True, but part of the problem is that “Visual Novels contain X, Y, and Z!” is not true of all VNs. Some classifications are based on content; a mystery novel by definition contains a mystery. There are many things a VN can have, but that not all VNs do have. I’d argue that a “game” in the broadest linguistic sense probably does contain some set of properties that all games have, and a subset that games may have but that not all games do have. In that context, some VNs would match all necessary properties and some secondary ones, while other VNs would only match some necessary properties or none at all.
I’m honestly OK with definitions like “I’ll know it when I see it,” because almost any rigid definition applied post-hoc is going to over- or under-constrain.
Loose definitions might be useful here, like, “Here is a list of X common unique properties of VNs, a digital artifact that satisfies N of these properties can be considered a VN.” (Because, in essence, that is the common cognitive process that occurs when attempting classification.)
I’m not sure if this is universally agreed upon, but I think that games are generally expected to have conditions for victory and failure. You can’t really “lose” a kinetic novel like Higurashi or Umineko - you just keep reading until you get to the end. Visual novels with branching paths are a little more in the gray area, but I think whether they count as “games” or not would depend on whether certain endings are considered to be failure states or not. Even then, I would argue that such games are not compelling on the basis of your ability to win or lose at them, but rather they entertain with their narrative. A game that consists solely of choosing two options and seeing the outcome isn’t very compelling in and of itself - usually things like this have something added to make them more exciting (like a game show where money or prizes lie in the balance, or a visual novel where the choices leads to different story lines to read).
Something like Phoenix Wright is more of a game - you can lose and have to start over a trial, or you can get stuck on the investigation sequences because you can’t find the next clue or where you’re supposed to go. I’ve personally found myself blocked and unable to advance in the Phoenix Wright games because I’m too stupid to figure out what I’m supposed to do next. I tend to consider visual novels which are only reading and choices to be more like interactive forms of reading with visual and auditory accompaniment. And I don’t think that takes anything away from them - they’re just different kinds of interactive media and we engage with them in different ways.
People have mentioned mysteries and how solving them is like a game. I would agree with that, but I feel like it’s more on the meta level. The mystery is a game presented in the story, which you can choose to participate in as you read. But it’s the same as other games mentioned in the story, like Mion’s collection of board games or the majhong sequences. You could go and play these games yourself, but you don’t have to play them to engage with the story. The mystery is the same way - you don’t have to solve the mystery to read the story. That’s why I would argue that, while trying to solve the mystery may be a game, the visual novels themselves are not.
I personally consider something a game if you can play it and immerse yourself in it, and that’s what VNs do. There are some VNs where you interact beyond choices (like in Hatoful, in one end, it goes full on RPG), and some where it’s just reading and maybe choices. But to say that they aren’t an art form is selling them short. I’ve felt more immersed in Steins;Gate and 07th Expansion works than I ever have trying to play Halo (though to be fair I suck at shooters). A lot of them, it’d be nice if they didn’t stick to only one route being true and hammering it as such because it makes the other routes feel like you shouldn’t even bother with them, but otherwise, as a genre, VNs are good, and many games are borrowing elements of them to enhance their games (Persona, anybody?)
I think it’s rather simple. Lets look at it this way.
We don’t view books or PDF’s as games do we? With that in mind.
PDF’s -
- Can be read
- Can have implied goals, such as solving the mystery
- Need little to none interaction from the user
- Don’t have sprites
- Don’t have music
- Don’t have text appearing in small chunks
- Don’t have voice acting (but neither do a lot of amateur VN’s)
So if we assume VN’s are games, then the line between games and non-games lies somewhere in the points above.
When I say “game”, most people will immediately jump to “video game”, but there’s a different kind of “game” that may actually share more traits with visual novels than most typical video games do:
Tabletop RPGs.
The most basic form of a tabletop RPG only needs two things: a game master, and a player. Leaving aside the fact that bedtime stories technically fulfill these criteria (would they be the kinetic novels of tabletop RPGs?), it’s a very similar setup to most visual novels; the author (or game master) has prepared a story, but how it plays out can be influenced by the player.
You can throw more advanced mechanics in there - dice rolls, stat sheets, charades, intentionally vague rules for the sole purpose of spurring amusing arguments between players… just like how a Visual Novel may throw in a battle system or a baseball minigame, but the core elements remain the same.
I’m not actually sure what my point is, this is just a potentially interesting observation.
