Dedications in your VN?

[Katy133]

Every visual novel I've made has a dedication to someone (listing it within the credits).

Despite films and novels including dedications and acknowledgments, I haven't seen any other visual novels that include one.

So, what are your thoughts on dedications/acknowledgments in visual novels? Is there a reason people don't include them? Do people simply not think of including one?

And if you saw a cryptic dedication in a VN, how would you react? With curiosity? Apathy?

[SundownKid]

In my case, there's not really anyone I can "dedicate" it to who isn't already in the credits listed as a contributor.

Films are usually larger productions, or at least happen in real life. There would likely be more people that were tangentially involved that would merit a dedication.

I wouldn't really care either way. I'd just stare at it for a couple seconds and move on.

[firecat]

wait why! its like the most important thing in the whole game (o.k not really). i always put acknowledgments to my VN not because the law says so but because people have put time and effort into making that piece of the puzzle. well i understand if lone wolfs made all the stories, art and music for VN but sometimes thats not possible for many, so its mind bordering as to why some VN dont add credits in the game.

i really never seen a VN that does not have a credit cutscene in the game, how you find them is a mystery to me.

[SundownKid]

i really never seen a VN that does not have a credit cutscene in the game, how you find them is a mystery to me.

I believe he is talking about dedications, not credits.

A dedication would be something like "This game is dedicated to: My grandpa, for his moral support". As in, someone who didn't necessarily work on the game but helped in some way, or someone you want to eulogize.

Credits on the other hand are people who are required to be shown to the player because they should be credited for working on the game.

[YossarianIII]

I can't recall any examples from VNs, but in video games, the convention seems to be to tack on a "Special Thanks" section at the end of the credits as opposed to calling it a "Dedication." Not that you're under any obligation to follow the convention.

Most dedications are probably more for the benefit of the writer (and the writer's loved ones) than for the reader. But I've seen ways where they're used for the reader's benefit, too.

To the End of the Land is a novel with an ambiguous ending followed by a real-life dedication that seems strategically placed right afterwards to affect your interpretation of the ending.

And of course there's the famous fake dedication at the end of the SNL "More Cowbell" sketch.

[trooper6]

I can't recall any examples from VNs, but in video games, the convention seems to be to tack on a "Special Thanks" section at the end of the credits as opposed to calling it a "Dedication." Not that you're under any obligation to follow the convention.

Most dedications are probably more for the benefit of the writer (and the writer's loved ones) than for the reader. But I've seen ways where they're used for the reader's benefit, too.

To the End of the Land is a novel with an ambiguous ending followed by a real-life dedication that seems strategically placed right afterwards to affect your interpretation of the ending.

And of course there's the famous fake dedication at the end of the SNL "More Cowbell" sketch.

I think the difference in dedication placement convention between different media that you bring up YossarianIII is quite important and the key to the topic.

Books: Dedications happen on a page, usually right after the publication information but before the table of contents. So...it is before the book proper starts for the reader, if you see what I mean.
Films/Video Games: Dedications, usually as Special Thanks as YossarianIII points out, tend to happen in the closing credits after the game experience is already over for the audience. Sometimes they are already walking out when it happens.
CDs: If they happen they are buried in the liner notes that you might never read.

I think the commonality between all of these things is that the dedication doesn't encroach into the viewer's experience of the entertainment if they don't want it to. So the question is--What sort of media is a VN more like?

For me, VNs are more like films/video games and so I could see a dedication fitting really well as a screen that happens right after the game ends, or at the top of a credits page. It would feel strange to me to have it be a screen that happens as a splash screen before the main screen or a splash screen that happens after you click the start game button. If there were some sort of screen that happens after the player clicks the start button...I'd prefer it to be related to the game experience. An epigraph or fragment of a poem that makes you think about what you are about to read/play.

Hm...I could also see the dedication being embedded in the main menu screen in the corner somewhere.

So, I don't currently have any dedications/special thanks in my VN...and I'm neutral on the topic. Have it or don't. Whatever you prefer. But I think the where is more important. And for me, I'd prefer the dedications to happen somewhere outside of game time.

[Rossfellow]

To my editor, whose stomach maybe ruined by laughing at my horror scenarios. And all that coffee.

[Kuiper]

i always put acknowledgments to my VN not because the law says so but because people have put time and effort into making that piece of the puzzle.

"Dedications" and "acknowledgments" aren't the same thing.

Acknowledgments are usually reserved for people who were involved in the project. Editors, alpha readers who gave you feedback early on, the people that you randomly bounced ideas off of during the project, the physicist who volunteered to fact-check your science fiction plot, and the barista at the Starbucks that you used as your personal office while coding the project on your Macbook. Some acknowledgments sections have dozens of names to thank everyone who helped contribute to the project.

Dedications are usually tributes to persons who had some significant impact on the author, but not necessarily involved with the creation of the project. For example, you could dedicate a book to your favorite grandparent, your seventh grade English teacher, the uncle who gave you a copy of The Hobbit for your tenth birthday and ignited your lifelong passion for fantasy literature, your partner, a best friend, or your pet cat. The dedication is usually reserved for a single person, or in some cases a single unit of people (e.g. "This book is dedicated to my parents.")

There can be some overlap between these two groups. For example, it's common for authors to use the acknowledgments section to thank people who provided moral support during the project. This could include a partner, family members, close friends--the same kind of individual that the author might want to dedicate their book to. There are plenty of authors who dedicate a book to someone who is also listed in the acknowledgments section. However, dedications are more about honoring someone you respect and appreciate, not about recognizing someone for their contributions to a project--that kind of thing goes in the credits.

So, what are your thoughts on dedications/acknowledgments in visual novels? Is there a reason people don't include them? Do people simply not think of including one?

