Backloggery, GGapp, and How Long to Beat are the main ones I can think of. Backloggery and HLTB track time, GGapp does not and only tracks status (backlog/played/stopped/etc). Personally I just made my own tracker in Notion since I tried those other trackers and although I liked them, none of them worked for me. Although once Backloggery is done being revamped I’ll probably try it again! GGapp and HLTB include visual novels, and Backloggery doesn’t have a game database at all (users manually input all games).
some thoughts about tracking time played:
I agree that time played is probably the best way to track progress, I doubt things like 100% complete/main narrative are really essential for language learning purposes. But maybe that’s because I’m not a trophy hunter so I don’t care about 100% complete.
If time played ends up being recorded on Natively, you could display the average time to complete on the game’s page. I suggest not pulling times from HLTB because 1) HLTB doesn’t have a public API and 2) HLTB times are based on native speakers’ times, and it’ll take us language learners much longer to beat these games. So if nobody’s played the game the average time would be null but that’s fine I think.
(this is all speculative of course, I just love thinking about how to implement this kind of stuff)
For what it’s worth, I’m not a time-based person at all besides looking at my total finished time (if the game records it). Game-wise I’m a proponent of allowing the user to just mark when they’ve beaten the game, stopped the game, etc., very basic stuff. While granularity is nice, it can also be a turn off in the opposite direction: “What, I have to put in how long I played tonight? I don’t pay attention to that; this is annoying.” I say options where you just trust the user are also essential; ultimately no one really cares if I marked that I’ve beaten 9 million games: it’s just my stats that are affected.
I would argue that time tracked is not a great indicator of language learning for games either, not compared to something like books or audiovisual. I could play a 20 hour RPG where 15 of those hours is gameplay or grinding or something; you can’t really track the Japanese time you’d be experiencing. Same thing with something like a puzzle game in Japanese. Sure, you played it in Japanese, but if the only text you saw was the menu options, by what measure should you be measuring your learning?
Simply recording how long you played the game is a valid statistic, I think, and a useful one, but not as a measure of language learning or how hard a game should be rated for a language learner (not that anyone brought that up, just something I wanted to add). I suppose as a method to track progress it’s one way, but I want to argue that it shouldn’t be considered the only way, or even the main way.
My main reasoning was so people have a way to estimate how long it takes language learners to beat the game. So that way you know how much of a time investment it could be. That’s the main reason I look at things like HLTB (“will this be a 5 hour game or a 50 hour game?”). But I totally get your point of view, and I agree that feeling like you have to track hours could be annoying. Maybe having the option to track time, but not making it required? Same as how it’s optional to track reading time.
I hadn’t thought about that at all, I agree completely. For visual novels, basically all the time tracked is relevant to language learning, while for lots of puzzle games (like you said), you often barely need to read at all. I’d consider RPGs to be more text-heavy and therefore more time is spent reading, but you’re right, a lot of time’s spent grinding.
I still think time is the best measurement of progress (if we track it any way other than just status labels), but I also get the arguments against it
I think it’d be useful to be able to track time, but in terms of Natively I think completion markers etc are perhaps the more useful thing. Interactive media is such a pain to track completion ratios anyway, I basically only have ‘want to play / playing / played and consider finished / played and consider satisfied / abandoned /’ statuses on my personal tracker.
Thanks for all the responses. I suppose the reason I wanted this feature is not so much to track progress but time it takes Japanese learners on average for each section/chapter but that would be too different from the existing grading/progress systems in place I suppose. Thank you guys for your time.
Circling back on this because I happened to be poking around last night…
Has anyone played around with https://www.igdb.com/? It seems to be essentially the equivalent to TMDB but for games. Can you find your visual novels on there? Games?
I’m not sure how soon i’ll add games, but if igdb would work that’d be a massive boon
I never heard of that page before, but I found even the most obscure Japan-only VN I know* there, so looks good from my perspective. I tried a few non-VN games too and found all of them.
My only nitpick: Some of them were missing “time to beat”, which e.g. https://vndb.org had. (I’m definitely not suggesting to use VNDB as the primary source though - they only have VNs, and even there their definition of VN is overly strict.)
*) Which is the Fuuraiki series. I don’t know a lot of VNs, so take that info with a grain of salt.
Ah, and maybe it’s clear, but I forgot to mention why “time to beat” is important to me: Right now, being new to VNs in Japanese, I mostly play short ones because I don’t want to be occupied for half a year or more. Additionally, while those times are of course different for a learner like me, I found that multiplying the number with 3 for the easier VNs (~L20-25) turns out to be pretty accurate in my case.
I went and checked my comiket haul against it and it actually had 3 of the 4 doujin VNs from this past year’s comikets that I checked. That was definitely better than I was expecting so I agree it’s promising
The only info missing here that I really wish it had was the author. I get why on a game focused site it’s not right there on the page, but this is one sense in which I browse VNs more like books vs games where I would be looking probably more at the company. At the end of the day though I don’t need Natively to be a VNDB replacement to be happy so this isn’t that big of a deal to me
The only thing is that I really would like to have at least the option to track these by pages instead of time (maybe something you can add optionally like how you can add time to your book logs?). I really just don’t keep track of time for VNs, I only track how many pages of text they were
Yeah, hooking them generally (so technically I’m tracking characters but I do also track this as pages by just dividing by 400 - about right for a bunkobon page)
I do sometimes also use a physical counter (like one of those little metal ones you click with your thumb) to eyeball it by counting lines
Also pull the scripts from the game, although this one I realize is way beyond what most people would do (but this is where a good percentage of the character counts on JPDB come from)
Thanks! When I hook something I just log as character count. Not that I do it often.
With ebooks I also log characters instead of pages… but it makes sense to convert everything to one or the other for easier comparison.
Another note on that: While people might not be interested in tracking their session time, they might want to track their total time spent in the end. Total time spent is automatically measured by e.g. Steam, Switch or when using a texthooker, so it’s readily available in many cases.
I’m not sure how useful it would be to display aggregates of that to others on the game pages, because it would wildly fluctuate by both Japanese knowledge level and playstyle, but in the end it could just go to the personal statistics page: Played X hours of games.
@brandon it would be nice to note what language you played the game in; would that be possible? So for something like Pokemon I could record that I’ve played the same game in both Japanese and Spanish.
I’d assume you would you just add the game in your Japanese section and your Spanish section, just like you’d do with e.g. books right now.
(Except games are mostly multi-lingual instead of having multiple editions, I guess - so maybe they’d be available for multiple languages instead of separate editions like e.g. books currently have.)
so I don’t care about 100% complete.
