I don’t consider a kinetic novel a game either, since it’s basically just a book with pictures and music.
As for board games, that’s an interesting point. I think since video games and board/card games are different, I’d use different criteria for them.
I’m curious though, what board/card games don’t require any decision making? I don’t play them very often so none are coming to mind
For example, there’s games where you just cast a die and move according to the result, like this one and its variations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_Ladders
What about games like Umineko?
The game aspects are entirely inside your own mind - can you solve the mystery? - while the game itself has no interactions to speak of.
Well, are walking simulations, where you walk along certan paths and get told a story as you go, or just see nice things games? THings like Firewatch forexample.
Most would say yes, and how about adventure games? Modern ones, like those made by telltale involve very little actual gameplay, and the gameplay is hardly why any one playes those games. Infact the gameplay is usually a drag! What it’s all about is a story, and one you have interactions with, even small one like choosing a route, or saying a thing to a girl.
I think Visual Novels are perfectly good as games, and trying to call them books, movies or comics is just wrong, because they don’t really act like any of those. Now wether they should join an existing genre of games, or of VN should be it’s own special genre is not up to me, though I lean on it being a genre in it’s own rights, that’s my opinion on this.
Would they? That’s been a pretty big debate in the games industry, most likening them to stories you walk through. On the topic of Firewatch I say it isn’t a game, for the reasons outlined in my original post back at the start of the topic.
I’ve never played a Telltale game as I’ve heard bad things about them, but I do know some have QTEs you can mess up and get a game over from, and a rare choice that leads to a bad end.
Many VNs have that too. Especially F/SN. That VN is riddled with bad ends.
I consider VN more of a book than a game, it’s like the goosebump books which had different endings you could pick from
In my own discussions, I have often avoided the question of whether visual novels are games and have decided that they should be considered as their own interactive entity. In limiting the audience’s interaction with the plotline and creating a finite, sometimes ordered set of outcomes, the traditional visual novel offers a narrative experience very similar to a choose your own adventure novel, but with more emotional maturity than the children’s books which are mainstays of the genre. Further, visual novels offer creators the ability to create structured storylines that standard video games often have difficulty restricting themselves to, especially with the modern industry’s heavy emphasis on extra content and diversions to retain player attention.
I think visual novels are more like Choose Your Own Adventure Books than they are typical video games. To the point that I wasn’t certain if saying, “I played a visual novel.” was correct or if I should say “watched” or “read”. After bringing this up with one of my friends I came to the conclusion that “played” is correct, but not in the “I played a game” sense. It’s more in the “I played a DVD” sense. This is doubly true for kinetic novels where you can set it to auto play and it gets to the end all on its own.
What’s also interesting is that there are adventure gamebooks that combine the choose your own adventure concept with a pen and paper rpg rule set. E.G. the Fighting Fantasy series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy
I think those blur the line between books and games as much if not more than visual novels.
I’ve had friends ask me about this before, and I’ve been on both sides of the fence. Eventually I just stopped caring whether a visual novel should be labelled as a game or a book and started enjoying them for what they are: visual novels.
Yeah I think you are on to something. For example you can use play with anything. The definition of play is just engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose. When you say “Jimmy played with his book” it does imply that he is not reading rather he is playing with the physical book This is because it implies he is not seriously engaging in the book. However if you said “Jimmy played his e-book” This implies that it might be automatic in some way but the he is “reading” it. It is really just assumptions that play is something different from reading.
Now lets take that concept back. In other words playing is always right even if you are reading. It is just a broader term. For example if you are reading the text in LB or playing the mini game play is always right. So am I saying everyone should stop using read? NO NO NO why? In the first example with “Jimmy played with his book” There was a problem it was the fact that it was hard to tell what exactly jimmy was doing… It shows what you are doing in that game, you are reading. All in all they are both right imo, but play is better. It is because play is always correct. I read the baseball mini game in little busters is just plain wrong. Play has more weight because it is a broader term. But it still may confuse people.
I usually say read/play cause it is just more information. Cause including read in there with play implies it is some non reading but mostly reading. It is just two different words that imply different things. It is just a game to game/book to book thing that matter very little. You can say I am working on finishing that vn. People know what you mean. Working implies you are trying really hard to play/read/whatever to the said goal. This again might also imply they you are making the game, but in most cases you would assume they are just playing it.