Without trying to discredit your point, I’d just like to point out as a side note that PDFs can actually be coerced to do all of these things. The format is a glorious, turing complete mess of things thrown in there just because why not.
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Assuming that you can, in fact, “play” a VN, or at least a kinetic VN that could in theory be read start-to-finish in auto-forward mode and never interacted with. The question isn’t one of immersiveness; no one is debating that VNs are a highly immersive medium due to their ability to combine reading with visuals and sound/music. Movies are basically the same and are certainly immersive, and video games often have all of the above plus the possibility of interaction on some level.
How much “interactivity” constitutes “play” is a different question, but not an easy question to answer.
In addition to @uppfinnarn’s objection, a problem with this line of reasoning is that it’s possible to argue in isolation that each of these elements is present in something that is unquestionably not a game:
- Books can be read, and books are definitely not games categorically.
- A math or physics problem has an implied goal – utilize pure knowledge and previously-derived information to explain an observed or theoretical phenomenon – but I think people would tend to say that a math problem in isolation is not a game even though it can be worked through and solved.
- Movies require little to no interaction from a viewer and movies are not considered games. In fact, more cinematic video games are often criticized for being movies instead of games.
- Georges Seurat’s pointillist technique creates sprite art of a sort, but you’re not going to find anybody who thinks A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is a game.
- Concerts aren’t games, neither are (most?) albums.
- Pamphlets, PowerPoint presentations, and other things trying to convey information or persuade people in a short amount of time all parcel out and pare down text, but this is not for the purposes of a game. Doing it this way is just a very effective way to be persuasive without being annoying.
- A play is not a game, and there are not many plays without lines.
Likewise if we examine VNs under the same criteria:
- It is possible for me to conceive of a VN that has no text, and while I don’t know of any I bet some exist. I would consider something like that to be a VN depending on its format and presentation.
- Not all VNs have a goal, explicit or implicit. Stories of course don’t have to, other than to be told.
- You could read Higurashi by setting text auto-advance and sitting back and reading the text as it appears.
- I would argue that some Interactive Fiction is functionally equivalent to a VN despite not having sprites in it. Arguably a “Sound Novel” deemphasizes the importance of sprites and might have only backgrounds or abstract computer-generated visual patterns or nothing at all, but would probably be made in similar engines to VNs and categorized by the average person as VNs.
- Not all VNs have sound. One might argue this is necessary and failing to do so is poor craft, but even then what kinds of sounds are necessary is an unclear thing. Does a VN need a soundtrack of music? Does it need sound effects? Does it need voice acting? I think that’s more a craft question and varies by the intent behind the work and the realities of production (doujin works can’t get voice acting easily, e.g.).
- NVL-style VNs could be, and in the case of 07th Expansion or Type-Moon works often are, quite wordy on a per-click or per-screen basis. At least equivalent to a printed page.
Now this is something that is not unfairly pointed out by @DaBackpack : Merely because I can find a counterexample for each specific point of possible definition, that doesn’t mean that I have reductively demonstrated that VNs do not exist or cannot be defined. I think his point was that some definitions are constructive rather than reductive, in the same sense that not all bread is leavened and not all bread is flavored and not all bread is made from the same grain, so the mere fact I can point out that some bread isn’t baked in an oven doesn’t disprove that there is some essential definite quality that makes something bread which might just be “some combination of being made of a grain, being baked, being leavened, having a particular texture, etc.”
I would argue that most people would say a bedtime story isn’t a game of any sort, and they wouldn’t categorize it with tabletop RPGs on the expectation that there has to be some ruleset there.
A better example might be two kids out playing make-believe. There is no formalized rule structure (hence “I shot you!” “No you didn’t!” and so on), yet most people refer to kids doing that as “playing.” Arguably they do so because it’s a participatory exercise between multiple people, and we’ve already all pretty much agreed that competition or cooperation are not necessary aspects of games. But they might be a contributory factor; that is, things that are competitive or cooperative are highly likely to be gamelike.
So I was about to approach this topic coming in with the whole “All issues of semantics can be solved by looking up the definition in a dictionary” but as I was getting my thoughts in order, I suddenly remembered that I answered this question before, and not coming from the perspective of semantics, but from the perspective of Game Theory. Original source and discussion of my thoughts can be found here
[quote=“Pepe”]I will be approaching this from the perspective of Game Theory. For those not familiar, it is a sub-branch of actually numerous topics, such as Economics and Computer Science. I actually took this course from Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/course/gametheory so those interested in further learning may want to take this one up 
It does look at things sometimes from a mathematical perspective, so be warned!
