The arcane vocabulary used by visual novel developers is arbitrary and inhibiting, and it needs to change. It makes the community needlessly difficult to penetrate and talk about, and it says something (not good!) about the attitude we take toward our discipline.
Kinetic Novel
Easily the biggest offender. “Kinetic novel” is a name for visual novels that either have no player choices or whose choices have no effect (or very little effect) on the story’s outcome. The first thing to be aware of is that this is Key terminology and it isn’t even being used by developers the way Key meant it. (Key, for those unaware, is a Japanese visual novel developer.) Secondly, it makes absolutely no sense. “Kinetic” is defined as relating to or resulting from motion. How is a visual novel without choices any more kinetic than a visual novel with choices? What is in motion? Nobody knows because nobody actually thought about the term before they started using it. It sounds like it was spat out of a random name generator. It’s ridiculous. Stop using it and tell others to do likewise.
More appropriate term: linear visual novel.
“Non-branching VN” has also been suggested, however the analogy to branches implies that when visual novel stories diverge they always do so in such a way that trees are formed, which often isn’t true. Trees don’t have branches that diverge then loop back into the trunk or another branch to re-converge, yet this is something visual novels do regularly for economy of writing and assets. For more information check out Sam Kabo Ashwell’s analysis Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games. Clearly we possess greater explanatory power when we describe—with specificity—what’s actually happening instead of relying on vague colloquial terms which conflate different things. We’re developers and critics, not just consumers. That means we need a technical vocabulary.
CG
It’s not entirely clear what this even stands for. A CG is used to refer to a special event graphic in visual novels. They’re a single image that tends to utilise an arbitrary viewing angle not possible with the typical layering of character sprites upon backgrounds. The bulk of CGs are single-use (or at least situation specific-use) unlike character sprites and backgrounds which are designed to be reused in many contexts. The acronym “CG” in an artistic context usually stands for “computer graphics” but isn’t all art in visual novels ultimately represented as computer graphics?
More appropriate term: event graphic.
ADV / NVL
From the Ren’Py wiki:
“There are two main styles of presentation used for visual novels. ADV-style games present dialogue and narration one line at a time, generally in a window at the bottom of the screen. NVL-style games present multiple lines on the screen at a time, in a window that takes up the entire screen.”
“ADV” stands for “adventure” and “NVL” stands for “novel”. “NVL” isn’t so bad, but the unnecessary omission of vowels reminds one of those awful old Unix naming conventions. At least when coding there’s an economy of space and (code) legibility argument to be made. There’s no excuse in community discourse. No one is saving any appreciable amount of time or space by abbreviating a five letter word to a three letter acronym. Two keystrokes in a post exceeding one hundred characters is nothing. It’s stupid and obfuscating. “ADV” is even worse. Not only is making an acronym of a nine letter word unnecessary, the word itself makes no sense alone. Many people have never played an adventure game and even those who have shouldn't have to make the connection that ADV stands for “adventure”, that “adventure” is referring to adventure games, and that adventure games are relevant because we’re reusing the textbox at the bottom of the screen that many titles of that genre used. It’s absurdly indirect.
If there is a textbox at the bottom of the window, say there is a textbox at the bottom of the window. If it fills the window, say so. Every term has a history, but where possible a history lesson should not be required to understand it. A technical term is not there for ornament—it should be precise and literal.
More appropriate terms: full window textbox (NVL), footer textbox (ADV).
One can also easily create intuitive variants from the latter such as “header textbox” and “sidebar textbox.” Alternatively, replace “textbox” in these suggestions with “mode”; e.g., “footer mode”, etc.
Insert Japanese Word Here
In short, Japanese and anime-influenced titles rightfully have a place in the visual novel community, but Japanese and anime terms should not be the language of development in an English-speaking community without good reason. As we can see above, adopting Japanese terms (especially terms by a Japanese corporations’ PR department) has already lead to us creating a nonsense vocabulary that we pretend is coherent and useful. We might as well be calling our kinetic novels “quantum novels” for all the sense we’re making. We ought to be embarrassed.
If there’s a sensible way to say it in English, please do so. It is a rare case that Japanese loan words are used in our community to actually preserve subtleties unique to the language. Rather, they’re used like a simple word substitution code to signify membership of the anime-enthralled subculture. It’s the pig Latin of English visual novel development.
Why This Is Important
The lack of rigour applied to the terminology we use everyday to discuss our medium shows a sort of contempt for sense-making. It’s as though the terms were actively chosen to confound rather than to illuminate and enrich discussion. To me, it says that we don’t take seriously the idea that visual novels could have their own academics who provide us with further insight into what we do. Instead, it says, “fuck it, it sounds cool.”
Our inarticulate terminology is indicative of a much bigger problem in visual novels: an absence of great critics. We have a lot of reviewers masquerading as critics, but it’s not the same thing. A critic does not merely tell you whether a part of something is good or bad, nor to buy this or avoid that. Their value is in how they analyse, dissect, identify, compare, and explain. A critic worth anything would immediately identify the absurdity of visual novel parlance. (And much, much more.)
Changing the basic terms we use every day to something more sensible is a small step—one of many that needs to happen. In doing so we signal to the world outside our bizarre little bubble that we’re ready to be taken seriously. Or, at the very least, that we take ourselves seriously. If we believe our medium to be important we should be inviting new developers in by speaking to them in a language they understand, not revelling in our own obscurity.
While this is one small problem, keep in mind that the slow accretion of many minor mistakes can have large effects. A group of small problems becomes a big problem.
I’ve written a follow-up piece to this which you can read here.