Now back to are vns games. Well the other post I posted already covered this but basically I said it is all about fun. In this case it is about the “playing” aspect of it (enjoyment). The creator creates a game to be fun, and the player plays the game hopefully… or it might suck and be “work”
While I personally don’t mind whether Visual Novels are categorized in one way or the other, I do believe that the fact that they’ve been marketed as games all this time has been detrimental to how they’ve been perceived, and the expectations people tend to have when they go into them. Leaving aside all the people who get bored with a lot of text in their games, most gamers tend to get quite hung up on the interactivity aspect of story-based games. In fact, a lot of the negative reviews I’ve seen on VNs tend to be related to how “your choices don’t really matter” or how “they don’t change much of the story!” I think it’s quite telling that the most popular VN in the west are either the detective trial-based murder mysteries like Ace Attonery or Dangan Ronpa, or stat-based dating sims. Why of course, those are the ones that tend to have the most interactivity! On the other hand I’ve seen people who are mainly readers be bothered by having to “constantly click to move forward” and finding all the interactive elements like choices, bad ends and mini games to be very distracting.
I think it’s ultimately all about expectations and what the VN audience goes to them for. For me personally Visual Novels are really just their own category. A very important part of what makes a VN experience is the combination of written prose+audio visual elements. It’s all about immersion. All the elements are put together in a way that puts the audience in the world right besides all the characters.
There’s no better example to illustrate the point than the way Little Busters mini games are incorporated into the story. The game’s main themes are friendship and youth, and that absolutely comes through with them. I especially find the baseball minigame absolutely brilliant. To elaborate, the first couple of times I played it I actually got a little mad by how unbalanced and, well, random it seemed. Rin’s throws never seemed to make sense, and she sometimes failed completely making me unfairly miss one ball. But as the game went along and I got to know the characters better and we recruited more members, I realized that I wasn’t playing to beat some score or defeat some CPU opponent or get the most hits, I was just playing around with these fun characters. Rather than hit the highest combo plays, I wanted to see all the characters react to all the different places the ball could go to. Seeing Rin succeed or fail in different/new ways. Seeing Kyosuke give a lame nickname to her when she sucked at throwing or seeing the girls just chilling besides the tree under the sunset and how they reacted when the stray balls went their way (usually towards resident buttmonkey Komari). Rin getting mad at the cats getting hit and Riki’s sometimes witty responses or cheering as Kurugaya or Haruka were in the right spot to catch the ball and saving our nice long combo. And at some point it hit me. It was never really about the gameplay, or the baseball mechanics themselves (really, it could barely be called baseball). When Rin failed her throws, it wasn’t for any gameplay/mechanic reason that you were supposed to “solve”, it simply was because she sucked at throwing! You see, the whole conceit of the minigame was simply about the mood it puts the readers in and getting to hang out with these people, Riki’s friends. Your friends. That, to me, is the quintissential VN thing that I can’t get in any other medium.
Even choice-less games like Umineko put together the whole audio, visuals and narrative together in a way that makes me feel like I’m actually taking part in solving the mystery even though I’m literally not interacting with the game beyond “clicking through the story”, and even seemingly trivial things like the text’s color are made to be a significant part of the narrative. All for the sake of immersion in a way that a normal book never, ever could.
I honestly believe that there’s too many things that separate Visual Novels from both games and books in terms of structure and audience expectations that it feels kind of unfair to lump them in the same category. Then again, the game market is rapidly evolving into something quite different, especially with the rapid increase of growingly niche indie games, so who knows!
(Also, dear almighty, please forgive the massive wall of text 
)
I think that using “read/play” would just create more ambiguity and fail to actually deliver more information. Imo it makes the speaker seem wishy-washy, like not even they know if you “read” or “play” a VN. For a visual novel like little busters (which has more minigames than most VN’s I know) you may spend 80 hours reading it but only 2-3 hours of that would actually be playing the minigames. If you spend >95% of your time in a VN doing one thing and <5% doing another, you can probably safely disregard the <5% for most casual conversation.
No it is 100% play and 95% read.
I include read to show that the playing is mostly through reading. The act of playing is defined as: engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose. So when you launch the game, the act of launching the game is already playing. You are launching the game not to work but to play. You also engage in reading but it is still playing.
If you say, “Jimmy go play.” Is he allowed to read? Yeah of course. It simply means “have fun” It also implies not being serious. Play with the book could mean not reading it so that is why you normally say read for books. The only real way around it is to say you are engaged in not play but work or study. It is not what you are reading it is why.
People really over complicate this topic way too much lol.
You know this question had me wondering for a while. Even though visual novels, are labeled as games, there are many people that will argue with that statement, however I think they can be referred as a different kind of game, since it has a plot and different states(beginning, game over, etc) , but it is more reading that anything else.
Regarding this, there are exceptions, since some visual novels include features from different kind of games like RPG or TCG, besides that some things that call my atention from visual novels are the fact that you can make choices, of course the real end is already predetermined, and the variety of possible endings. It may not be your typical game, but it is good on its own.
