A full game made from AI without an engine. Tim Sweeney is not amused.
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That doesn't qualify as gameplay, it's a choose your own adventure story. There's no unique experience or random chance based on your interaction. I've watched and read movies and books that do precisely the same. There's no gameplay to loop.
Making choices is a core gameplay mechanic, though. I'm not huge into visual novels, but I have to imagine that at least some have or might have, say, RNG based skill checks or the like. Finally, I would absolutely consider Choose Your Own Adventure as a game. (Not a video game, of course, but still.) The Wiki article even calls it a "gamebook" in the opening paragraph.
It's a game in only in that the only thing that makes it a game is simply choosing which text to read in what order. There is no interactivity in that, and there is no rule-set.
I mean, by that logic, slot machines aren't a game, since there's no interactivity. I suppose there is a ruleset, but ultimately all it's doing is choosing what order the reels are in, or, in more modern machines, simply choosing some random numbers.
They're not. They're also not supposed to be. That's what makes them gambling. The law refers to them as "Game of Chance" versus "Game of Skill". This goes all the way back to the first pinball systems at the turn of the 20th century. The first pinball games were entirely chance. Where the ball landed up is where you would get money or prices from what you put in. The lights and bells are just psychological tricks to keep you addicted to pulling the lever and putting money in.
When states started banning gambling, they started (literally) taking axes to the pinball machines. The pinball manufacturers (... and the mob...) added buttons that controlled levers, to keep the ball from falling into the slot. Thus, making it a game of skill under the law, rather than a game of chance.
I wouldn't consider a true game of chance to be a game, as it does not actually require any interactivity.
Normally not, but I have played some that in fact do have such. From things that have pretty complex detail differences depending on earlier choices to having different random events on different playthroughs.
The problem there is that the barrier for creation is so low that the specific market is flooded with low effort slop meant for coomers to a point where its impossible to even find the quality.
I think I know what you're talking about with some sorts of dating sims and the like, and I wouldn't call it purely a visual novel at that point, and it would in fact be a story-game.
I'd rather we sort through the slop and see the best rise to the top, rather than wait for corporate gatekeepers to tell us why Concord 5 is GOTY. To be honest, this is something we should be doing here.
But by most metrics it would get sorted into being called one. Reaching a certain level of quality doesn't change a game's genre. Because that's a quality difference, not a deliberate one in most cases. Good ones are interactable, while bad ones are novels with pictures.
I wasn't saying otherwise. Only that the pile is literally so flooded with slop that it taints the perspective most people have of what it can be, and makes people usually unwilling to even delve into it to find that best stuff. Like most people only think of dating sims and other hentai games when VNs come up, rather than Clannad or Higurashi.
Heck Zoe Quinn's game that started all of this was a basic bitch VN, that's how low effort most of them are and the poor reception they have once the mainstream sees them.
I don't think that's a qualitative difference, I think it's a foundational one. I think that's actually giving it the attributes of a "game".
As for the games, I think this will (again) be sorted out with the next inevitable gaming crash.