[i]I’m going to post twice.
The first was something I typed out last year on a thread, similar to this one, that I started myself. This first post was written mainly for visual novels, but since some eroge, esp. ren’ai types, fall in the category, I felt like including it here…
The second will be an entirely different essay that I wrote without referring to the original, and is more eroge-centric, and, I hope, would be up to Olf’s standards.
At the same time, while the first post is slightly redundant, I do hope the second post makes up for it.
~
Anyway, here goes the first:[/i]
I think pretty much anyone who is playing visual novels, ren’ai, dating sims and bishoujo games as of this moment know their own reasons and justifications for playing these games. In turn, I hope that the most dedicated of its gamers do not hesitate in the face of opposition or accusation from disapproving eyes, be they conservatives or stereotypers who like to label all these players as mere ‘otakun’, and that, for all those gamers who are depressed and demoralized at this point of time do not turn their back on these games when happier times do come (I wish that these games not be seen as some pure fantasy)
And that’s the thing; pure fantasy. Fantasy would be seen as a puerile endeavour, something that should only be bothered about when young, and even then, if it were to carry on to later life, it should be restricted to no more than mere whimsy and entertainment. Yet, since the days of early civilization, fantasy has followed Man to remind him not so much of his place in his Universe, but what he can aspire to become in this universe. I would draw upon the Bible, from Old to New, the varying differences between the presentation of God in both books, and ultimately, the tales of the Men who sought the approval of God, and bettered themselves in that way. If I were to talk of pure legend, I’d draw upon the tales of Gilgamesh, Beowulf and the Iliad. And not only of what Man can become, but also of what he could achieve, from Leonardo Da Vinci’s early tanks and contraptions, to Jules Verne’s steampunk, the future was prophesied, even if incorrectly, by these writers. And, even if it were purely for the sake of fantasy itself, why should one restrict himself to quotidian discussions of everyday life everyday ? To quote Tolkien, ¬ÅgShould one belittle the prisoner for talking of things outside the prison, rather than just of the guards and the prison itself ?¬Åh Most people restrict their conversations to everyday life, and I would think that’s a boring life.
But this topic is not about fantasy purely. Rather, it is about visual novels, and I will have to get back on track.
That being said, visual novels are a development in fantasy, the way a predecessor of theirs changed the way we approached and perceived fiction. This predecessor which changed fiction that I am talking about, and which I view the visual novel to be the brain child as, is the graphic novel. The graphic novel has its roots in any culture, from the ones that told all their stories in a purely pictorial format (and thus, lacked some comprehension amongst more developed peoples who came to standardize their language in an aural and visual form) to the illustrations in books throughout the ages, and finally, the first comic books of the 20th century. Like any art form (just as with animation, with both West and East seeing a potential for a more mature form of storytelling, like Coonskin and Akira), graphic novels developed, and became more than just some juvenile form of entertainment, but a new medium to tell more complicated stories of tragedy, darkness, toil, as well as triumph, growth and glory.
Visual novels, themselves, have a history of their own. Their beginnings lie back to the ADV games, from Zork, to the classics of Monkey Island and the others. Games like these were big in the West, evident up till now in the fact that old school computer gamers can still reflect on the old days with these games, as well as the recognition of the name in some circles (one way you can tell the fame and infamy of anything is how well it is known, and in which circles) And then, something happened. I cannot really label what it was. In part, perhaps it was Westwood’s slight mistake with the Dune 2 engine that made the world’s first real strategy simulator. Maybe it was the improved technology that allowed better gameplay in the form of voxels, and then, polygons. And another mystery occurs… how did the genre transplant itself so well in Japan when its origins lost favour in it ? It’s not as if Japan doesn’t have a robust games market (it certainly does) but, it should be noted that it doesn’t have a really strong PC game market (which, I am tempted to put a blame at, on the use of the keyboard) Of course, there are the further details of this that I wont go into here that can be read elsewhere, from the big ren’ai FAQ of Megatokyo, to the various articles of it on Wikipedia. I’m no real expert on the history of ergoe, and of b-games.
