Game as Lit. & Japanese Transnationalism (e.g. Catherine)

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The guy who made Trilby posted a review of the Japanese "visual novel with puzzle elements" called Catherine (I'm guessing that people on this forum already know Catherine, as it is a major commercial release, in English, within the Japanese visual novel genre).

The usual warnings apply that if you're offended by coarse language (applied, not inappropriately, to the description of a game that handles gender-politics, etc.) then don't watch this review (it also contains cartoons making fun of cartoons... unlikely to offend people on this forum, I'd hope):
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... -Catherine

One of the recurrent problems here is that a "story-driven game" would seem to require a well-written story. New media seem to go through a transitional phase wherein anything will do... simply because they're new. The first 3D films didn't need decent plots or dialogue... they just needed to be in 3D. That gets old quick, and people return to the distinguishing features of good writing that (surprisingly) haven't changed much since Euripides or The Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢 = 红楼梦).

The reviewer (linked to here) doesn't broach it in those terms, but it deserves to be asked: given that block-pushing puzzle segments are not even as "leading edge" as 3D (or any other fad technology)... why is it that visual novels seem to lag so pathetically behind expectations of storytelling, relative to any other medium? On this continent, at least, they're more expensive than television, paper books, or most movie formats... but the medium of the visual novel itself seems to make it exempt from whatever expectations we would have of writing in those other genres.

Why?

Several things make the problem of "games as lit." interesting in the case of the Japanese (and pseudo-Japanese) visual novel:
• "Transnational-ism" and the peculiar contrasts that arise between Asian and Western (other cultures too, more rarely, come up in this mix...)
• Transgressive themes seem to dominate here... perhaps to a greater extent than in Proust or The Dream of the Red Chamber... perhaps because the whole genre is in some sense still haunted by its association with Hentai... in fact, the domination of these themes is so great that they still seem to define games that have had their content censored or toned down for the western market (i.e., you're often left with the sense that the raison d'etre for the game is exactly what the censors cut out of it).
• The quantity of work involved in producing a visual novel is actually pretty high... an estimate of how many man-hours of labor produces one of these things (i.e., including all the time for illustrations and programming, etc.) would definitely exceed a paper novel... and the fact that the creators work so much harder than the readers heightens my sense of disbelief that these things are so often produced (with intricate details, etc.) but simply "go nowhere" and seem to have had nothing to say in the first place.

Hey, Tolstoy wrote romance, too, but he had so much else to say, that he digresses into essays on the meaning of history in the middle of War and Peace. Even if a visual novel is more of a light comedy (and less comparable to Tolstoy) I really have to wonder why they don't seem to be written with nearly as much passion or purpose as (e.g.) a stand-up comedian (who really has something to say about dating and relationships, etc.) --or, indeed, well-written TV sitcoms (many of which have a carefully structured thesis fit into the 30 minutes... not something I enjoy personally, but millions of people do).

[papillon]

As I've said many times: I wish like hell we had some decent reviewers willing to do detailed breakdowns and literary commentary on these games. Most people are not born knowing how to spit a polished magnum opus out of their heads full-formed. Feedback and criticism are hugely important. If you know any professional book authors (and I do) ask them how well they'd fare without their editors.

There's a lot the untrained eye simply doesn't see. Look at beginner art classes and how much they don't recognise about the world right in front of them until it's pointed out. Visual novels are in a way almost outsider art. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but: There's no formal school of development for how to do it, and most of the people doing it are kinda nuts.

VNs fall into a terrible gap between video games (where 'good writing' is few and far between and rarely even considered something worth TRYING to achieve) and novels... but without the big audiences of video games and without the support structure of novels. There is no publisher who is going to help you polish your work. Even if you've got the money to hire a freelance editor, there is no existing school of knowledge that understands the genre.

You'd have an easier time finding a full-time academic to critique your Buffy fanfiction than your visual novel.

