Literacy and Visual Novels

[crunchytaco]

Had you done a VN research on educational material in general, you could have a starting point somewhere with Sengoku Rance. 

[Zalor]

Hi guys! I'm currently a student and I'm doing a research paper on visual novels. The topic that I'm trying to argue is that video games, specifically visual novels, can help improve literacy when people play them.  I'm trying to prove that visual novels are basically like regular novels but more interactive and engaging.  They also reach out to visual literacy as well as print literacy, because it involves pictures, facial expression, and learned social interaction.  I just want some opinions on this topic, I've already done a lot of research, but it would be nice to have some other ideas. Thanks!

Do you think visual novels can improve literacy? Why or why not.

 

Visual Novels have the potential to do everything you are saying. They can tell highly complex stories in intelligent ways. The fundamental flaw with VNs is that the market they built themselves around in Japan are Otaku. Otaku are not people I usually associate with being intellectuals interested in complicated themes and presentation. So I would not look at most Japanese visual novels as support for your argument. However there are exceptions, by literary standards Swan Song executes its themes in quite intelligent ways.  

 

There are also some OELVNs that have some pretty decent writing. Both Katawa Shoujo and Dysfunctional Systems are written pretty well. In any case, I'm totally of the view that it is up to western artists to save Visual Novels. As long Visual novels are predominately made for otaku, they will be condemned to mediocrity. Since there is basically no market for VNs in the west, there are no incentives to compromise storytelling for VNs like there are in Japan.    

[steve_AU]

Hi I just came across this thread quite by accident while googling for VN's.

 

I have been a gamer since the days when the best PC's had 16 Kilobytes of RAM. I'm sad to say I never really got into VN's ( I think the last one I tried was "starship titanic"), this changed about a month ago when I played Sunrider. I am really excited about gaming again it's like I've found something completly new and fun.

 

But I digress:

  I never thought of VN's or games in general as a method to learn another language, I have been trying to learn Mandarin (on and off) for a few years now. Seems most people on this thread used gaming to learn english as a second language. How many english speakers here have used gaming to learn an Asian language. Can anyone offer some tips or games I should look at?

 

 

[RinXD]

Um using VN's/games to learn a asian language is a bad idea as you run the risk of learning dialect rather then the core language same could be said for any language to be honest