A ‘Player’s Bill of Rights’ for Visual Novels

In 1995, Graham Nelson (in his short book The Craft of Adventure) wrote A Player’s Bill of Rights for interactive fiction. In the name of encouraging the kind of theoretical understanding around visual novels & the norms and expectations around them that the interactive fiction community has enjoyed for three decades, and with the understanding that visual novels have drastically different tendencies, tropes, and tics, I would like (with apologies to Nelson) to present an alternative list.

1. Unexpected death or dead-ends must always provide new information
   Where players of both parser-IF and point and click adventures are focused on solving puzzles (i.e., their goal is to win the game), players of visual novels are focused on understanding the characters and world. To that end, visual novels have enhanced technical facilities to make save-scumming and back-tracking easier (such as multiple save slots & the ability to fast-forward through or skip already-seen segments), meaning that unexpected deaths are completely acceptable. However, the extra effort necessitated by unexpected deaths or dead-ends, while minimized, is still non-zero, so every death must have a reward (in the sense that it provides a clue for some future play-through).
2. When choices have locked the player into a particular route, this must be telegraphed
   It is normal (for logistical & technical reasons) for VNs to lock players into a particular route or arc, often based on flags set earlier. In other words, VN stories are tree-shaped. It’s good…