If I HAD to provide a straight answer to this question, I would not classify kinetic novels like WTC as games, but maybe games like Steins;Gate or Katawa Shoujo as games because of the interaction. Ryukishi, around when EP1 came out, posited that Umineko was a “game” in that it was a duel of wits between author and reader, but this description does not fall under the classical definition of “game”.
My personal opinion on the matter, which isn’t really an answer but a perspective:
(As an aside, I’m slightly salty at how the common notion that “VNs aren’t games” is often used as a way to discredit the legitimacy of VNs as an interactive medium. I won’t go deeper into that component of the discussion because it doesn’t address the fundamental question.)
I do think this is a largely arbitrary and meaningless distinction altogether.
If Umineko isn’t a game, what happens? Does it change the way you approach it? Ideally, I would say it shouldn’t, because you should approach a work based on its own terms instead of your preconceived notion of “what this should be like”, but realistically speaking it probably does, and I think that it is actually pretty harmful to these kinds of games altogether. As tech-savvy people, our attitude towards digital media is unconsciously situated in the notion of “gaming”, and something that doesn’t fall in line with our expectations of “gaming” is treated as “other”, or “foreign”, which can have numerous consequences on people’s perception of the artifact.
Somewhere along the line, the term “interactive media” has been conflated with the term “video game,” most likely due to how the history of interactive media has been centered on games (PONG, Space Invaders, w/e)
As someone whose professional research intersects with studies in digital media, I think the label of “game” is incredibly reductive. “Game” has a specific connotation which doesn’t apply to a lot of digital media artifacts yet is constantly used to place the near entirety of interactive digital media under a single umbrella. On top of that, the term “game” and in of itself suggests that the purpose of all of these artifacts is to entertain like a typical game (e.g. board game) does.
I think at the center of it all is the way that our expectations of the experience we will get out of the artifact is mixed in with the medium’s label itself:
The term “book” describes the format in which textual information is presented, but doesn’t reveal the kind of experience we get out of it.
The terms “movie” and “film” describe exclusively the format in which visual information is presented.
The term “game”, on the other hand, implicitly suggests the kind of expected experience one would get out of the artifact.
Coming back to reality, how does this actually affect real people? Anecdotally, I see a kind of cycle happen a lot with non-VN-savvy friends:
This computer program is made for entertainment -> this is a game -> this game is boring because I can’t really interact with it -> this isn’t ACTUALLY a game
And, a least from personal experience, the disparaging “this isn’t ACTUALLY a game” often follows.
In general, I would much prefer to divorce the broad classification “interactive digital media” from the actual term “game.” It doesn’t serve artifacts like Umineko and Higurashi justice and, in the end, you’re comparing apples and oranges, except we live in a world where the term “apple” is the same as the term “orange.”
EDIT: @Renall it might come off this way but I’m not trying to discredit your discussion (there is a lot of insightful discussion that arises from this question) but rather address a larger, recurring discussion in the community.
I do think this situation has gotten better over the years, but there still is that “game”-centric bias there. The fact that the question “are VNs games?” is such a large one in the community betrays the fact that our “gold standard” for interactive media is in gaming.