Anyway, to organize what I wrote on the chat, in Game Theory, the most simple way to describe a game is through Normal Form. In order to be able to describe a game through normal form, it must have the following:
- A finite number of players (VNs have 1)
- The actions the player can take (Which would be the choices in a VN)
- The “profiles” of actions of all players (Which is the list of actions made by each player)
- And a “utility function”, given the strategy profiles of all players (Which is the ending of your VN)
If we were to classify a VN in normal form, then it could work as a game. The outcomes that result from the utility function give a certain “payoff” which could be the good end, bad end, true end, etc. Now, working with Game Theory isn’t as simple as classifying these games. Here we can assign certain values to each outcome, say, 1 to good end, -1 to bad end, 5 to true end. Then we could attempt to calculate the optimal decisions that need to be made to reach the best outcome. Like if the player had to play some bad ends to reach the good end, we could single out the least number of bad ends needed to get the most payoff from his game. But a lot of that is debatable. Is assigning a negative outcome to a bad end really fair if the player himself wishes to see the bad end?
Furthermore, we could also classify VNs into separate games. Is getting into a character’s route already an outcome? Then the route itself would be considered a new game. Indeed, for most VNs, once you get into a character’s route, the choices you make in the common route have absolutely no effect on the rest of the route; only the choices made during the route affect the outcome. Of course, I can think of a few exceptions, like in CLANNAD and the goddamn Kappei route which required you to interact with Yoshino in common so that you could get the good end, but my experience tells me that isn’t very common.
Now, I did a bit more research after the skype chat and found this resource: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/whatis.htm which seems to imply Visual Novels fall more under Decision Theory. Although, most decision theory involves risks where there is a probability for the outcome to change despite your decision. Despite that, perhaps VNs would be more classified as “Decision Making” rather than “Game Playing”
Another resource here: http://assets.cambridge.org/052181/4626/sample/0521814626WS.pdf seems to assert that “A game must have two or more players, one of which may be nature.” (p.4, under Terminology). The example it gives to a single player game such as Solitaire is that nature plays first by shuffling the cards.
However, in p.6, the author states that "Games of skill are one-player games whose defining property is the existence of a single player who has complete control over all the outcomes. Sitting an examination is one example. Games of skill should not really be classified as games at all, since the ingredient of interdependence is missing."
This seems to describe VNs right on the dot, because the single player has complete control over all the outcomes based on his decision. Therefore, if we use this author’s words, then VNs “should not really be classified as games at all”. And yet they are still called “Games [of skill]”. 
So, after all this rambling about Game Theory, what do I think? I think that the normal form that I described earlier is merely a way to convert Visual Novels into a means to be thought of from a mathematical perspective, which does not necessarily guarantee its status as a game. What it can do, on the other hand, is allow the player to devise an optimal solution to his desired outcome, which takes a lot of skill. Anthony Kelly (author of the book I linked above) does seem to describe it quite well with his explanation of “Games of skill” and that jives in with looking at games from the normal form. Any idiot can click and attempt every possible set of actions, but it takes someone with skill to decide what actions to take to maximize his own payoff.
But, as he said, they “should not really be classified as games at all” ;)[/quote]
So after I missed the existence of this thread and created an entirely redundant one, I’ll just paste what I put in that one here.
One of the commonly accepted definitions of a game is that it has to have a definitive “win” state, and a definitive “loss” state. In other words, at the end of the game, one has to be able to definitively say whether or not they’ve won or they’ve lost according to the rules of the game. Strictly by this standard, all linear visual novels fail; without any interaction from the “player”, there cannot be a distinction between a win or a loss. So in that sense, kinetic visual novels are not “games” in the same way that, say, Counter Strike is, with a definitive winning state and losing state.
On the flip side, one could also argue that a win state and a loss state can be subjective. Because in reality, not everyone has the same goals because people desire different things. For example, when I play Counter Strike, I obviously like to win, but a game where my team loses by the skin of its teeth is far more entertaining than a game where we sweep the other team 16-4. So in a sense, my objective when playing Counter Strike is not to win the game as the game defines it, but simply to have fun while playing the game. Therefore, when considering whether or not a visual novel is a game, one could argue that if the reader feels like they’ve fulfilled whatever they intended to fulfill when they set out to read the novel, then they have “won,” in a sense.
