What is a Game?

[Mirage]

But pay to win.

[Karifean]

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)

[Loony BoB]

Visual novel and video game are two different things. However, they are not mutually exclusive. So just because two different things are both visual novels doesn't mean you have to blanket them both into either Video Games or Not Video Games.

[Karifean]

Visual novel and video game are two different things. However, they are not mutually exclusive. So just because two different things are both visual novels doesn't mean you have to blanket them both into either Video Games or Not Video Games.

I guess. In my mind, VNs are a subcategory/genre of video games. They're not common enough to make up a category by themselves, so I usually see them marked as games.

Although it seems in Japan there is indeed a distinction between NVLs ("novels") and ADV ("adventure games"), and it's just lumped together into 'visual novels' over here. So there you go, I guess.

[Shauna]

I think it's because adventure games are a different thing here. Not sure what it is, but it's usually lumped with "Action" as the genre.

[metagloria]

But pay to win.

inb4 EoFF microtransactions. "Pay $0.99 for unlimited posts for the next 24 hours!"

[Skyblade]

But pay to win.

inb4 EoFF microtransactions. "Pay $0.99 for unlimited posts for the next 24 hours!"

I think it would be more like "You must wait 30 seconds before making another post. Or pay $0.99 to post immediately."

[Christmas]

For starters, no microtranscations plz. Secondly, no multiplayers. I HATE PPL. I HATE HAVING TO PAY. I HATE YOU IF YOU DISAGREE.