Visual Novels, ludonarrative consonance and active projection

Glossary

Active projection: match between the mastery of character skill and player skill; a performative narrative premise that requires mindful decision-making to advance (this concept is further discussed in my Dark Souls' level design and active projection rant).

Ludonarrative consonance: one of the basic conflictivities in videogame narrative design, and popularized by its infamous contrary, the ludonarrative dissonance, ludonarrative consonance can be understood as a perception of seamlessness between the game's narrative and the player's narrative.

Visual Novels: game genre that is generally played by reading a story from a textbox, clicking on the screen to progress, and eventually taking pre-determined decisions, in a similar fashion as the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books, but with audiovisual support. Note that many of them do include gameplay elements, with more or less success, like the Phoenix Wright series, Danganronpa's main games, or Doki Doki Literature Club.

Context

Visual Novels have been widely separated from the common notion of games, their place in the media even questioned due to their closer resemblance to literary tradition. Starting a debate about such topic (of which I won't expand, since there's work in progress about defining what are videogames), a point was made about VNs' potential for ludonarrative consonance, since all player action perfectly blends with the narrative.

Opinion

In hindsight, the discussion was erroneously directed from the start, for two reasons:

• As it developed, it kept mixing non-related concepts: lack of embodiment, feedback, agency and ludonarrative.
  
  
  • Lack of embodiment: being told that you took a picture feels less personal than aiming the camera and pressing the trigger. Outside motion controllers, videogames have never accurately correlated the execution of player action with the action performed in-game, due to the need for generic controllers. Making a distinction between VNs and other genres, in this aspect, seems quite redundant, then.
  
  
  • Feedback: a much more interesting point of discussion. VNs' only feedback is how the story progresses, and due to the cadence in which consequences are usually revealed, it's easy for actions to feel weightless in the moment. Even then, this has nothing to do with ludonarrative consonance, albeit they both are important parts of immersiveness.
  
  
  • Agency: under our current assumptions, VNs have no ludic agency, but can have, and are in fact completely centered around, narrative agency. The importance of this depends on the type of player, and it is this focus on few, but highly drastic decisions, what I think has contributed to the genre's success.
  
  
• If VNs are generalized, for the sake of the argument, as games that lack gameplay... They will hardly be able to contain ludonarrative anything. Because there is no ludus to speak of.

Despite confidently saying that many VNs have no gameplay, however, I wouldn't say that many of them don't have active projection. Here is where an interesting phenomenon takes place: active projection is the accurate mirroring of the character journey onto the player's experience, which is usually manifested in performing prowess (after all, while narratives can easily create empathy and self-growth, being able to do something that was previously not possible feels like a more concrete reflection of the experience, both during and after it has taken place). The bridge connecting both perceptions are player decisions; they usually are framed within a system of mechanics, but can exist as standalone instances, devoid of performance.

Almost as if VNs' awareness of their lack of gameplay informed their design, many titles don't focus on mechanical performative premises, but in intellectual and emotional ones: a genre where the character's struggle is figuring out how to build relationships by learning to understand others (Katawa Shoujo being my favorite example of this kind), or solving misteries (in my experience, 999 does a fine job at it, even if the mystery doesn't always stay as the focal point at all times), being the most prominent types of narrative conflict.

As a consequence, many titles don't feel alienating, because the bulk of a purely cognitive challenge mostly resides within the player mind, a challenge they get to have the full experience of, even if the conversion from that decision into diegetic consequences is not always representative. Visual Novels are, of course, not the only games that include purely cognitive decisions that are central to the character's conflict (the original Dark Souls itself was filled with them: how to traverse the world effectively, in which bonfires to rest, which ones to kindle...), but is a genre that seems to understand how to cover one of its most glaring weaknesses, effective and elegantly.