What is a Visual Novel?

Visual Novel (VN) is a widely recognizable genre of narrative-focused games that has grown in popularity over the past decade. Surprisingly, despite being so widely recognizable, there is not a singular definition to help guide the design and analysis of such games---with academic definitions and implementations ranging from "interactive textbooks" to "adventure games with multi-ending stories". In this paper, we present a unified definition of VNs drawn from an analysis of 30 prior academic definitions. We also examined 54 existing VNs to further refine our definition and employ a deeper analysis of the interactivity within VNs. We highlight key features of VNs that arise in our definition, and discuss resulting implications for the design of VNs. This work is relevant for narrative game designers and researchers, affording a more unified structure and clearer guidelines to identify, analyze, and design future VN games.