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Topic

Across time, space and discourse: The elusive nature of visual novels

Department of Pacific and Asian Studies

Date & location

• Friday, August 23, 2024
• 1:00 P.M.
• Clearihue Building, Room B215

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Michael Bodden, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, ·¬ÇÑÉçÇø (Co-Supervisor)
• Dr. Mamoru Hatakeyama, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, UVic (Co-Supervisor)
• Prof. David Leach, Department of Writing, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Jentery Sayers, Department of English, UVic

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Marina Bettaglio, Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies, UVic

Abstract

In software publishing as well as in recent academic scholarship, visual novels have come to be viewed as a type of story-driven video games originating in the late 20th century Japan, conveying their stories through the mixture of text and audio-visual component, while being characterized by a number of formal elements (e.g. anime-inspired art, nonlinearity and eroticism). Although most academic conversations center on works produced during the 1990s and later, the period of 1980s – whose software I argue to be equally important in the context of how this perception of visual novel came to be – is largely omitted from discussion. This thesis offers a comprehensive analysis of the variety of sources connected to visual novels (e.g. game software, periodicals, visual novel databases, informal scholarship, online blogs, academic writing), reexamining the genre’s current conceptualizations and classification criteria, highlighting the overarching trends and implications present in the 1980s visual novel precursors and employing the aforementioned findings in order to bridge the temporal, interregional and discursive gaps presently existing in the scholarly conversation, with the ultimate aim of discovering a more globalized lens for exploring the visual novel and its history in the academic setting. Illustrating its points through the means of various canonical as well as outlying game software, this thesis argues in favor of recognizing the menu-based mechanical paradigm and the perceived cultural point of origin as two underappreciated criteria that have so far been used to delineate the visual novel from other video game genres, and points to potential next steps in driving the global studies of this genre towards terminological unity.