(#KatawaShoujo) Visual novel “Katawa Shoujo” as a bright event in the world of free culture and charity

In the world of free copying there are, in my opinion, two fundamentally different natures of free products, and two metaphors will be needed to demonstrate their differences.

The life of some products is a process in many ways similar to the gradual growth of a tree. The seed of the idea, warmed by the sun of enthusiasm, slowly germinates, either on the fertile soil of a whole team of enthusiastic authors of the product, or thanks to the persistence of the original author of the idea. The stem of the realization of this idea is steadily moving higher and higher, the product is ever better at achieving its original purpose, and gradually puts on, like branches and leaves, useful additions. This way many free programs (utilities, servers, clients), operating systems, libraries of functions, technical standards and specifications, wiki articles are developed. All of them can be used for years, their usefulness increases with time, and they are rooted deeper into the soil created by the urgent need for them - it gives them support (that is, user base) and nutrients (that is, new authors). Year by year, more and more users converge to enjoy the beauty, benefits, elegance of such products. The capabilities of users updating their products develop with them. So that development does not stop, these products are most suitable for such licenses that allow not only free copying, but also free add-on: MIT, LGPL, GPL, FDL, CC-BY-SA, and so on. The benefit of such products is that they are the subject of everyday life of their users.

The life of other products is an event in many ways similar to a sharp supernova explosion. Without any warning in the sky, the radiance of a new and majestic phenomenon flashes blindingly, proceeding from the one point that was not previously paid close attention - based on the author or a small team of authors, previously unnoticeable to anyone. Rapidly increasing in volume in proportion to the third degree of the past tense, in cyberspace the enthusiasm of viewers is growing, affected by this phenomenon and began to mention it on Twitter and the blogosphere. If the initial charge was strong, then day or week this shine is visible even in the daytime sky - in trends and tops. In this manner, many free music, literary works, computer games, three-dimensional renders, paintings (files) of painting, visual novels appear before us. Only after their appearance, some viewers, if they wish, will be able to delve into the history and see that on the spot of the spectacle that opened to them for several years now, without attracting undue attention, the asterisk of the original idea smoldered - the blog of its creator or the authors team. But the beautiful moment irrevocably goes to the eternity of the past: the music is listened, the book is read, the computer game is passed, the illustration was admired, the visual novel was read (passed) several times, along all possible ways of the plot development - the need for them disappears, and the supernova remains at the explosion site a nebula of grateful public memory. For such products, even licenses that allow free copying alone, but not refinement, can easily fit: CC-BY-ND, CC-BY-NC-ND, and the like, because only potential authors of such derivatives are interested in creating derivative works ( authors of remixes, fans, “photojob”, adaptations, adaptations, translations, podcast speakers, game modders, homosexual slashers), but not the bulk of the original consumers who already enjoyed it completely. The benefit of such products (here I mean the original, and not derivatives) is that they are works of art and are intended for the single use of their consumers; however, good works can be completely repeated (you can reread the book you like from time to time, re-run a computer game, and so on), but with daily (or even weekly) it will inevitably get tired soon enough.
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It is appropriate to make a reservation that such quality (to be an event rather than a process) is characteristic not only of free works of art: we can also find it in commercial hits (pay attention, for example, to the history of the appearance of hits of domestic pop music, set out in the New Year’s issue “Posters "). It is also appropriate to make a reservation that this division is not absolute: some works of art may have all the qualities of the process (such as serials, comics, etc.), and the creative way of the author or group of authors (which, undoubtedly, is also a process).

All of the above thoughts were prompted to me by the appearance in the cyberspace of the next, and even very noticeable, product-event - the visual novel “Katawa Shoujo”, released ten days ago (January 4, 2012). But before starting the story about him, let me give you a small (≈188 kilobytes) illustration from the cover of the Japanese edition of his manual, on which all the main characters of Katawa Shoujo are visible:



The visual novel “Katawa Shoujo” is written in English, and the Japanese speech on this cover and in the title of the novel is explained by the fact that the novel is set in Japan. This is probably a tribute to the tradition of the genre itself (visual novel), which originated in Japan (just over thirty years ago) and is most popular in Japan (the Wikipedia article on visual novels reports that 70% of PC games, issued in Japan in 2006).

What is this genre?