I’d say it’s pretty clear that the hybrid VN’s ex:Danganronpa, Ace Attorney, Zero Escape, with gameplay that ties into the story are very much games with gameplay and game overs/bad ends.
Video Games, from what I can tell on various dictionary sites, are defined by their interactivity with the player.
Personally I think standard VN’s with meaningful choices, routes and bad ends can be considered games.
Kinetic Novels, as much as I don’t like to say it, aren’t really games because with the last entry the player is consciously making decisions, here a player is pressing enter or a to advance the text.
I feel like if Kinetic Novels were to be considered games, then e-books could be considered games, as both have the same level of interactivity.
That’s not to say I dislike Kinetic Novels by any means as I’ve enjoyed various Kinetic Novels from Key and 07th Expansion.
I’d also like to add that this element of interactivity that makes something into a game should be present throughout the Visual Novel.
So having a single choice like in Fault Milestone One isn’t enough to call it a game.
I’d like to add another point that further solidifies my point of view in regards to Kinetic Novels.
If you look up Higurashi in the app store, you’ll find that it’s listed under “Books” instead of “Games”.
The whole idea of a game is very reliant on the idea that the player can interact with the game in a meaningful way.
There’s quite the difference between pressing a to the beat of the music and pressing a to get to the next line of text.
That said, whether a Kinetic Novel is a game or not is somewhat irrelevant. Ultimately, Steam won’t take off a VN because it’s not a game, after all they sell a plethora of things from games to digital art tools and even anime episodes, so having a Kinetic Novel or two wouldn’t really be a bad thing.
The thought that a Kinetic Novel isn’t a game does impact it in that it’s incapable of being sold at game stores.
Even if a Kinetic Novel were to do extraordinarily well, it would be highly unlikely for it to get a reasonable physical release that isn’t accessed via backing on kickstarter or on an online store.
Hybrid VN’s with a lot of gameplay don’t have to deal with this restriction to the digital market and can play both the physical and digital market, assuming they have the money to do so.
In conclusion, I believe that Kinetic Novels are Novels and Visual Novels that aren’t Kinetic Novels can be considered games.
While there are some VNs that would easily classify as games to someone that had clear barometers or definitions, I generally tend to follow two simple rules when it comes to this:
Personally I just group them as visual novels and treat them their like own form of work since I’m spending time reading it all the same. 1 hour is 1 hour no matter what you do with it. Likewise, I consider interactive fiction (Zork, 80 Days) to be their own category.
I mostly consider them novels. After all, it’s in the name.
Also, I think interaction must be more meaningful than “a different scene plays if you choose a over b” (there are a lot smaller things like single lines that can be changes, but the point I am trying to make sill apllies to that). That’s like reading a book in a different order than it’s printed in, or just certain parts of it.
I actually think there are books that have choices, sending you to a specific page depending on what you pick. And even if they arenot that, that concept is simple enough to see. Would those be “games” because you make a choice?
Since 98% of what I do is read, I’d also consider reading the better term.
The only reason why people are considering them games and they have shown up on Steam and such is the way you access them: they are technically speaking games, as you launch them like a game, they are build like a game, you install them like a game, you “save” and “load” rather then set bookmarks. What even is a game in that regard? An “app” used for pasttime entertainment?
As such, while I don’t think viewing them as games or using the term “play” is entirely wrong due to the nature of VNs, I view “read” and considering the contents closer to books as more accurate, as I give the content itself priority over the means it works on.
However, seeing them as kind of their own hybrid thing between book and game does make a lot of sense as well. So, they’re basically the Nintendo Switch of books and games :D?
I’d disagree with that simply due to the fact it generalizes one medium as a whole.
The Switch is a handheld console that also serves the purpose of a home console; it is both, and since there is only one ‘Nintendo Switch’ design, there is no question as to what it is.
Visual Novels on the other hand are very case-by-case, with some being distinguishable as games and some being distinguishable as novels. Narcissu for example is a novel, and Ace Attorney is a game.
Also I completely disagree with this:
My opinion (and what i’ve told people) has been mostly that they are a hybrid of games and books, however i’ll take this opportunity to formulate a somewhat more formal concept, in my opinion the discussion orginates from the fact that the medium of visual novels is a computer (or any device that has a CPU such as consoles, phones, etc) program and that most of them require interaction from the person engaging with it, however the content is more akin to a book, with obvious exceptions to VNs with minigames like clannad/LB/Zero Escape.
I believe that they are neither a game or a book heres why:
Game
Book
So in my opinion the definition should be closer to a hybrid or something else entirely, i believe VNs are a whole new format for storytelling, there’s movies, TV series, books (and more) and visual novel is a new format to be added to that list with the main defining feature of it being its computer program medium.