As others have noted, dedications aren't that common outside of the medium of books. There is the technical question of where, exactly, you would place a dedication page in a visual novel. However, I think the bigger issue is this: writing a novel is primarily a solo endeavor. There may be multiple people who contributed to the project and influenced its creation (such as editors), but you generally only have one author with their name on the cover of the book. When the entire book is a personal expression of the author's artistic and creative intent, it makes sense for them to include a personal dedication as part of that.

When you get into mediums for visual novels, you often have multiple people working on a project collaboratively. Unlike a traditional novel, most visual novels don't have a single "author." Who gets to write the dedication? Is it the person who came up with the idea for the story and created the first outline, or writer who contributed the most words to the script file, or the artist who invested more hours in the project than anyone else? Further, if you have multiple people who collectively choose to dedicate the work (to their philosopher, or the studio that inspired them to begin working on the project), it starts to become a committee decision, which is something that is pretty far removed from the personal heartfelt expression that I usually expect from a dedication page. I suppose you could compromise and let each person on the team write their own personal dedication, but then the dedication page can become long enough that readers will be tempted to skip it entirely. That's fine, if you're okay with it.

And if you saw a cryptic dedication in a VN, how would you react? With curiosity? Apathy?

Dedications are, by their very nature, often cryptic. That's part of what makes them fun. When I see an author dedicate his book to his favorite teacher, I often take a moment to wonder what it was about that teacher that inspired the author, and it also makes me remember my own favorite teachers with fondness. The dedication often presents us with a bare minimum of information. That will inspire some people dwell on them for a bit, and maybe fill in the gaps with their own speculation. Other people will simply read the line and move on.

In my eyes, a good book dedication is either a) laconic, or b) clever or in some other way interesting and/or entertaining. Being laconic is much easier, and much more common, and I often prefer laconic dedications that leave more to the imagination, but I do have a soft spot for creative dedication pages. Best of all is if you can be creative while keeping it brief. As an example, Gillian Flynn wrote the following dedication:

What can I say about a man who knows how I think and still sleeps next to me with the lights off?

That's still pretty short, and it's a creative and fun way to dedicate the book to her husband.

[ketskari]

There's a dedication in my current project. And a couple of times I've made small VNs for birthdays, that were, of course, dedicated to the recipient.

Really, I don't think it matters as long as the dedication does not disrupt the player's experience by taking too much time to disappear from the screen, clicking being disabled, that sort of thing. I like to fit it in an intro sequence just after the title screen is shown, or at the end of the VN with the credits.

Also, there's a TV tropes article on this here. At first glance, it seems common in film to dedicate to someone who recently died.

[YossarianIII]

Books: Dedications happen on a page, usually right after the publication information but before the table of contents. So...it is before the book proper starts for the reader, if you see what I mean.
Films/Video Games: Dedications, usually as Special Thanks as YossarianIII points out, tend to happen in the closing credits after the game experience is already over for the audience. Sometimes they are already walking out when it happens.
CDs: If they happen they are buried in the liner notes that you might never read.

I think the commonality between all of these things is that the dedication doesn't encroach into the viewer's experience of the entertainment if they don't want it to. So the question is--What sort of media is a VN more like?

This list got me thinking... if you wanted to explain a cryptic dedication without intruding on the reader, you could do it the way ebooks/blog posts add extra information -- with a hyperlink. It'd probably make more sense to keep the link within the game, the way some VNs define words when you click on them, although I suppose if there were something really important on the Internet you just had to link to you could have an outgoing link.

(A little tangential, but FWIW, I skim the "thank yous" in the liner notes of pretty much every CD I buy out of curiosity. Because they're so infrequently read, it seems like musicians pretty much write whatever they want, and the best have an odd stream-of-consciousness beauty to them. My favorite is when Jack White thanked "food.")

[trooper6]

This list got me thinking... if you wanted to explain a cryptic dedication without intruding on the reader, you could do it the way ebooks/blog posts add extra information -- with a hyperlink. It'd probably make more sense to keep the link within the game, the way some VNs define words when you click on them, although I suppose if there were something really important on the Internet you just had to link to you could have an outgoing link.

(A little tangential, but FWIW, I skim the "thank yous" in the liner notes of pretty much every CD I buy out of curiosity. Because they're so infrequently read, it seems like musicians pretty much write whatever they want, and the best have an odd stream-of-consciousness beauty to them. My favorite is when Jack White thanked "food.")

I, too, always read the liner notes. I'm really interested in them. This is why I don't favor buying mp3s, but rather, favor buying a CD and then ripping it to mp3s--because I want the liner notes and too many mp3 albums don't include liner notes!

But your words made me recall another way dedications have happened in video games. Video games are interactive. And in games that allow exploration, I remember coming across graveyards in game and reading the tombstones and realizing that these were dedications for actual people So having the dedication exist inside the game that the player can find is a special possibility that video games can do. That can be fun...but it has to feel in-game and not break my immersion.

[RokAbiel]

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with a dedication. I do think that it probably fits best in the credits though. That's where mine will be anyway when it's done haha, at the very end of the credits. :3

[Kinjo]

Every visual novel I've made has a dedication to someone (listing it within the credits).

Despite films and novels including dedications and acknowledgments, I haven't seen any other visual novels that include one.

So, what are your thoughts on dedications/acknowledgments in visual novels? Is there a reason people don't include them? Do people simply not think of including one?

And if you saw a cryptic dedication in a VN, how would you react? With curiosity? Apathy?

I think visual novels don't usually do that because they originated more as video games, and dedications have always been more of a book thing, so people don't think to do it.

I've included one, but it was toward the end rather than the start. If I saw one, I'd probably think "that's cool" and move on, like I do with books.