That said, I don't think you can really state that no one cares about the quality of writing in visual novels. The hardcore japanophiles who worship particular VNs are quite insistent that their writing quality is great, and disdain things that fail to meet their standard. You may or may not agree with their standards, but they certainly have them. (ISTR stumbling across a thread where someone was pasting segments from his favorite VNs and comparing them to famous literature and swearing how much better the Japanese writers were.)

Many people who thought of VNs as just "porn games" have been favorably impressed by the depth of the experience once they actually tried one. There are several games which are routinely held up as great, and many which are generally held to be a lot weaker.

[applegirl]

So...the escapist replaced Extra Credits? Interesting ideas, even if the delivery is poor.

I do admit it would be grand to have that kind of development team for a VN, but it is simple why that doesn't exist. VNs are a niche, a tiny community that already lives off the blood and sweat and tears of its creators. The creators barely get paid a fraction of what they would make with a daytime job (if they do commercial which suffers from raging piracy).

However, I challenge that assertion that VNs lag behind in storytelling. First, we cannot claim a published book means good writing. Thank you Twilight for proving this. This is not just my opinion, Stephen King made fun of Twilight for all of us who wanted to laugh at the pages filled with breathless description of Edward's perfect hair/face/breath.

I have played numerous VNs that have truly floored me and made me read for hours on end. Those had excellent storytelling that made me become engrossed in reading. The beautiful art and voice acting made the scene come alive.

Please do not focus only on the poor VNs that flood the public consciousness. Like books, there are plenty that are just awful and do not deserve to be representatives of this medium.

For example: I played the all-ages version of a Japanese visual novel that made my jaw drop. It was a psychological thriller that had a touching romance and truly heartbreaking twists in the storyline. The characters were deep and complex. Do I think there is an English VN that comes close to that kind of experience?

Sadly, it's not even close.

But, maybe some day.

By the way: I agree Tolstoy's War and Peace was good. But don't forget Anna Karenina

[DaFool]

why is it that visual novels seem to lag so pathetically behind expectations of storytelling, relative to any other medium? On this continent, at least, they're more expensive than television, paper books, or most movie formats... but the medium of the visual novel itself seems to make it exempt from whatever expectations we would have of writing in those other genres.

Most visual novels today are "Type B" works (as is most anime as well): they provide characters to wank off to. Most studios prefer Type B because it's easy to merchandise: artbooks, figurines, drama CDs. Simply, they sell.

Twilight is a Type B work, only in live action. A lot of Hollywood is becoming Type B as well... most movies feature famous actors just for the sake of having famous actors (whereas I'd rather watch a good movie with no-name actors who know how to play their roles rather than being distracted "Oh look! It's Tom Cruise acting like... Tom Cruise")

It's quite close to the problem we touched on in the discussion between BxG, GxB, and non-renai games. "Type A" works are works that do well as non-renai (or can also be romantically focused, just not focused on making X character wank material)

• "Transnational-ism" and the peculiar contrasts that arise between Asian and Western (other cultures too, more rarely, come up in this mix...)

It is generally said that Eastern media focus on characters, while Western media focus on plot, in general. So there's more pre-disposition towards Type B in the East.

• perhaps because the whole genre is in some sense still haunted by its association with Hentai... in fact, the domination of these themes is so great that they still seem to define games that have had their content censored or toned down for the western market (i.e., you're often left with the sense that the raison d'etre for the game is exactly what the censors cut out of it).

And the Japanese don't want to do anything about it:
http://omochikaeri.wordpress.com/

I'm currently almost finished reading Sharnoth and am enjoying it only because it's a breath of fresh air and my affinity for steampunk material; otherwise it drags on and on and repeats scenes and phrases just to stretch the experience. Perhaps it's because it's the translation, but I have a feeling a good Western writer would be able to provide a similar experience while still saving me 20 hours of filler.

• The quantity of work involved in producing a visual novel is actually pretty high... an estimate of how many man-hours of labor produces one of these things (i.e., including all the time for illustrations and programming, etc.) would definitely exceed a paper novel... and the fact that the creators work so much harder than the readers heightens my sense of disbelief that these things are so often produced (with intricate details, etc.) but simply "go nowhere" and seem to have had nothing to say in the first place.