A belief that I have retained from youth(and I’m still quite young, actually)is the belief in the possibility of PC games as being a form of literature itself. This was the result of various factors, having been brought up with these games as well as books and television (and I tend to have a penchant of having an obsession with one of these at times. Indeed, I’d be glued to the TV for hours, or game four hours, or, if in the middle of an interesting book, wouldn’t be able to sleep as I kept reading through the pages in bed) Video gaming culture has, indeed, affected itself to the point that parts of it obtained their own form of media, but, the one folly of adapting a video game into a film, book, or anything, is the complete lack of interaction. Still, the amount of media produced as a spin-off from the game originals, looking at the Sonic and Mario institutions alone assures us of this fact. Also, two games that did captivate my imagination were Alpha Centauri and Half-Life. The former had been inspired, to a lesser extent, by Frank Herbert, and indeed, a trademark would be the quotable quotes used every time a technology was researched, while the latter actually had an experienced novelist (Marc Laidlaw) who helped make the game feel move life-like. Half-life kept me on my toes, raised controversial topics, and indeed, worked my brain with imagination and fun.
It was once said that the future of television, of fiction in general, was that the television programs of the future (I can’t trace the source of this belief, but I think I might, someday) would be where the viewer could not only watch the story, but change the story to his own liking. It would not only have multiple options to affect the path, but it would also have characters that the user can customize, and maybe even have different actors play this roles. But, this is just in television.
For in turn, the visual novel may be that development in literature that video games represent. While I admit that it requires some reworking on the parts of the writers, (and I hope that a distinguished writer like Haruki Murakami produces a visual novel of his own, and that a Western version does likewise), and that the social stigma is hard to escape (but frankly, I don’t see the point of that stigma; it reminds one of the times when Ralph Bakshi tried to do animation that wasn’t so focused on entertaining children. And besides, anime has been more successful at this) The visual novel, after all, retains the interactivity of other games, and yet, places heavy influence, especially in the best cases, on the textual medium, which is what graphic novels thrive on. Graphic novels are nothing without text, and indeed, people say that actions are louder than words and pictures speak a hundred words, but, if that were the case, modern society as we know it would have been able to have developed everything without text. And we can’t, as a vast array of things, from the workings of the computer programs, to machinery, to even the most mundane of things, rely on language of some form or other, be it computer, or colloquial.
And lastly, something that I cannot emphasize enough, is that interactive feature, the multiple pathways. Let me put it in another way; as much as the greatest novels captivate us, the fact remains that they are restricted, and very much so, but their linearity. This is a problem faced with a majority of most games, a television show, a movie, heck, with any story. We are thrust with a story where we cannot affect the ending, and from time to time,w e have been forced, in most cases, with happy endings based on climax, where we do not get a chance to experience what would actually happen if the darker alternative had came to be, and at other times, the dark reversal, where a tragedy with no hope for a happy ending is forced down our throats. While some tend to force the idea that we have to counted with the notion that is a reflection of real life, where there is, apparently, only a one way option, I beg to disagree; as long as Man cannot decide the future, and as long as the Future offers multiple pathways, and prophecies that can be defied, so too should the reader have in defining the story he wishes to enjoy. I look on the choose-your-own adventure stories of youth, and its incarnations. This, belief, in turn, is based on my own belief in parallel universes, something which, itself, is a scintillating topic. As we explore the various actions that a character could have undertaken in a story, do we realize the potential that a hundred universe could exist from this very moment, where the decisions of the individual can spawn a hundred different universes. We may live only in one, but, we can sense the many possibilities the future may hold.
Machiavelli once had the habit of pretending to talk to the writers of Antiquity by reading their books first, then developing the arguments with them in his own imagination. While the latter is something not too hard to discuss (imagination is itself a powerful tool, esp. when one can keep himself occupied with an active imagination), I often feel that the musings of writers can sometimes feel dead; their ideas may survive, but their works, in their linearity, do not retain the life they had. While I cannot say that visual novels would give a work ‘life’, I think that, if used properly, it may at least help the writer better visualise the mind of the deceased writer he wishes to speak with, and develop more arguments.
We can not laugh at the sight of fresh blood when there’s that dramatic atmosphere hovering around one of us during a playthrough…
