Play and then watch - “The researchers chose to play the VNs instead of watching footage since gameplay is vastly different than watching a playthrough, providing more authentic results than video. This is also the typical approach in existing game research which generally relies on gameplay first and uses videos as secondary sources when necessary [6].” (Camingue et al., 2021, p. 2857)”

bril.etal_2019

if you give players a choice they expect it to mean something/have some effect (Carstendottir et al. 2019, p.7)

“Similarly, none of the educational VNs featured player-centric interactions—i.e., interactions that assist the player but ultimately do not affect the story—while a number of the entertainment focused VNs did. For instance, Hakuoki: Edo Blossoms[42] and Valentyne Stories Necromancy [9], had a glossary or journal that included important key words for the player to reference. It served as a way to explain and give context pertaining to the story for the player. Educational visual novels could benefit from implementing similar features” ([Camingue et al., 2021, p. 2864]