I enjoy Japanese games but I hate how most of them seem to be designed for hikikomoris. 50 hours and probably only 10 hours of that is non-filler.

Due to the mostly linear nature, VNs are content intensive, since each branch may require new CGs, despite the savings afforded by recycled sprites. I've mentioned this before but I think CGs are the main culprit for delayed projects.

If it were a regular video game, you'd just build the setpiece once, the characters once, then use machinima techniques to animate the cutscenes. I think that's far more efficient in the long run.

VNs are expensive, more expensive than console games because they are a niche product. The studios know they usually won't sell more than 5,000 to hardcore fans so they price accordingly.

Even if a visual novel is more of a light comedy (and less comparable to Tolstoy) I really have to wonder why they don't seem to be written with nearly as much passion or purpose as (e.g.) a stand-up comedian (who really has something to say about dating and relationships, etc.) --or, indeed, well-written TV sitcoms (many of which have a carefully structured thesis fit into the 30 minutes... not something I enjoy personally, but millions of people do).

And that is why I am working with Taleweaver. Daemonophilia is a good example of this in action. I've seen many good writers in these forums over the years but for some reason they feel the need to default to the conventional Japanese pointlessly long-winded narrative style.

I want eastern graphics, an eastern format, but western writing.

For the record, it was Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn that made me discover anime and get into the anime fandom.

[Auto-Anthropology]

Papillon wrote: "I wish like hell we had some decent reviewers willing to do detailed breakdowns and literary commentary on these games"...

Well, if you look at the various comments above, it should give you some hope. This discussion thread has drawn in some intelligent and constructive comments in record time. I think you'd get "decent reviewers" (such as those who have just commented here) if you had a slightly more structured website (and not merely a comment forum) for them to contribute to. That, too, would require editing.

Regarding "Eastern aesthetic, Western writing" (as a paradigm proposed in various words by various commentators, above) I'd have to say that my own interest is not quite parallel.

I'm a white man who lived in Asia for ___ years... if I watch a Korean soap-opera (with sub-titles in English) a large part of what makes it interesting is precisely that it reflects Korean cultural assumptions and interests. I would not (in general) be interested in a soap opera written by westerners that took place in Korea; the latter would just reflect what westerners think about Korea. What is alien about other cultures is part of what makes them interesting; and, in related news, I would never watch an American soap opera, simply made by and for Americans (they're of no interest to me... and, yeah, I think there's an objective argument that they're of lower quality/intensity than KBS World).

If I look at Korean "drama" (i.e., soap-opera) like The Slave Hunters (simply 추노 in Korean) there's an amazing array of political baggage there, as contemporary Koreans re-examine the brutality of their own history (slavery, feudalism, etc.).

Frankly, (1) there are very few western media products that attempted anything similar (in Europe, the feudal past has been romanticized and robbed of its anguish a long time ago... it is a past populated entirely by well-fed people with perfect teeth, etc.), and (2) the ones that exist are (partly) less interesting to me precisely because they're set in a Western (and Christian) past --instead of a Buddhist and Asian one (not to mention Confucianism, Shinto, etc. etc.). Under the latter heading, I note that historians screamed about the inaccuracies about the recent attempt to re-cinematize King Arthur (2004), and while that film may be crap on a number of levels, I remembered thinking how rare it was to see any depiction of Europe's feudal past that depicted as factually "normal" the reality of torture, execution, etc., in the way that film did. It was also rare in bluntly depicting how religion and political power were closely linked (or one and the same) in that era, in a manner that was personal to the characters, and not abstract.

There's a sense in which I can recommend everyone on this list run out and buy The Slave Hunters (추노) on DVD, despite the fact that (1) many of the martial arts sequences are crap, and (2) it has many of the "candy-coated", "escapist" and "windswept" features of soap-operas everywhere. This was brought to mind partly by the contrasting comment (above) about character-driven vs. plot-driven ... honestly, in this case, my interest is neither. What makes it interesting really is culture, history and even politics... despite the fact that the series is very much an over-the-top pulp romance (and, yeah, the ending is terrible... KBS world is weak on endings).