This is especially true of a mystery novel such as 07th Expansion’s. In both Higurashi and Umineko, a series of questions are presented over 4 chapters, which are then answered over a series of 4 more chapters. So, by asking the readers these questions, 07th Expansion is giving them an objective; they’re asking the reader to figure out what happened in each chapter. So the “game” is to figure the answers to the questions presented in the question arcs. You’ve “won” if you correctly figured out what was going on in the question arcs as explained by the answer arcs. Conversely, you “lose” if your theories turn out to be false. Therefore, despite not having the player interact with the storyline, a game emerges.
I don’t know if you could tell by the difference in the length of each argument, but I do believe that such visual novels qualify as games. If you go by the strictest definition that games must have a definitive win or lose state, then a lot of games actually become… not games. The one that pops into my mind would be Dungeons and Dragons; I’m sure most people would consider it a “game,” but the best written DnD campaigns are the open-ended ones where the players choose the path of the story. They may not end up defeating the dragon, and the town might be reduced to ash, but that doesn’t necessarily matter as long as the players achieve whatever it was that they wanted to achieve.
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I really like your argument to this.
I remember feeling so accomplished with Umineko when I figured out things down the line while it was still on-going. It was fun reading all the theories while also coming up with my own with help from friends and man counting down comiket days to read the spoilers. It really felt like a challenge between an author and their readers.
After finishing a VN, I feel so fulfilled with having finished it all. I got to the true end, I went on a journey and back, invested in characters, and just feel like I won or if it’s a bad ending “how did I lose this???”
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I like this mindset, but you could argue that any narrative could be classified as a game. Any story that has events leading to a climax entices the reader to think about “what will happen”, and thus “winning” or “losing” would emerge from how well the reader’s expectations align with the actual climax. A joke could be called a game, too, since the ability to predict the punchline (which is something that we usually do when given jokes) gives rise to ‘win’ and ‘lose’ states.
EDIT: This also leads to the notion that a ‘game’ is not something that is determined by the author, but rather that it is decided by the participants. A card game gives rules for how its played and manually specifies win/lose states, but with your model, the card game isn’t really a “game” until the participants decide what winning and losing means. This is a very interesting perspective, but some people might assert that the notion of “game” is embedded in the rules themselves.
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I don’t think I’ll ever see the Visual Novel medium in it’s current incarnation as truly being a segment of the greater “game” genre of interactive mediums. This opinion, however, it not meant to detract from the Visual Novel style in the slightest.
From my own humble perspective I see VN’s as the culmination of a few separate movements in storytelling and interactive media. When I first stumbled upon a handful of visual novels that caught my interest I was immediately taken back to the days of MSDOS and text-based adventure games. So sure, some VN’s do occasionally have limited “gaming” mechanics within them, but the other medium that I find parallel to VN’s would be the CYOA Books of the '80’s and '90’s.
This is truly where I feel a classification of VN’s should come. If anything, most VN’s are either kinectic (in which case they are simply digital graphic novels not unlike reading a graphic novel ebook), or could be considered CYOA Graphic Novels in digital format.
Again, this is not meant to say that VN’s are lesser than games, or less deserving as a means of storytelling. I’m just as much a fan of an inspired story as I am an enveloping gaming experience. Sometimes they walk hand-in-hand. Other times they are apart. It doesn’t mean one is better or worse than another, but I do take contention with one thing to arise from the movement of the VN currently; due to the insistence of the community, or the authors, or both (I’m really unsure) of them being classified as games, it becomes frustrating to stumble upon them when I’m instead looking for a interactive gaming experience. Many times I have recently found myself checking tags or comments to be sure what looks interesting is a “video game” rather than a visual novel because of this forced ambiguity, and quite frankly, it’s frustrating. It literally puts me off of a visual novel if I’m mistaken due its somewhat mislabeled experience, and I know I’m not alone in this feeling.
Thus, for the sake of visual novels flourishing as they properly should, I would think a unique and individual classification would only help them grow. People who enjoy them will search them out no matter the title, but “gamers” who feel duped into downloading/purchasing them because of vague and misleading marketing will only come away with a negative bias.
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There has been this discussion lately all over the videogames community, both devolpers and players, about what is a videogame. Lately I have been using the term “videogame” as a substitute for other terms, prefeering “Interactive experience” to actually describing them instead. I think single route VNs like Umineko are not games per say, but if you are able to manipulate the outcome like in a branching VN or a VN with puzzles, I would call it a Game/Interactive Experience.
