"Novel Games"

Hirameki International Group, Inc.

The concept of the novel game is a japanese refinement of the old "choose your own adventure" books. This seems like a pretty exciting field for the entertainment industry. I wouldn't be surprised if it slowly replaced more traditional entertainment media over the next few years. To really understand the attraction to the genre in Japan you should consider the following from a lecture at the Pacific Design Center in 2001:

Another more example. This is a diagram showing the structure of the computer game called "novel game" in Japan. This is not for PlayStation or Nintendo but exclusively for adult Windows users provided with pornographic pictures. The game system consists of a multi-ending story expressed as a textual novel, related illustrations and background music plus sometimes character voices. No movies or simulations. The player (generally male) reads sentences on the screen, selects choices and aims to accomplish the sexual relationship with a girl he has chosen. The novel game plays an important role in the otaku culture these five or six years because the above mentioned two-layer structure can be expressed most clearly in their consumption. In the left side are the actual screenshots you can see while playing the game. In the right side are the raw data of which the screen consists. The screen of novel games is made by overlapping two or more different pictures (as the background and the character), textual fragments and MIDI music.

The novel game is basically sexual ones but it is remarkable that many of them adopt the guise of classical love story where the player and his heroin are fatefully led into a serious tragedy, which must be overcome. We can say that, in some otaku communities, they are beginning to take a role equivalent to that of traditional romances. Some games now hardly include pornographic pictures although they are welcomed enthusiastically by a hundred of thousands otakus. Here is an interesting contradiction. The novel games have plural ends in definition. It means that the player should do love with plural heroines while each of them is claimed to be his lifelong partner partner.

This contradiction proves that there exist two kinds of desires towards these novel games. One is a romantic fantasy with which otaku players read them. The other is an insisting zeal to analyze, decompose and rearrange all the data included in the games. Consumers of novel games are often provided with an abundant knowledge of computer and a hacker-like character. They voluntarily develop and circulate many free softwares which decrypts the data pack of the games and extracts the raw images and texts from there (as I am using one of them to make this chart). The data obtained is naturally misappropriated to many amateur activities. For instance, the image clips called "mad movies" are being constructed and exchanged in the net otaku communities. Some of them are the movies consisted of all the original data and original music while its changes are only the combination. I am sorry not to have an appropriate example here. The activities of this kind are of course a serious threat to its original copyrights but they are also thought to be an inevitable result from the essence of novel games. As shown, a novel game is based on the system that makes one story on the surface from the combination of many fragmentary pictures and texts deep in the database. Therefore, it is natural that otakus may think they can reconstruct another "version" of the original game while recombining the same data in a different way.

Otaku culture consists of two layers of simulacra and database. The former is visible and the latter is invisible. Seeing an illustration of a certain anime character, an otaku does not only appreciate the superficial design aesthetically. He or she immediately decomposes the image into many elements and feels zeal to reassemble them up into another character. The superficiality of otaku culture is so complicated. There is the database instead of the camera eye behind it. We can say that the "super" of "superflat" means this database depth.

What I love about this concept, is the intrinsic paradox of exclusive romance with multiple focuses. Only the otaku could keep that going. But it's not really so odd. We can read books with complete emersion... for the period of time we are reading that book, it is our world. We can easily close the book, put that world on hold, and head to the movies to be emersed in a completely different reality for a few hours. We can then return to the book and pick back up where we left off. At the same time we stay mindful of our actual life as well. These are all passive realities. We simply consume them. We can be efficient consumers or inefficient consumers but that is the limit of our interaction with the product. It has traditionally been a one way street. The alternate reality is fixed. What is intriguing about the "novel game", indeed about many "simulation" style computer games is that the alternate reality is not fixed... not exactly. Clearly we are dealing with a closed set of pre-determined possibilities. What is not programmed cannot happen, unless we hack the program or alter the data... something that the above quote alludes to as a real consequence of the otaku mindset.

The fact that there is not a predetermined "goal" in the story is interesting... the outcome is multiple. We are not impelled to any one conclusion. We are simply given a vast set of possibilities and through our choices we arrive at the ending most suited to our state of mind. I love this process. If you've ever taken an online poll which ends with an assessment of you based on your answers, there is a nagging suspicion that one particular question if answered differently might have dramatically altered the results. I am always finding myself re-taking the surveys with slightly, and eventually radically, different answers to see how they effect the results. My favorite survey to do this with, by the way, is the political compass survey.

So you arrive at a product that is blank. I would imagine the best of these games are the ones which provide the material best suited for feedback with the player. The more possibilities the greater the re-play value and the greater the curiosity as to how to arrive at all the possible ends. There is a real danger of narcisistic obsession though... dreaming about your dreams. The best game would create a powerful feedback loop which would allow the player to refine the game endlessly, sinking further and further into your own desires. Second guessing your every instinct to alter your outcome. What was that movie, with Marissa Tormei and Vincent D'Onofrio? Happy Accidents (found it!) D'Onofrio's character has travelled back in time to save Tormei's character but apparently hasn't been able to do it... they are caught in a loop and each time he has to try to figure out what to do differently to avoid the tragedy. Actually this sounds a lot like the plot of one of these novel games. Happy Accidents came out in 2000 which puts it well after the advent of these games in Japan...

In anycase, one can imagine the difference between simply watching the film and being D'Onofrio's character yourself. It's very intriguing... Open the story up more to allow you more choice in the details or characters that motivate you to play and you can really be addicted to the game.