"gamer logic" nonsense that annoys you

[PartridgeSenpai]

It is hard not to imagine all the game excluders walking around telling kids that what they are doing is not playing a game, because that seems to be the only goal to this debate.

Hey, now, the goal of being a pedantic arsehole isn't to harass children. It's to harass other pedants on the internet

Jokes aside, I wouldn't say it matters that they aren't participating in a game, but what does matter for kids is that they are playing. You can play a virtual novel, but that doesn't need to mean it's a game. You could even play with and have fun a DVD-menu, but that doesn't mean it's a game. Like Isiolia said before, just because something is definitively not a "game" doesn't mean it's inherently worth less, it's just not a game. Just because a book is a book doesn't mean it can't be just as fun and valid as playing a video game.

I think the biggest confuser here is language. "Playing" being 100% synonymous with "gaming" because that's how we happen to refer to it in English. At least in the other languages I've studied (German and Japanese), that isn't the case. They use the verb "to do" for gaming, exactly as one would "do" their taxes, one "does" their video games.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Hahaha! I am glad my post was interpreted as hunor.... as it was intended!!! Phew... Forgot my blue text!

[marurun]

Let me just point out that Wikipedia classifies visual novels as a sub-genre of adventure games, with the following introductory text on the article: "A visual novel (ビジュアルノベル bijuaru noberu) is an interactive game introduced in Japan in the early 1990s". The two references on that sentence are books about games, one of them about storytelling in games. And in most VNs you do make interactive narrative choices, so the game elements are, in effect, the act of directing the narrative among the available branching paths. Interactive Fiction (text parser) games also take this approach, just without the graphics and voice acting.

Walking Simulators are much like adventure games in that you interact with the world to discover the narrative. That interaction with the world is the game element. If you just turn on the game and sit there and watch and don't interact, nothing happens. So without interaction there is no story, there is no game. It's not a movie or a book, where the only interaction is hitting play or turning the page. You choose which elements of the environment to interact with first. It may not shape the end narrative, but it shapes your understanding of the narrative. You choose how and when to proceed. You choose which aspects of the narrative you want to experience in what order by how you interact with things. And with stuff like Firewatch, you choose how to respond, helping to shape the tone of the narrative.

So in summary, visual novels and walking simulators are absolutely games, but they are specifically sub-genres of adventure games. Adventure games have historically been just as interested in the narrative as in gameplay elements. So in the sense that a visual novel has almost nothing in common with Doom or Mario, that's definitely true. But it is absolutely a game in terms of it's relationship to King's Quest and Zork.

I cannot force the naysayers to agree that VNs and WSs are games, but the historical record and current environment and audience around them favors the interpretation that they are indeed games. And as a forum at large, I think our formal stance is to accept them as such. So while we can certainly engage in discussion about semantics, let us make sure that we do not bludgeon others for their gaming preferences.

[Tanooki]

A visual novel from all I'm reading there is more or less a digital version of those old Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks I think a lot of us experienced back in the 80s or early 90s as kids. Right? You buy a story (game), and you watch it unfold (read the pages), and then a choice appears on screen (in the book) and then your choice jumps (page flips) to the next part and your fate is chosen. Life, punishment, reward, or death, or some kind of extreme. You keep pecking away at it from the start trying to remember the ways you fouled up so you don't do it again, or you got lucky and want to see if there are more paths to choose.

It's a game, just as much as those old books were games in print. You're gambling with the story and making choices on the outcome, much like rolling the dice in D&D.

[Segata]

Life is a game and everything in it.

[PartridgeSenpai]

If you just turn on the game and sit there and watch and don't interact, nothing happens. So without interaction there is no story, there is no game.

I would argue the same is true for a DVD-menu

You choose which aspects of the narrative you want to experience in what order by how you interact with things. And with stuff like Firewatch, you choose how to respond, helping to shape the tone of the narrative.

I would argue, that open world games like Firewatch (a game I have not played, mind you), that have an emphasis on world exploration specifically, are about as close to a game as you can get in that genre even though you can't really die. It reminds me of a WS like Proteus, although Proteus basically IS just exploring, no real story or game to it.

But it is absolutely a game in terms of it's relationship to King's Quest and Zork.

I think Visual Novels and Walking Simulators are a very far cry from old-school adventure games like Kings Quest. You could lose like CRAAAZY in those game. They were filled with random object-puzzles and the like that required logic (often disgusting leaps of logic) to see their ends where WS like Dear Esther or Everyone's Gone To the Rapture simply do not to any comparable extent. I would say that modern WS's are the natural de-gamification of the old adventure genre, where those older, ham-fisted and unfun video game elements have been removed for the purpose of telling a story through loosely interactive digital media.

I cannot force the naysayers to agree that VNs and WSs are games, but the historical record and current environment and audience around them favors the interpretation that they are indeed games. And as a forum at large, I think our formal stance is to accept them as such. So while we can certainly engage in discussion about semantics, let us make sure that we do not bludgeon others for their gaming preferences.

I can't say such sentiment does anything to change my mind, but I respect your ability and choice to disagree

A visual novel from all I'm reading there is more or less a digital version of those old Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks I think a lot of us experienced back in the 80s or early 90s as kids. Right? You buy a story (game), and you watch it unfold (read the pages), and then a choice appears on screen (in the book) and then your choice jumps (page flips) to the next part and your fate is chosen. Life, punishment, reward, or death, or some kind of extreme. You keep pecking away at it from the start trying to remember the ways you fouled up so you don't do it again, or you got lucky and want to see if there are more paths to choose.

It's a game, just as much as those old books were games in print. You're gambling with the story and making choices on the outcome, much like rolling the dice in D&D.

At the same time, there are also many visual novels which are just that: Visual novels. Other than effectively clicking to turn the page or occasionally making a choice which is actually just the illusion of choice (as it doesn't affect the story in any meaningful way), there is no game-element. The Starcraft 2-based visual novel (which is apparently just called SC2VN) is a good example of one of these types of VN's.

Interestingly enough, there ARE actually old CYOAB's that literally have you roll dice. It was a key gimmick in the old Fighting Fantasy books (many of which have been turned into IOS games, iirc (although I may be thinking of another old, English adventure book series)). Those, I would agree are games. There are definitely VN's I would say are games, and those I would say ostencibly aren't. Perhaps another term is needed within that genre to properly distinguish them