Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Karifean View Post
And then there's Planetarian which has no choices of any kind and is just a linear story from start to finish. This is really the point where the only interactivity is pressing a button to advance the text, and nothing more. It's still different from reading a book, as it's supplemented by graphics, music and voice acting, but does that make it a "game"? Hardly.

stuff

And if I consider Ace Attorney a game, I feel like I should consider Planetarian a game as well.
Wait, what? Based on what you described, you can not change anything, you can only read and watch and flip to the next "page". This, to me, is not a game, because you are not really interacting, you are just pushing a button to progress. That is akin to scrolling down a thread on EoFF when the thread happens to include images and text and perhaps video.
Yeah, I know. If you look at planetarian by itself, it shouldn't qualify as a game. It is a visual novel, though. Ace Attorney on the other hand you can look at by itself, and it should qualify as a game. But again, it is a visual novel. The choices that most visual novels have is enough for me to consider them games, as that does make them interactive, but then the only difference to Planetarian is the complete lack of those choices. Other than that it's the same kind of software. And to draw the line right there and call the visual novels that have at least one choice games and exclude the ones that don't... feels like an arbitrary distinction.

In short I wouldn't call planetarian a game by itself, but because it's part of a genre that I do overall consider to be games, I just count it as one as well.

I actually find Higurashi to be a more interesting example, since, well, is a single choice that changes no more than 10 lines of dialogue in an 80 hour long visual novel enough to call it a game? Is that one little thing sufficient to differentiate it from planetarian? (Edit: Technically there are two choices in total, but the other choice is even more irrelevant to the story)