In a sense here, I'm also demonstrating why VN would be of any interest to me, or someone like me. Tolstoy didn't write about Buddhism. A lot of literature that is of Asian origin is implicitly dealing with the legacy of Buddhism, even if it isn't directly about it. And, indeed, a very different political legacy, as I've alluded to above.

[Auro-Cyanide]

While I'm all for good writing, sometimes you also have to consider the purpose of the text.

Writing is all about communicating. Specifically communicating with a particualr audience. If you deem something below your standard of literature, maybe you were not the target audience? I doubt this is the intention a lot of the time of the author, but it happens. Take, as someone has mentioned before, Twilight. The writing in it is poor and I want to burn it in a fire. It should never be held up as an example to anyone. However. A lot of people liked it. It was on their level and communicated to them. I can live with that.

Good writing also means different things to different people. I'm a huge fan of simple, clean writing. I hate waffling and I hate the use of jargon. It is contradictory to the purpose of communicating. The main reason I strongly dislike academic writing. There is no reason at all to isolate people from understanding what you wrote unless that is exactly what you want to do. Tolkien is another example. Amazing story writer, but man could he waffle on and on and on. I didn't find it very effective if the whole point was to tell the story. But that's just me.

I'm all for a greater sense of good writing, but like Papillon said, people aren't born writing masterpieces. A lot of people here are beginners, and everyone is still learning. If you feel some person's writing could use some work, maybe you can give them some suggestions? Also, most of us are doing it for the love of story telling, not for achieving super high standards. We can all face the fact that there are much, much easier ways to make money, if they are commercial. I'm an artist for a VN, but I also work at a full time job. I simply wouldn't earn enough doing comissions.

There are a handful of people on this forum I honestly admire for their writing, not because I think they are the reincarnation of Tolstey, but because they can pull me into a good story. And that's all I'm really worried about.

If you are talking VNs in general, including those outside the indie groups, well I'm not really surprised. Popular media lately hasn't exactly been shining examples of writing, and yet they sell well. I don't blame people for going after that when their wages are depending on it. Plus, like I said, the audience is key. A lot of people just don't like thinking to hard unfortunatly and so the easy route is often taken.

[papillon]

I think you'd get "decent reviewers" (such as those who have just commented here) if you had a slightly more structured website (and not merely a comment forum) for them to contribute to.

Authors generally do not create the pulpit from which their reviewers speak. For one thing, that would tend to create a conflict of interest. Many people with valid criticisms feel hesitant about offering them in an author's personal space (and, for that matter, many authors respond badly to even valid criticism and may try to strike it down at first glance without taking the time to appreciate it. I'm sure we've all seen book authors snipe at reviewers on amazon / blogs.) And if I'm intentionally asking someone to review my work in a particular way, with focus on things that I point out, that's going to affect their response.

The most useful review I've gotten IMO was the one from Emily Short. I did send her the review copy, but I tried to otherwise not say much and let her see it as she would. Of course, she has credentials, and I don't just mean that in terms of the academic standing. She has written about a lot of games. You can look over her writings and understand that she's capable of making quality judgments about works which are highly varied in genre and style.

I've seen review blogs where the sole review gushes about everything such that they make the shakiest fangame sound exactly as good as the fan-favorite grand-epic. Those reviews are meaningless. I've seen review blogs that try to sound more professional by bashing everything, and make the grand epic sound exactly as bad as the shakiest fangame; that's not helpful either. A proper reviewer needs to be able to demonstrate that they know something of the conventions of the genre they are talking about (Bashing a visual novel for being text-heavy and action-light shows that you are reviewing the wrong game) and that they are capable of judging one thing as better than another; that they have some sense of scale.

These things need to be established on their own; any blog intentionally founded by me for these purposes would be flawed at the core.