Moving the discussion going on in different thread to here:
Obscura wrote:On a related note, I always wondered why OELVN's are stuck with such a dreadful moniker. I feel like the name in and of itself stifles the growth of the entire genre. Visual Novel sounds bad enough to me...OELVN sounds even worse. Is there a reason why EVN isn't the accepted phrase?
LateWhiteRabbit wrote:We've had that discussion on these forums before. It really is a a dreadful name. I'm pretty sure it evolved just like this:
"Oh, visual novels are from Japan, but now some are being translated into English. I want to search for or talk about those, so I'll call them English Language Visual Novels. Oh, but look, now somebody has made a visual novel that wasn't Japanese, and was written in English to begin with! I can't get it confused with the PURE visual novels that have just been TRANSLATED into English, so I'll call it an Original English Language Visual Novel! Oh, crap. That's way too long. Acronym time! OELVN!"
Everyone else ever: "What the hell is OELVN?"
And yeah, "visual novel" sounds about as exiting as left-overs.
tagged as: pet peeves and other things that bother me
nyaatrap wrote:I remember one Japanese media introduced ren'py as "Interactive e-book" recently. I first thought why it's not VN, but think it later, It makes sense. And I found more possibility to expand the market from this naming.
TrickWithAKnife wrote:Perhaps I'm wrong about it, but I get the impression that this community has a pretty strong presence in the VN field. Admittedly, this field is in the early stages, but it is growing.
Might I suggest that we, as a community, start to define the terminology that is used?
The longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to make changes, and perhaps it's in our best interests to label what we make in a more appealing way.
I think we all know of the negative images that often come with the existing labels.
Please discuss this, LSF. I think this is probably one of the most important things that could affect the growth of VNs as a whole.