The only requirement something needs to be a game is to have a failure state. Considering that many VNs have bad endings, this means that they have failure states, meaning that they are games. Sure, kinetic VNs aren't games, because you literally cannot get bad endings in them, but that doesn't mean you can just write off the entire genre as "not games".
Why aren't VNs considered games?
Dominic Miller
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Daniel Wood
why is Yea Forums so desperate to argue VNs are games whilst also arguing games like TLOU and GOW are movies?
Brody Garcia
they're garbo
Tyler Jackson
But they are games, they are listed as games and playable in gaming platforms. Why do you care so much about what literal whos here tells you?
Evan Long
>V is one person
Jaxon Phillips
correct.
Hunter Roberts
They're not movies, they're movie-games. They're games by definition alone, but they only use gameplay to gain the attention of the AAA audience, as their stories alone cannot carry them to record-breaking sales heights.
Meanwhile, VNs don't care about mass-market appeal, and instead of diluting their story with blanding third-person shooting segments, they deliver their story entirely on its own, no gameplay filler needed.
Jaxson Collins
VNs are their own thing. It's not an insult to say they're not games because unlike the things mentioned they're not even trying to be games or to market themselves as such.
Jose Evans
because one of those statements has to be true yet Yea Forums does not want accept either of them to be true
either choices + interactivity = gameplay therefor VNs are games or the fact that an interactive medium is not necessarily a game just because it has gameplay and game mechanics
for the past few decades the entire definition of what a game is has been stripped down from "rules, winning and losing conditions" to "if it has game mechanics it's a game"
if you were to accept that game mechanics together with a story are not enough to define something as a game, as in you need actual wining and losing conditions, then you start going down the rabbit hole of "technically Red Dead Redemption and GTA aren't games but interactive fiction that exists within a simulated environment"
the logic has been spectacularly twisted by developers who want to legitimize games as art similar to literature and publishers that want to appeal to more casual audiences that can digest more simple gameplay by turning "the game is finished because you won/lost" to "you won because you finished the game"
Hudson Sanders
Cause Choose Your Own Adventure books exists.