Tag: interactive entertainment

#oneaday Day 744: Being a Sidebar to That Interminable Games and Art Discussion, Regarding Visual Novels

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Games are art, games aren’t art, games can never be art. Who gives a toss? Actually, judging by the amount of discussion this topic has been generating over the years, quite a few people. For me and my friends, it was Final Fantasy VII that first made us even consider it. Nowadays, of course, Final Fantasy VII and the JRPG genre in general is regarded as something of a cliche, but that’s not what I’m going to get into here.

Instead, inspired by finally getting around to downloading, installing and starting Katawa Shoujo, I wanted to say a few words about the visual novel genre of interactive entertainment, and its tangential relevance to the “games as art” issue.

For the uninitiated (and those too lazy to click on the link above), Katawa Shoujo, which apparently literally translates to Cripple Girls, is a visual novel-cum-dating sim developed by members of notorious Internet cesspit 4Chan. It casts the players in the role of a teenage boy struggling to come to terms with his own condition — arrhythmia. As part of his rehabilitation and treatment, he’s transferred to a special school that specifically caters to students with disabilities, and from here he comes to know a variety of strange and wonderful characters, most of whom each have some sort of disability. After the first act, the game then proceeds down one of several paths depending on which girl in the cast the player decides our protagonist is going to pursue.

I shan’t talk any more about Katawa Shoujo specifically at this time, as I’m still partway through my first playthrough and don’t want to draw any conclusions just yet. But what playing it is reminding me is that visual novels are one of my favourite styles of games — and yet, ironically, they’re barely games at all by the traditional definition.

I know I said I wouldn’t talk any more about Katawa Shoujo yet, but in Katawa Shoujo so far, I have pressed the “continue” button a whole lot and made approximately four choices in about two and a half hours of gameplay. I do not feel short-changed by this, as the stuff for which I am pressing “continue” is interesting, compelling and utterly addictive in exactly the same way that a good book is.

The situation is pretty much the same with titles like the Ace Attorney series, arguably my favourite series of all time. The vast majority of your time in these games is spent pressing a large “continue” button, with the occasional choice of where to go next, what to examine and, in the series’ iconic courtroom scenes, using what you have discovered at the appropriate time to prove your case. In these games, there’s one set solution and no deviating from it — but again, I don’t feel short-changed at all.

Why? Well, the technical limitations of the genre mean that you find yourself filling in the blanks with your imagination a lot more than you might if the game were fully-voiced, fully-animated and provided complete freedom of interactivity. Instead, you’re presented with static backdrops; character stills overlaid with maybe three or four different frames of animation to represent different emotions; and text. Lots of text.

The latter part is what puts a lot of people off visual novel titles — the “it’s too much reading” argument — but it’s from all the text that these titles gain all their power. Typically involving the player getting inside the head of the protagonist and playing things from a first-person narrative perspective, the use of text throughout allows for a far more in-depth exploration of the character than we get in even the lengthiest of RPG. We know what the protagonist is feeling; how he reacts to events; what his attitudes towards the other characters are; and any conflicts he might be feeling. It’s a curiously intimate relationship that the player of a visual novel has with the character they’re ostensibly “controlling”, but this intimacy is oddly often amplified by how infrequently you get to make choices or speak for the protagonist. The choices you make, in many cases, are extremely important, and in some cases can cause the entire plot to veer off in a completely different direction. Their relative infrequence makes them powerful moments to mull over.

But what of the relevance to the “games and art” debate? Well, visual novels present an interesting medium for a variety of artists to express themselves. A novel is typically the work of one person — the writer, perhaps with an illustrator in tow depending on what type of book it is. A painting is the work of a visual artist. A piece of music is the work of a composer. But a visual novel requires all of these things — art, music, sound, writing and in some cases, animation and acting — making it a distinctively collaborative, cross-disciplinary medium. Alongside this, it’s one of the most accessible forms of game there is — if you can read, you can play, understand and enjoy a visual novel even if you’ve never, ever picked up a controller before — meaning it has an inherently larger potential audience than the relatively specialised “gamey games” markets. It distinguishes itself from movies, animation and TV shows by providing a middle ground between the “show, don’t tell” of moving pictures and the pure imaginative effort required when reading a novel.

