Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFluff
The reason nobody serious writes academic papers about VN's is most likely that doing so would instantly make them perceived as not serious. Really now, the medium (when commercialized) is almost exclusively used for melodramatic porn (explicit or implicit) with generally terrible prose; not to mention your average commercial VN is fucking unbearably long, especially if you want to cover all paths. Even pop culture scholars generally have too much self-respect to write about VN's. Unlike real porn it's sort of hard to write social commentary about it too. Except if you want to write about NEET's, I guess, but that only touches VN's tangentially.
I recommend that if you really really need to write a paper about VN's you should start with theorizing that the reason the VN format is only popular in Japan is that requires so much time and tolerance for bullshit that only a NEET would play them. In the US, they're mostly played by weeaboos (see the paper "The impact of telepresence on cultural transmission through bishoujo games", which goes into a lot of details on the issue). |
Well, I agree that the “semi-porn” nature of the medium – along with the fact the frequent use of otaku tropes that don’t make sense to most people - might be a concern in terms of people taking you seriously. However, I think that by concentrating on the medium rather than message originally, the OP has a pretty good handle on this challenge. As for the rest…
I’m pretty sure that I managed to complete at least three commercial VNs in the time it took me to play through Dragon Age Origins once. I don't play J-RPGs but I don't get the impression the comparison would end up being that different.
The reason only weaboos play in the west… well, as mentioned there’s a lot of otaku tropes the average person wouldn’t get. More importantly though, the primary way new VN players get interested is VN to anime adaptations, so the player base if going to get drawn largely from hardcore anime fans anyway. Going into long winded discussions of why the VN medium may provide a greater sense of cultural immersion does nothing for me – the author is making way too much of the first person perspective, the amount of “cultural immersion” one gets from a VN is no greater than from watching slice of life shows. In fact, in my experience it’s the other way around. Most hardcore anime fans are aware of slice of life shows, so an interest in VNs has to be explained by something else.
The observation that VNs managed to be immersive despite the games being an “iconic” rather than realistic form of art is interesting and probably something that’s helpful to newcomers trying to grasp the “culture” of the medium – I keep thinking of the speech Madarame gave on the subject in episode 2 of Genshiken. If the OP is planning to compare and contrast VNs to comics though, he may already have covered this to an extent.