Well, I see ripples, objects that might represent “a boy”, “a girl” and “8 dwarves”. I’d love to interpret more into it, but “ripples” and the numbers are the only things that match. And ripples aren’t even part of the tale of 8 dwarves…
On a side note:
There’s a term for that, too and it’s called the anthropic principle. It says that for something to exist, it requires someone conscious to witness it.
And now back to the topic.
I agree with this. In my opinion, VNs add to our “knowledge” just as much as other books do. Works of fiction can influence us almost as much as personal experiences (fiction merely ‘feels’ less real because we’re conscious of the fact that it’s fiction and also because it doesn’t impact all of our 5 senses). But in the end of the day, everything we experience is just in our head and we can’t bypass our brain in order to find out whether the information it gives us is 100% true or not. This is both good and bad. It doesn’t even matter if you tell people the truth or lie to them. What matters is whether they believe it or not. A believable lie or even propaganda will influence people just as much as a truth would.
But I digress. Some people may ask "How in the world are VNs, being a fictional work for the purpose of entertainment, be as valuable and informative as, say, textbooks? Well, did you know that life experience is an important asset in creating a fictional story? The more experience you have, the more you can share, the more realistic your story will become. An experienced reader will be able to tell apart a realistic story from mere juvenile fantasies.
And by writing a story, you share that life experience. VNs tell the stories of people, of lives and life situations. How do people think, what do they feel and how do they react in a given situation.
A textbook will teach you 1 + 1 = 2, but the knowledge you get from a story isn’t as plainly visible. Only by understanding the situations and the characters will you be able draw conclusions and learn something from the story. And you know what the fun part is? Different people might draw different conclusions. Readers might conclude something different from what the author wanted to say. Authors might have subconsciously included something they didn’t even intend to include, but it ended up there because it’s also part of their life experience, which they used to create the story.
Oh, and it’s not like there’s zero scientific knowledge included in works of fiction. Scientific topics are ALSO used as material for stories. Just look at this thread. People were talking about schrödinger’s cat but only a minority of them are actually familiar with quantum physics and the math behind it. Sure, they didn’t know as much, but they more or less had a general idea of that topic.
Now think about it: how come they knew it without reading a textbook on quantum physics? We’re not all physicians. If it wasn’t for certain works of fiction, we wouldn’t even have known about things like schrödinger’s cat. Most of us would never read an actual textbook on that topic. But those things have been mentioned in several works of fiction we’ve read or watched and now we know about them.
We have tons of valuable knowledge in our heads that ended up there by means of entertainment media. So of course there’s real meaning in Visual Novels.