Talk:Renai game

From Academic Kids

192.169.41.33, I see you've done some reworking of this article. I appreciate the effort, but if you think an article is using the wrong name, it's better to move it to the correct name and start a new article for the "real" meaning of the term, instead of deleting a bunch of text and replacing much of the rest with material about a different subject.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the correct nomenclature for these games, and Wikipedia would be a great place to set everything straight. If you don't feel like personally adding articles for all the game types, it would be nice to at least set out the definitions here on the talk page so I know where to put stuff. As it is, the article obviously needs some cleanup but I'm not going to try to write stuff if it's about the wrong thing. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 03:10, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

No need, I see Shibboleth has cleaned things up nicely. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 02:04, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Sure, glad to help.

By the way, I should comment about the list of famous games. I think it's important to provide some sort of list of important ren'ai games, to give examples. But I don't think we should let it grow out of control, with everybody adding their pet ren'ai game to the list, so I've given the restriction of only listing games with anime TV series or OVAs based on them. It's not that I'm a huge anime fan, or that I have something against games with no anime series based on them --- it just happens to be a convenient filter that lets through only the most famous and popular games. I hope people will try to stick to it, just to avoid cluttering the list too much with obscure titles. --Shibboleth 03:31, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Having a full List of renai games in the same style as List of H games would seem to be the way to get around this, although I'm not sure if such lists are deprecated now that this categorization stuff exists. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 04:46, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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I note that the page Visual novel currently redirects here. It seems to me that the concepts of "visual novel" and "ren'ai game" are sufficiently separate that they could productively have separate pages... or at least a proper definition of "visual novel" on this page. I'm still new at this - is there a guideline somewhere on whether a page should be split off to its own article or added as a subsection of an existing one? --AlexChurchill 08:46, Jul 1, 2004 (UTC)

The English terminology over bishojo games is something of a nightmare. There are 2 problems here. One, Joe American the average English speaker has never played any of these games and has only heard of them,. So for Joe, "dating sim", "hentai game", "visual novel", "ren'ai game" are all different words for the exact same thing. Then, you have Bob Otaku who makes fine distinctions between them. To make matters worse, Bob speaks Japanese and he rarely gets to meet any other English speaker who plays these games, so he will make up his own terminology by loosely translating the Japanese terms (which are themselves rather messy). The result of all this is that everybody has their own unique idea of what terms mean what, and confusion ensues.

In the case of "visual novel" specifically, I have seen the term used to mean either:

• Exact synonym for "ren'ai game"
• Ren'ai game which is somehow more "novel-like" (e.g. more first-person narration than usual)
• Ren'ai game with text on the entire screen instead of in a text box on the bottom
• One of the 4 games in the Leaf Visual Novel Series

Since you haven't explained, I'm not even sure what you mean by "visual novel", AlexChurchill: I wouldn't be surprised to hear you hold yet another alternative meaning!

So, with all this confusion, I think we shouldn't use English terms such as "dating sim" or "visual novel" as separate article titles on Wikipedia. First, it would piss off Joe American who just wants to read about that Kanon game he's heard about, who doesn't know or care whether it strictly qualifies as a "visual novel" or "dating sim" or otherwise, and doesn't want to follow a bunch of different links before he finds the proper subgenre. Two, it would piss off Bob Otaku, who would likely consider the very article title to be POV. The only way to avoid this mess is to use unambiguous Japanese (not English or Engrish) terms as our article titles. Currently we have three main articles: bishojo game, ren'ai game, and H game, which I think are the 3 major subgenres. I don't think we should fork off into more subarticles over terminology nitpicks.

That said, if you want to add more explanation of terminology as you see it, feel free to modify the articles. I tried to centralize all terminology discussion over at bishojo game, that's why I didn't define "visual novel" here at ren'ai game. The truth is that the whole debate doesn't matter that much, anyway: the most important thing is to understand that there is no "one true meaning" for terms like "visual novel". --Shibboleth 17:10, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Heh. Well, that's demonstrated the potential for confusion at least! I was thinking of the genre of games which ranges rather wider than just those with renai elements - so it overlaps heavily with "Renai game", but neither is a subset of the other. (Where characters and locations appear onscreen, text is read and clicked through, and occasionally decisions are made in Choose Your Own Adventure style which may affect the plot. Similar to the most story-driven Interactive fiction but with static visuals, really.)

I don't think I really know enough about the distinction to write the page myself, since pretty much all the visual novels I've played are ren'ai games (but not vice versa). I do see the problem, though. I guess providing a paragraph in this article would be fine, except there's the problem you mention of lack of clear consensus... Maybe there's not much that can be done for the moment. --AlexChurchill 09:32, Jul 14, 2004 (UTC)

Okay, you mean games like Radical Dreamers or Gyakuten Saiban would also qualify as "visual novels" by your definition. Yes, that's another reasonable interpretation. Anyway, as you can see it's a mess; probably the best we can do is add a note emphasizing the lack of consensus. --Shibboleth 20:53, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Indeed. I expanded a couple of bits of Bishojo game, because that's where the terminology discussion already is, including a definition of "Visual novel". Does that look okay? If so, the only other question I have is whether the redirect at Visual novel would be better pointed at "Bishojo game" (where the definition is), or at "Renai game" (much closer in concept). Can the redirect point straight to the "Terminology & genres" subheading? --AlexChurchill 15:19, Jul 15, 2004 (UTC)