Is this a game?

Because money is exchanged. I agree with you on the principle of not limiting your experiences but the idea, "it doesn't/shouldn't matter" would have to assume that money isn't a factor at all. When selling anything one should be as clear about what it is they're selling otherwise it's either poor communication or nefarious manipulation.

The discussion that comes from all this is stirred up because of a lack of better definition while we try to hold the word "game" prisoner to our personal standards rather than better communicate broader definitions. Any single word with a million definitions is a fairly useless word.

Anyway, for the OP, i feel like if you have to ask then the answer is probably, "no". If it goes on some deep sale it maybe worth checking out if you want to broaden your horizons on new forms of what i call, "virtual installation" or wait it out for virtual reality to become a thing which is where i believe things like Dear Esther and other experiences like it will become more relevant and better accepted.

So glad we can have this idiotic discussion one more time before the end of the year. Merry Christmas everyone!

By that very limited definition, no, it's not a game. There is no "lose" state. But there's not one in the majority of adventure games.

If you consider Myst a game, then yes, this is absolutely a game.

More importantly though, who cares? There's really no better way to market something like this, and a lot of people (myself included) loved the hell out of it.

i would go and make the parody thread under Pac Man CE DX if it weren't immediately shut down by the mods :(

Let me ask another question. If only games that involve challenge and objectives are allowed to be called games, and we come up with a different name for things like Gone Home or Walking Dead, what does that accomplish?

It's a cry for help from anyone who plays it.

Is this the real life

is this just fantasy

caught in a landside,

no escape from reality

open your eyes, look up to the skies and seeeee

Of course its a game.

Granted i have no interest in these emotionally manipulative indie games personally, but they have their place and i'm glad they exist.

I agree that it's a game, but:

1) I don't think that the game ever establishes "solving the mystery" as you put it, as the goal of the game, and the game ends up being about something much different from this in the end.

2) There are plenty of puzzles to solve in a book of crossword puzzles, but that's not a video game.

3) I think you've hit upon the essential nature of what makes games games here. Even if you can't change the overall outcome of the story or engage in combat or challenges of any kind, you're exploring a world at your own pace through a character's eyes. Every person who plays Gone Home is going to explore that same house and experience that same story, sure, but they're all going to do it differently.

I think the way Gone Home works is more of a game than the recent Telltale stuff or of course 999/VLR.

Pick whichever one of these options that you like better:

- Gone Home is a game

- Gone Home isn't a game

Then play it if you want and move on with your fucking life.

It is, but only if you want it to be.

Yes, if it's interactive, it's a game to me, just like 'visual novels' are games too. If Gone home wasn't a game, what would it be? It doesn't fit any other medium, and honestly, I don't think it deserves it's transcendent reputation, it's merely a good adventure game, not a new genre or milestone.

Is anything really a game? Does anything these days even have a real lose state? They all checkpoint you, just putting you a few minutes back if you die, still letting you finish it if you just try a few more times, if they are even challenging you to the point that you can die.

'course it's a game.

...though I also tend to consider visual novels as games too. Anything where you're making choices, really.

1. Well the first thing you see stuck on the door is a note left by your sister telling you not to try and look for her. Seems like a mystery waiting to be solved and sets up the initial objective. You still uncover the mystery in the end regardless of where the story was headed at that point.
2. I am referring to the "gamey" aspects of Gone Home that signifies that it's a video game. You know what I mean.
3. Yes.

This right here.

Would you run up to someone and ask them, "Hey, have you watched 'Gone Home'?" or, "Hey, have you played 'Gone Home'?"?

The third option: Does it matter?

Why does it matter if Gone Home is or is not a game? No one seems to be able to answer this but some are pretty sure it is important for some reason.

@extomar: I know that I too wrote "what does it matter?", but if people insist on having this discussion, it matters to define these kinds of games as "video games". The reason most people decide that certain games are not "video games" is because they want to dismiss them as something "other" than video games, something that falls outside the medium. One of the early examples of that was original Animal Crossing; you had lots of people who dismissed that as "not a game". As the medium expands with indie titles, titles like Gone Home and Dear Esther, it will only be more important to establish that yes, those are video games in the same way shooters are video games, and should be taken seriously. If a whole subset of games are suddenly not considered video games, people can just dismiss them out of hand.