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I’ll just throw some choice quotes from someone I know onto the pile here, I mostly agree with him, and he puts his points far better than I can:
If you want to define game, you need to include what games were BEFORE they became video games, and you need to recognize that choose your own adventure books, amusement parks, and promenade theater were NOT in the game category before video games came along, and therefore should still not be referred to as games.
and:
I’ve come up with a perfectly adequate descriptor of what a game is: A contract that a person or group of people agree(s) to abide by in relation to pursuing a favorable outcome or set of outcomes from a system that produces said outcomes inconsistently, for the purpose of amusement.
Inconsistency in the above definition covers both random chance and difficulty.
By this definition, which I am a fan of, I don’t think I’d describe Visual Novels as games. People don’t read VNs for the thrill of avoiding a bad end, they read it for the story and the characters.
Also:
This guy gets it.
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Throwing my two cents in!
For my definition of games I think I’ll draw inspiration from the more legal stuff.
A game is a test of skill, test of chance, or a mix of both.
Most VNs wouldn’t be either so people wouldn’t consider them a “Game”. Which is fine and can properly set expectations.
Mystery VNs (or something like an Ace Attorney game) can fall under a test of (deductive) skill and therefore a game. A fair play mystery in a static form can be considered a game since it tests skills.
To paraphrase my ideas better a year on, I’d say that technically VNs are their own medium, but practically they’re games.
I suppose this is begging the question of whether mysteries are considered games. And not like in terms of Ace Attorney or Danganronpa, but something like And Then There Were None.
The reason I say that is if you’re going to argue that the challenge of solving it is equivalent to a game, then you might as well be classifying most games, like Zelda as a common example, as RPGs because you play the role of a character. Board and card games typically don’t have gameplay in the traditional way, but are filled with strategy, luck, and decisions that aim for a condition or victory.
A visual novel is pretty much exactly what the name implies, a novel that is visual. You could argue that there is audio there too, but I’d say it’s just more convenient than saying Audio Visual or AV Novel. Now granted, in many visual novels, you can make choices that impacts how the story plays out or the ending will change. I’d say this isn’t much different than a choose your own adventure book, except that the medium allows for more convenient piecing together of the story depending on your decisions.
What is a visual novel with gameplay then? It’d be closest to describe it as an adventure game. Perhaps they’re more streamlined without all the pixel hunting, but it still inevitably requires the correct decisions to progress through the game.
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You know, there is And Then There Were None the video game! I’m not joking, I own it.
Anyway, to get back on topic, many JRPGs have super complex stories (looking at you, Final Fantasy), some of which are complicated enough where if they really wanted to they could probably be adapted into novels. Almost every game in existence has storytelling qualities, and more and more stories have gameplay mechanics. The two cannot be separated. This is why I see gaming as an extension of storytelling rather than classifying them as different things. I feel that games are just another medium in which stories are told.
I guess you could say I consider VNs to be games, just because I see them both as mediums in which stories are told. I think stories makes gameplay connect better with the player, which is why some games feel the need to build themselves worlds of lore for people to get invested in (again, looking at you, Final Fantasy).
But not everyone likes super story centric games. I think this is part of why stuff like Zelda and Kirby are so popular. Sometimes you want a game to just be a game, with no story attached to it. That said, other people like super stories in their games, where there’s little to no gameplay and it’s more like reading (this is where I think VNs like Umi and Higu do).
I think this opens up a whole new can of worms. And that can being the question of, “At what point do you consider something to be a story verses at what point do you consider it to be a game?” Because for some VNs like Higurashi, I say I’m “reading” them since there’s no gameplay aspects. On the same token, there’s other VNs like Steins;Gate where there’s a lot of choices and gameplay and so I would say I’m “playing” it.
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Yes me too. I’ve played it. (It’s ok, there are better adventure games you could play, but the way they changed the ending was neat)
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Now I’d argue that many of the Zelda games do have a little bit story, and there’s a lot of fans analyzing the lore in great detail, but I’ll give you that it’s more gameplay focused. But that’s getting off topic.
In terms of the topic at hand, if I’m explaining someone what a VN is, I usually say that it’s like a Choose-your-own-adventure book, since that gives the person a clear idea of what a VN is without being too far off the mark, so I guess I don’t quite view them as games. But U4ea’s idea is pretty good, as for when you’d want to compare a VN to other things and how it can push the medium, more often than not you’re looking at other things telling a story, so perhaps looking at the grand picture of how a VN can push story telling media compared to a film, book, or game is the best idea.
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