When i first started collecting Eroge/visual novels i tried to hide it from my parents out shame. Now i realize that was silly and my parent accept my hobby. In this topic write about your Family opinion on your hobby. Do they accept or have you never told them?
Interesting topic! The only family member I really talk about visual novels with is my youngest brother*, who I share a love of video gaming in general with. That took a bit of working-up-to, because, like you, I found it awkward broaching the topic given the adult content present in these games. However, as I was playing Yumina the Ethereal, one of my first visual novels and still my favorite, I was having such a good time with it that I finally got to the point where I had to talk with someone about how cool it was or felt my head would explode.
(* He’s in his twenties… not scarring a five-year-old here, haha.)
My brother wasn’t familiar at all with visual novels as a genre of entertainment, and he gave me a pretty weird look when I sheepishly mentioned the sex scenes, but by the end I had him laughing about the funny characters, interested in the plot, and intrigued by the battle system, so… win! He isn’t interested in playing visual novels himself due to the passiveness of the “gameplay,” which can’t even be called that in kinetic/sound novels, but I can and do talk to him about many VNs that have a lot of artistic merit outside their adult content (ex. Cho Dengeki Stryker, Steins;Gate, Song of Saya, etc.). However, I keep the more sex-festy stuff to myself, since I feel like that would be an unacceptable breach of familial awkwardness. Heck, I still sometimes feel like I’m Tomoko Kuroki from Watamote, awkwardly traumatizing my younger sibling with my hobbies, haha.
The only one that I would love to discuss with him that I haven’t gotten around to yet is Katawa Shoujo, which also sits very near the top of my favorites list. (Granted, that visual novel is very uneven in places, but when it’s good, it’s utterly fantastic.) However, there’s such an initial awkwardness hurdle with that game because if you’re only looking at its premise, it sounds like a nukige catering to a very unusual fetish. Which… I guess it can be, but it’s way more and way better than that.
Anyway! That’s the story of mi familia and my visual novel hobby. I would be very interested to read others’ responses to this, either in terms of family or close friends. The adult content is a hurdle to visual novels gaining wider acceptance, and how (or “if”) others approached that with their closest relatives and such should be instructive.
My Parents and Sibling have always known about my hobby for Anime/Manga. Though they don’t share the same interest in my hobby, they are accepting of me enjoying it.
I’ve only told my mother about what Visual Novels are like and while she doesn’t completely understand them, she thinks they’re good because of their story telling structure. However, even though my Mother is pretty accepting about a lot of things overall, I haven’t told her about the more adult content in detail because it is difficult to talk about even with people who are accepting of most things.
Like Jacksprat has said, getting others to accept the adult content is the biggest obstacle that prevents many VNs from being discussed completely openly. Even many fans of Anime/Manga don’t seem to know or understand what Visual Novels are like which really makes it hard. Until I discovered the Forums here overall there was only one person online that I knew of who also knew what Aselia the Eternal was and enjoyed it. So we talked to death about that game for awhile since there was no one else who knew the same joy of that game.
I still do like to try and talk about VNs with other people including my Family even if no one really understands what they are or knows what I’m talking about. Because it is so difficult to enjoy something that no one else seems to know about and not talk about it.
I tend to take the attitude that unless you know for a fact the other person wants to have the conversation, it is rude to talk about one’s taste in porn. It makes people think about a side of you that (most of the time) they’d rather pretend didn’t exist. So the folks don’t know about the adult video game part of my anime / video game hobby. I’m pretty sure if they did, they wouldn’t really care, but I don’t intend to rub their faces in it (so to speak) to find out.
@Nandemonai - Haha, true enough. There are a number of all-ages visual novel titles out there and more proliferating by the day, but one should obviously be very discriminating about casually discussing anything with adult content (which still covers the vast majority of the VN market at present). When in doubt, best to stick to stuff that did or could make it onto Steam with little or no changes, if you broach the topic at all.
With that said, if anyone wants to discuss Starless or Euphoria at Thanksgiving or their next big family gathering, I would love you to record and share it for hilarity purposes. 
While I don’t really have any conversations about it with them, both my mother and my step-father know about eroge, and see nothing wrong with it. However, my family situation is definitely not typical, since my mother (who was a nurse at the time) taught me about sex with books and the old PBS NOVA documentary long before classes in school.