As my hobby is writing long, boring philosophical forum posts no one wants to read, I decided this would be a good topic to post in. Feel free to skip if you don’t want to read lots of philosophy. I don’t have a tl;dr.
Do you consider visual novels to be games?
This involves language, which means it really involves the philosophy of language. We can see the importance of it simply by glancing through the posts: a lot of the topics, points, and distinctions are made based on how we use the words “game,” “video game,” “visual novel,” etc.
Well, that’s language, which is a tad more complicated than one might imagine. There’s a whole school of philosophy dedicated to it (analytic philosophy, though it deals more with the method of logical proof they use; and even that is debated), and in particular, a man whose name you might’ve heard in passing: Wittgenstein.
Time for some history of philosophy.
Early Wittgenstein was, in some respects,the founder of logical positivism: in one of his early works, he proposed a so-called ‘logical language’ in which every statement corresponded directly to reality; or, really, he was speaking about the way language should work, to a degree.
It was a language where every statement had a particular meaning: a state of affairs in the real world. Any sentence that didn’t correspond to that had no meaning, because it had no “sense” (a real thing which the sentence references). Metaphysics had no “sense” because we couldn’t observe the reality of metaphysical statements; but we could see the reality of physical ones.
There’s more to Early Wittgenstein (this was all from the Tractus), but we’ll stop there.
However, Late Wittgenstein (i.e. Wittgenstein in his later years) contradicted the entire premise of his earlier work. Language isn’t precisely logical like that at all, nor can it be. Instead, language consists of “language-games” which are determined by their context. His example is simple: take two construction workers, Jim and Bob. They develop an elementary language-game: Jim can say the name of an object and a place, like “Beam, north cross-section”, and Bob will know that he means to take a beam to the area to the north with the cross-section. It’s a very simple idea, but it illustrates an important point: that language isn’t where we define each word and then combine them to form ideas. It’s the other way around: we form ideas and then use words to describe them, and sometimes that means our understanding of what a word means can be unclear. If any of you are translators, you know what I mean; some words and phrases “literally” mean something wholly different, and some words are really defined by their context.
You may not agree with other claims that Wittgenstein mixed into his philosophy, especially regarding his beliefs on whether we can say anything meaningful at all, but his point about language-games is a very good one: language isn’t something we can really divide from context very easily. Some things, sure: names of physical objects. But other things are nearly impossible. Even metaphysics has this problem: people can easily get confused and understand the terms ‘form’ and ‘matter’ as things different from what they’re meant to mean. One of the biggest problems of philosophy is understanding what on Earth the other philosopher means.
…now back to this discussion.
You can’t divide the use of certain words from their context. So let’s take the word “game,” as we’ve used it here. Like this statement:
This is a problem of differing language games. “Is a mystery novel a game?” Depending on the “language-game”, that sentence can mean all sorts of different things. For example, the Detection Club used it as so:
THE DETECTIVE story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more — it is a sporting event.
Then what does “intellectual game” refer to? Van Dyne, in saying that, was really referencing the very battle between author and reader that he’s referring to. In other words, his use of “intellectual game” is meant to mean the experience of “the detective story” as he and his fellow authors and readers experienced it.
So Van Dyne can’t be wrong in his statement: it’s a tautology. But it might seem wrong to someone else, because “intellectual game” might mean something different to them. They may consider “intellectual game” to refer to “an intellectual activity that engages the mind,” and they formed that definition of “intellectual game” after considering it for a moment, or maybe they developed it from some other context.
In that case, who is right?
There’s no right, because there was no argument to begin with. You were claiming different things all along. Van Dyne was equating X with X. Jimmy was equating X with Y, though he used the same word(s) as Van Dyne did. Two different meanings.
Ultimately, what is my point?
First, that there are language-games, as described before.
Second, that our use of “game” lies within multiple language-games.
Third and finally, that the answer to this question is really a discussion about the context in which these words are defined and whether said meaning applies to the meaning of the other words in the context that defined them.
To say it more simply, argument should come only after we’ve discussed the exact meaning you mean a statement in; only if you both mean “X = Y” can you argue whether it’s true or not. If you want to say “Visual Novels are not Games,” you should outline the context of definition of “visual novel” and “game.” Then it’s just a logical analysis: if “visual novel” = “a bunch of these computer programs I played” and “game = a bunch of these different activities that involved play and X, Y, Z, w/e”, then we can say: “well, ‘visual novel’ isn’t exactly the same as one of those bunches of activities, and those bunches of activities seemed to carry common aspects X, Y, and Z. Should we call a ‘visual novel’ a game?”
In reality, you can do either. Set an arbitrary definition for the category “game” and then you’ll know if “visual novel” settles into it. But it doesn’t change the fact that “game” in your language-game (and others langauge-games) doesn’t precisely mean that.
Unless you do want a standardization of language (then you should just copy-paste dictionary definitions), you can just end there, once you understand what you meant by “game” and “visual novel” in our respective language-games.
EDIT: I thought of a simpler way to say all of this.
Saying a “visual novel is a game” is really trying to say “visual novels have these qualities ABC that we associate with the word ‘game’”.
But due to differing language-games, we start to argue over whether “visual novels are games” is true or not, when it’s really a matter of differing language-games.
To solve this, just bypass the useless step. Instead of insisting “visual novels are obviously games, because they have X, Y, and Z, which games have,” just say “visual novels have X, Y, and Z!”
Since that’s what you wanted to point out by saying “visual novels are games.”
It’s more direct, and it cuts out the unnecessary arguments about how we use the word “game” in different language-games. Even if the gaming and VN communities agree on a standardization of “game” for the industry, people will still approach that word from outside the industry with their own understanding of it in their own language-game.