar views.

The Mass Effect series didn't know whether it wanted to be a game or to tell an epic story, which led it to try to mix the two and develop the Renegade Paragon morality system as well as made them overload on too many choices

They gave players the choice to play as an interactive story, an action game, or a combination of the two. They pulled it off to much acclaim.

Get a set of theories to question his base definitions for what he thinks the medium is and that is when you have true 'thinking out of the box'.

A definition is not required. Only knowing limitations is.

Of course you can have your vision of 'Rules are Illusions' but even a true Anarchy must be clearly defined.

Not needing to be told what we should be doing and how we should be doing it is not anarchy. It's freedom of choice - one of the best parts of being indie.

By nature of having a story you already place the player within a bound so its less a 'freedom of choice' and more a 'personality test'.

No it isn't.

TrickWithAKnife wrote:
What is the purpose of this topic?

As with the point of any discussion on Aesthetics, to try to see what the goals, limits and potentials of a medium or art form really is and should be.

It looks a lot like one person saying how one particular way is acceptable and anything else is wrong.

Shaking up and questioning the small foundations lead to new ways of seeing and creating

By telling us that many popular methodologies are wrong?


Sorry, but you have a lot of harshly worded reasons why our design choices are inferior to your own, but by your own admission you've created nothing. After you create an incredible VN following your own rules, your words will carry a lot more weight.

[Shinoki]

I totally agree with TrickWithAKnife...

What is the purpose of this topic?

As with the point of any discussion on Aesthetics, to try to see what the goals, limits and potentials of a medium or art form really is and should be.

I wasn't going to join in on the topic at all, but czxcjx, I feel like if you lessened down on the huge text walls, the intimidating capital letter text, and the type of phrasing that seemed as if you weren't open to suggestion and discussion and what you said is supposed to be some kind of absolute truth, this topic would be more of a discussion on aesthetics rather than an argument and hostility...

[Caveat Lector]

Why is it that most people who get into the medium, with the knowledge that they can create everything they want, still stick to conservative 5 heroine branching path structures?

Actually, most VN’s around here (at least from quickly glancing through the WiP topic) tend to be otome games, GxB. Date Warp is along these lines, and the author puts her own unique spin on it. It's not what you do, it's how you do it.

As with the point of any discussion on Aesthetics, to try to see what the goals, limits and potentials of a medium or art form really is and should be.

Art has no limits or goals, but it does have a lot of potential. It's something you explore, not diminish.

Definitions and rules are set, people react and question these rules with meaningful retorts, new definitions and rules are set. Shaking up and questioning the small foundations lead to new ways of seeing and creating, even though this may seem like an arbitrary exercise meant to piss people off.

Art becomes revolutionary when the art work itself makes people question the medium and the genre and whether more can be done with it, not when someone tries to set up “rules” for what the medium should be and then claims anyone who does not like them is just being “hostile” or having an “aggressive knee-jerk reaction”.

[Enigma]

Well what I really see happening here is that most of the forum have a different artistic philosophy than the OP.