That said, I think the discussion itself is dumb. Terms like "win states", "lose states" have no clear definition, and they're just defining terms people have invented in order to exclude games they don't like. But if we're having the discussion then yes, it's important to argue that these sorts of experienceses are indeed video games.

If I wanted to be technical about it, I would ask, " Have you experienced/tried it?" Or I would define "play" in that circumstance the same as when you play a movie or CD.

this is my least favorite discussion that I see on video game forums.

Worse than "Are games art?". Now we actually, frequently ask "are games games?"

It doesn't really matter.

"Experienced" is such a catch-all phrase that it's meaningless in this context. You can experience anything from staring blankly at a wall to stabbing someone in the throat. "Tried it" is an inherently active notion. You try a video game. You would never ask someone is they tried a movie. And play in the context of a movie or CD means something completely different from play when you talk about Gone Home. Playing a movie or CD has nothing to do with watching/listening to/experiencing it. Saying you played a movie would be analogous to saying you booted up Gone Home.

Is Apple Pie food?

Terms evolve to define more things over time. This is certainly a game in my book.

I know that. I would use it in that context because - like with some other new trends, art forms, etc. - no appropriate word or term comes to mind. Except "interact with". But I thought "play" was close enough.

The Last of Us is an interactive story. So is Call of Duty: Ghosts.

An apple is a fruit, but a fruit is not necessarily an apple.

there are gated door states and you have to find ways to unlock them there for, yes it's very much a game.

...right? The Last of Us is an interactive story. Call of Duty: Ghosts is an interactive story. Gone Home is an interactive story.

An apple is a fruit. An orange is a fruit. A pineapple is a fruit.

But a fruit is not necessarily a pineapple and an interactive story is not necessarily Gone Home.

I don't know what you're getting at.

You implied that since Last of Us and Gone Home are interactive stories, both of them are games. I'm saying that interactivity doesn't make a story a game. If I wrote a novel, I would be manipulating the story, but it wouldn't be a game. I could turn the process into a game, but I'd rather treat it as a puzzle/problem in need of solving.

I would say it's more an experience than a game, you would probably get the exact same experience if you just watched it on YouTube. I'm not saying it's bad, I think it's quite good and that everyone should "experience" it.

No, it's a choreographed dance number.

No, it's a throw pillow.

No, it's a partially dehydrogenated soybean that looks vaguely like Spiro Agnew.

(apologies to Al Jaffee)

It's a visual novel presented as a first person game. Yes.

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh

its a thing.

If it wasn't considered to be a game, then what would it considered to be? I think the argument is kind of dumb, it's definitely a game. I haven't played it, but I'm pretty sure there's more interactivity in it than Pong, and Pong's very much considered to be a game. You don't always need to shoot something, or gain a high score for it to be a game. I feel like this shouldn't even be a question or discussion.

Yeah, I didn't feel a sense of reward for "playing" it myself, since all that progression entailed was exploration and since I didn't have choices which affected the outcome. You barely have to think and you can't fail.

Well..... I guess it's as much a game as the Easter egg game or an easy treasure hunt.

Yes, and shut up. This semantic argument is totally worthless. What do you gain by disqualifying this from being a game other than some sub-genre of interactive media that nobody outside of you will know what to refer to as? Is it really hurting you to call all of this medium video games? The name is already prolific, so if it's just the sound of it that's bothering - well, too bad. Things get called things all the time when they're not technically what the name implies. As long as everybody knows to what you're referring, does it matter?

VIDEO GAMES ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS GUYS!

What's the point of going to movie theater and paying to feel sad??? I want all my movies to be slapstick, physical comedies or great heroic vignettes.

You interact with the world and objects. Done. These type of threads are just as bad as music genre threads on other forums.

No, you really wouldn't.

Are you using the word game as a Platonic form where a game must possess a necessary and sufficient set of properties to be be a game, or are we using the Wittgensteinian concept of family resemblance where games have common features but no one feature is found in all of them?

I'm just a poor boy

I need no sympathy

because i'm easy come easy go

little high little low

Could we stop with this useless pedantic BS?

Anyway the wind blows

Doesn't really matter

To me

Your a game