In short, it allows for stories to be told in a way that is unique to its own medium. These stories, while often following similar patterns and very often involving big-eyed anime girls, are no less valid and worthy of study, interpretation and criticism than those presented in more “traditional” media. In fact, if anything, the fact that the visual novel is a relatively new and emergent art form merits more attention than it actually gets.

And sure, while many visual novels descend into Japanese absurdity, titles like Katawa Shoujo; Digital: A Love Story; Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story; and numerous others all push the boundaries of what it’s possible to make interesting interactive entertainment from, along with taking on subject matter I can’t recall ever being dealt with (tastefully, anyway) in other types of game.

Consider how simple early movies were and how sophisticated they are now in comparison. Given visual novels’ relative infancy compared to other media, imagine what the possibilities might hold in the future. Will we ever see a title like this regarded as “interactive literature” or equivalent?

Who knows. All I know right now is this: if your primary motivation for playing interactive entertainment is to be told a story that draws you into its world and characters, you’d do well to check out titles like those that I’ve mentioned above.

#oneaday Day 723: The Escapist

Escapism is cool, and an important and valid method of keeping yourself sane.

There are, of course, many means of escapism, and different ones are more or less effective for different people.

There’s the escapism of a child giving life to the inanimate lumps of plastic they own. Without a child, they’re just potential, models, things to be looked at, without life. Add a child (or, more specifically, someone still in possession of their childish imagination) and something magical happens — those objects come alive, engaging in battles to save the galaxy; heroic adventures; or even just a normal day in a normal street.

Then there’s the escapism of a good book. Good readers also have one of the most important qualities of a good creative writer: that active imagination again. But it’s partly also down to the writer to create a convincing world, compelling characters and a reason for the reader to commit part of their life to staring at tiny print on paper, e-ink or an LCD display. You know a writer’s done their job properly if you can hear the characters’ voices, see the places they’re in, picture the things they’re doing. And as a reader, your interpretation and mental imagery might not be the same as the writer (or indeed the person who designed the book’s cover) — but that doesn’t make it any less valid.

There’s the escapism of interactive entertainment. Instead of passively observing an unfolding story, you become a part of it. It doesn’t have to be an explicit narrative as such — a long game of Civilization tells a story just as much as a chapter of Heavy Rain. The meaning the player chooses to assign to the experience is what makes interactive entertainment special.

There’s the escapism of film. Increasingly designed as memorable spectacles these days, a good movie plunges its audience into darkness before casting them into a whole new world. It could be a world of giant robots; of CIA agents; of lads on a pulling holiday. For those couple of hours, though, the outside world ceases to matter.

There’s the escapism of a good TV show. When you find a show that resonates with you, you want to stick with those characters, to find out what makes them tick, what they want, what they find challenging. You cheer for their successes, feel bad when they encounter adversity. And given the amount of time you spend with the cast of a TV show over an average run of a moderately successful show these days, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the cast might feel like “friends” by the time you’re through.

And there’s the escapism of music. Music is a powerful imaginative stimulus, but again it means different things to different people. For one person it might stir up dormant memories. For another it might encourage them to close their eyes and picture themselves in a whole new situation. For yet another it might have an emotional impact that reflects the things that are weighing on their mind at that moment in time. And for others still it might inspire them to push forward, to do their best, to power on through and do that extra set at the gym, or put in that extra bit of effort at homework.

All this isn’t even getting into what it means to be a creator as opposed to a consumer of all the above media, either.

The fact is, the world can be, at times, a bit of a sucky place. Having something comforting to escape into, whatever form that escapism might take, is important. No-one likes to feel trapped, so even if it’s only for a short while, escape into something awesome and return to the real world refreshed, invigorated and ready to tackle any challenges it might want to throw at you.

And if you don’t have anything like that? Then you need to have more fun.