Aines445 wrote:I think this was derailed because everyone was tired of arguing, but I think that I might not be right.
That's basically right - or, I suspect, because a lot of people realize that people were talking past each other. It's because this sort of thing is working on two levels - a macro and a micro one.
The macro level tends to talk about what would be good for visual novels as a whole - that there are two many of v kind of game, that there should be more of w kind of game, that if we do x, y, and z, EVNs will be accepted by the larger world, better, and/or more artistic. The micro level is the one where people decide how to spend their time - what sort of game do they want to spend the next few days, months, or years making.
After years at this I've come to the conclusion that arguments at the macro level are basically useless - regardless of what the arguments are. There's are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that the macro level doesn't really exist, since people don't play EVNs as a whole, they play the individual games that catch their fancy. How many times have you hear "All EVNs are crap except..." and then people listing the games they like. It's like with movies - there are a few people (movie critics, people who are into production) who like movies as a whole, but most people tend to like action movies, or romantic comedies, or childrens cartoons, or whatever.
The second reason is that there's a massive amount of difference in effort required to talk on the macro vs the micro level. To contribute on the macro level is easy - you just post here. Making a game on the micro level takes all the effort and the time - and it's very hard for a macro level argument to convince people to spend that time on things they don't want to.
The worst things we can do - and I've seen it done, on multiple occasions, often with the argument "x is overdone" - is to use a macro argument to talk people out of making a game. That's because - with few exceptions - game ideas aren't fungible. When you talk someone out of making a game, you're generally not talking them into making a "better" game - you're usually talking them out of making a game at all.
I've tried, in the past to make arguments at the macro level - "otome games are overdone". I regret doing that now - it was massively ineffective, caused a lot of hurt feelings, and was basically me trying to impose my will. And I also regret not stepping in when other people did the same thing. So I think that's why people respond quite strongly to the idea that "I'm sick of x".
There are ways to make changes at the macro scale. IMO, there have been several games that caused tectonic shifts in the forum - Fate/Stay Night, Re: Alistair, and Katawa Shoujo being the big ones. Releasing a popular game and promoting it is one of the best ways to change things. But simply talking about it - trying to make a macro-scale argument to people working at the micro-scale - seems doomed to failure.
(And so does this thread, although I'd like to conclude it rather than just lock it.)