Otakuism

Scholar mode activate!

While perusing my usual news sources, I found a rather interesting article on Wired. It’s about a new DS game called Hotel Dusk, an interactive novel similiar to Pheonix Wright. Clive Thompson, the writer of the article, while enjoying the game, criticizes the limitations of interactive games, being niether games or novels. Me, being the otaku I am, started thinking about Visual Novels and their relation to the uniquely western interactive novel or adventure games, and how both relate to gaming at large. For this comparison I’m basically going to lump all the ADV’s, kinetic novels, and visual novels into one group.

Adventure games have been popular since the dungeon and dragon days of the eighties, and were popular up until the mid-nineties when the advent of FPS’s took over the computer gaming world. Visual novels developed around the same period and were born of otaku fantasies, becoming intermixed with anime and manga. While both adventure games and visual novels are outside the norm, involving the the reading of large amounts of text with little input or gameplay, both have developed into different kinds of games. Adventure games are more about puzzle solving, asking the right questions to NPC’s, finding out who did what where. The narrative does not serve to contain the puzzle but the narrative is the puzzle. All aspects of the story serve the overarching mystery. Visual novels on the other hand create a world of rich and varied characters with their own relationships to others and the protagonist, or at least the good ones do. While there are elements of mystery in many visual novels, Otaku will tell you any good story is nothing without good characters, to the point where visual novels have eschewed gameplay completely to basic decisions. So while adventure games embody the aspect of gaming, visual novels are all about the narrative and characters within.

Still, getting right down to it, both types of games can tell very good stories. Personal taste applies, but a good story is a good story, just as a bad one is a bad one, no matter what. So why have adventure games fallen in mainstream popularity, while visual novels keep rocketing skyward? The cynical part of me says an illiterate gaming public who doesn’t like to think and a gaming elite who only cater to realistic graphics. While visual novels are successful because, to be blunt, they have sex. And we all know that sex sells, though there is a difference between games focused on sex and games that contain sex just to sell ie. Kanon, Fate/stay Night, etc. I doubt that such sex-oriented games, no matter how mild the sex, could ever be big in the West, as they’d be subject to that rampant moral witchhunt that is conservative politics. Peach Princess has tried releasing such games to limited success. Their titles are certainly more profitable than Hirameki’s, but still under the radar.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is graphics. Surely the rise of the moe aesthetic style has increased the popularity of visual novels, while the mostly 2d centrism of adventure games has put off today’s 3d wired kids. But from a narrative standpoint, the art doesn’t really matter. There’s only so many ways you can click a mouse to make text go faster. Graphics shouldn’t be godawful though, and the whole point of both adventure games and visual novels is to use graphics to complement the text. Using graphics means that much less time you’d use to detail character appearance or setting. But unless your making a game solely for money, the graphics should be back-up to the story. Ayu may be ungodly amounts of moe but that means nothing without her characterization and backstory.

Now a couple of specifics: Clive Thompson mentions how Hotel Dusk is played while holding the DS sideways like a book. I think this same feature was used in a Negima game, or maybe it was a visual novel adaption for the DS. He also seems to think that the more paths a story offers, the worse it will be, thus hurting the adventure game genre. I disagree. Different paths will tell different stories, but the themes will remain the same, and the work can be just as rich as a singular tale. Just look at Tsukihime, where the plotlines were different but still similiar in themes and motifs, and where information from one path could be carried to another. Different paths allow a writer to focus on different characters without completely rewriting the work or disrupting the overall narrative.

In the end adventure games and visual novels are both unique forms of art made by different cultures. Both can be enjoyed from a literary standpoint. Who cares if their not games or not. Does labelling them games make them inferior in any way? Maybe we should just get rid of the label ” game ” itself, and call everything graphically interactive art or some other such nonsense. Just sit back and start reading. You’ll enjoy the story more that way. Feel free to disagree with me on any of this. God knows I’m no expert on it.