In any discussion of visual novels, there’s a good chance that the same misconceptions are going to emerge. One of the more obvious examples is conflating visual novels with dating sims, although I’m not too concerned about that one. There are enough games in both genres to prove a distinction, and more experienced fans are already careful to separate them anyway. What catches my attention is how people separate visual novels from other genres. They define these games through a very narrow set of conventions, like those Patrick Galbraith uses in this Game Studies article: