I disagree with it being in anyway important and I disagree with it being much of a reason at all, at least in the sense of ‘apps’ and ‘installing.’ Your examples are strange, and they’re such a minute portion of what a VN is, it’s hardly important. To say the method you take to run a VN is more important in the zeitgeist than the question of if the reading of a VN constitutes gameplay is… ridiculous. If your assumption was true, VNs would be considered DVDs more than games in my opinion, as they run much more similarly to DVDs. They can have the menu, they can have the fast forward and jump back features, they can have the extras menu, they can have a scene selection feature, and the idea of inserting a disc to access the material is much more relatable to a DVD than a modern PC game.
I say that, but it’s because the focus of your comment is off. Such an idea could be true if you aged it back 30 or so years and compared the medium with the content being put out on the time’s platforms (such as the PC88, the MSX, and of course the Famicom) as well as looking at the material of the VNs, because there’s a very blatant reason for why VNs were initially video games, and it did involve the platform.
As I’ve said previously in this topic, the initial reason for defining VNs as games was the inherent fail-states. Several other factors include: The popularity of VN-style cutscenes, the reliance on immersion and ‘problem solving’, and the obvious comparisons with already-popular gamebooks. The big daddy of factors however was in the origin.
Japan is renowned for being a mystery-novel loving country, and that’s very apparent in Visual Novels; the original market was driven by first-person problem solving, much like the point-and-click gaming that would come to rise. This text-based storytelling of interactive fiction was known as the adventure game, and included classic titles such as On-Line’s Mystery House and Softporn Adventure. Sometimes they would have visuals, sometimes they would have sound, and sometimes they would lack both of those things. In a world of arcadey puzzle games and old school JRPGs, the adventure game was the video game genre for readers. The simple idea of writing a story that would cause the reader to solve problems was enough to consider it a ‘game’ but the addition of meaningful interaction with consequences really sealed the deal.
And so, as technology advanced, adventure as a genre became more about digitally-rendered 3D worlds and relied less on presenting every line of text… But just because the genre changed, it doesn’t mean the original ‘adventure game’ concept was lost, and so it became multiple distinctive genres such as the ‘Visual Novel’. They were considered video games because they were an establishing force of video games.
However Visual Novels progressed, and now we have things like Key’s ‘Kinetic Novel’ where there is no interaction… and we also have hybrids that are more reliant on a core gameplay loop than the average VN. But because the core experience of reading was so similar, these non-video games such as Kinetic Novels simply became a subcategory of Visual Novels, which is what brought the validity of the Visual Novel as a game to question. It’s a matter where two labels of convenience go against each other.
Since the initial conception of VNs (where this question didn’t even exist) there hasn’t been any moment of “well they boot up the same way” to validate VNs as video games in my opinion, hence my disagreement. It’s not a valid thought in the zeitgeist. There’s very little “I run them like an app so they’re a game” unless you go back to before the term “Visual Novel” was even a thing. It’s too modern a thought. These questions didn’t even exist until a type of storytelling was mis-categorized by the masses as a subcategory of Visual Novels.
Anime is on steam. They share a medium. DVDs have many of the same mechanical features of a VN, they share a format. No one questions if these things are games because there’s no defined fail state and nothing in the way of meaningful interaction within them. They don’t have gameplay, and that’s the signature motif of this discussion; whether people consider the reading of an interactive piece of text ‘gameplay’ or not is what causes this exact discussion.