Like almost all visual novels, “Katawa Shoujo” is not in the usual sense of a computer game, although it needs a computer to play. It would be more appropriate to talk about a computer literary work, or, to be more exact, about a computerized theatrical presentation : on the screen in front of the user a semblance of a theatrical play develops, in which replicas of characters and words from the author appear in several lines at the bottom of the screen (or on top of the screen), and bólshey on the screen can be seen painted (in the style of "anime" / "manga"), actors (whose posture and facial expression changed in the course of the play) in the background, changing from scene to scene - all of them are represented such what sees and the main character works, he remains behind the scenes (this artistic technique enables the viewer to watch the scene from the first person - and thus identify with the main character). This is a kind of computer analogue of the theater, in which living actors and the real scene are replaced by artistic illustrations. The action, as in the present theater, takes place to the music. It must be said that simple illustrations (obtained by the elementary imposition of characters on the background) at the most expressive moments may give way to scenes drawn entirely by the artist, or even dynamic video sequences. The creative freedom of the playwright is also manifested in the fact that at some moments the plot forks: the viewer of the visual novel finds himself in front of the menu and can choose further words and actions of the main character, influencing the further development of the plot. (Because of this, sometimes it is customary to say about visual novels not to “read” or “looked” like books or plays, but “passed through” like text-based quests. However, all three of these terms are to a certain extent conditional, metaphorical. in relation to visual novels, it is possible to use one instead of another.) As for the plot, the majority of good visual novels, not excluding Katawa Shoujo, are love stories about romantic (erotic) relationships of young people, by chance acquiring a dramatic or sales e tragic turn.

This definition immediately shows that a good visual novel is either the fruit of intense superhuman labor of one or two extremely versatile talents (equally capable of writing plays, drawing illustrations, and writing music), or is generated by painstaking work of somewhat larger creative team. The creator of Katawa Shoujo is the international group 4LS (Four Leaf Studios), consisting of twenty-one people (dramatists, artists, musicians, animators); the creation of Katawa Shoujo took them five years (since 2007) of collaborative work via the Internet, as a result of which the visual novel turned out so voluminous and exciting that it would be easy to spend more than five hours in a row to read each branch of the plot, and the intention to go through all the branches will turn days of enjoyment spectacle. That is why the intention of the 4LS group to distribute their work for free (and they indicated the license “Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License”) - and the intention that was voluntarily accepted initially, inspired all their work, and not forced by circumstances - such an intention can, and should regarded by us as the majestic feat of human philanthropy.

The charity of creative work at Four Leaf Studios has another, equally important, side - sensitive attitude towards people with disabilities. The name “Katawa Shoujo” is translated as “disabled girl” (“invalid”, if you like), and the scene for most of the novel’s action is a specialized boarding school for disabled high school students, and all the characters seen on the above cover are doomed for life to overcome this or that congenital deformity, or tragically acquired mutilation, or a serious incurable disease, sometimes life-threatening. A genuine drama is achieved with this creative choice, which the reader (viewer) cannot forget, even when he sees joyful smiles on their faces and falling in love in their hearts. At the same time, the freshness of the range of characters free from common dies is also provided: the viewer can still expect to see the genes of Meganecco , but not the deaf and dumb. And the main thing is that one such work of art, written with love, can change the attitude of society towards people with disabilities more than a dozen videos of official social advertising (perhaps even the ill-fated Saratov ramp will be perceived by the public a little differently than it is now).

The visual novel “Katawa Shoujo” works on the Ren'Py engine - it is a free open source engine designed to display visual novels and written in Python. So a free program culture supports a free culture of visual novels: if it weren't for Ren'Py, the 4LS team would also have to look for programmers.

Having told about all this, I don’t have much left to do: point out to all readers the entry on the Four Leaf Studios blog where torrents are located for downloading versions of Katawa Shoujo for three operating systems (for Windows, for Mac OS X) , for Linux), but to warn against reading all those readers who have not reached the age of majority (and therefore should refrain from erotica), and thank the author of that news on Linux.org.Ru , which allowed me to learn about the appearance of this visual the novel.

The “Four Leaf Studios” blog is generally quite interesting in places - first of all, the reasoning of “ Reach for the Stars ” in January last year, which is interesting to point out the shortcomings of many modern visual novels and on the way of their possible elimination, deserves attention.

The discussion of “Katawa Shoujo” on Twitter occurs, as you might guess, under the #KatawaShoujo hashtag , which I will add to the beginning of the Habrahabrow blog title so that the button starts up as it should. But for those who are just starting to read this visual novel, I do not recommend peeping on Twitter: you should avoid spoilers, sometimes rather indelicate. This caution also applies to the Danbooru fan art gallery.