highimpactsex

blogger and game dev

no more social media. i make text games that are poorly rated in game jams and talk about cool niche stuff.


you can tell i've never truly recovered from academia because during dinner, i started thinking about a research question about japanese visual novel/adventure design:

how, when, and why did japanese adventure games lose "interactivity"?

and my follow-up questions:

  • what does "interactivity" mean?
  • how important is role-playing as understood in tabletop design to adventure games?
  • how much did adventure games between japan and "the west" actually differ?

help me.


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in reply to @highimpactsex's post:

While I can't speak on your second two points, I have seen differences in play flow between modern and older VNs. I'm choosing to define interactivity as the game asking/requiring the player to do something beyond progressing the text in order to achieve a goal. I'll use three examples:

DIVI-DEAD: It requires the player to select from map locations to progress the story. In order to move forward, the player should pay attention to where they think story-progressing events will occur (ideally. map-vns don't always seem like they make perfect sense, although that impression might be that it's been years since I played one and the translation for DIVI-DEAD was apparently not great). I haven't seen any map-VNs recently, but that may be because I don't look for them.

Hello, World: This VN has a different sort of interactivity: while the player will constantly be progressing towards one end or another by clicking forward through the text, the endings are controlled by the many choices offered. Interactivity-the interface of the player being required to engage with the medium-is found through puzzling out which choices lead to each end. Hello, World also offers the encyclopedia/data entry-type interludes, in which the player can learn more about the world and setting by clicking through articles. Saihate no Ima has a similar feature, although that version involves clicking through links.

Ladder Structure: These VNs are more interested in telling a story that unravels with each character rather than a focus interacting with the player. There may be choices that lead to various endings, but the goal seems to remain to move the character-driven story forward. They're more similar to a series of choose-your-own adventure books than interactive fiction that requires the player to pay attention to and understand the world. An example is Chusingura 47+1. It has a choice in one route that I remember, but that may be more of a matter in choice of heroines.

Now, I'm no historian, and I make no claim to have a comprehensive answer to your question, but I wonder if the leaning towards losing interactivity/meaningful choices is a matter of lowering difficulty in the name of wider mass appeal. It may be the case that there may be more money in making VNs with easily-accessible "waifus" rather than interactive games that require the player to chip away at the understanding of a story if they want to get anywhere in the narrative.

Another factor may be in the rise of easily-made interactive RPG games. For example, Mon-Musu Quest (Monster Girl Quest) originated as a series of three VNs that involved 1-on-1, somewhat-scripted battles. While there was little interactivity in terms of meaningful choices throughout the games, there was combat. However, the sequels to the original trilogy, Mon-Musu Quest Paradox RPG, are made with RPG Maker. These games allow for extensive character recruitment and customization while keeping the VN-level of plot density (these are very long RPGs).

What I'm getting at with that point is that those inclined to make highly-interactive VNs may have instead moved to RPG Maker and the like. There's certainly a surfeit of doujin games available, and many have no combat at all. These could be considered to be another form of adventure game, one where the player moves around a map in search of interactions and clues.

Alright, I'm probably rambling to the point of annoyance. I hope that any of this was useful.