Honestly trying to solidify the idea of what a video game can be quite difficult, and decisive. These days it certainly means games that primarily focus on moving images to convey gameplay in a digital form.
Yet this would include stuff like… I dunno, boardgame simulator. It’s just a digital boardgame. Would that count as a video game? Quite a lot of people would beg to differ and just refer to it as a digital boardgame.
Then you have light novels and visual novels that focus on story telling with text and images to accompany them. Images always being present and taking up the majority of the screen.
Later on you have IF and IN which are a step below that with text being the primary focus and that is to its advantage I’d say.
Yet you have roguelikes, I’m sure everyone is familiar with Dwarf Fortress. Few would argue that it’s not a video game. Yet it uses ascii/text to convey information… though it uses it as a replacement to moving images and tend to have some pretty heavy mechanics. With mechanics having such an appeal to them that people get past their appearance.
All I can say is that I am glad that games are so varied and cater to many different tastes. At the end of the day if it has win/lose states its a game. Anything else is kind of like specifying the sub-category of game it is. And then you have genres… though some games do get mistakenly assigned a genre, like RPG being assigned to Fallout 4 is clearly a mistake
If Infocom’s text adventure library count as video games, CoG counts. If classic roguelikes like Nethack, Dungeon Crawl and the original Rogue count as video games (considering the visuals are entirely text based), CoG counts. If visual novels count as video games, CoG counts. In my experience with gaming communities, the former two are far less disputed compared to the latter.
Yet 4X and Grand Strategy are different. Paradox titles tend to fall into Grand Strategy and have quite a lot more complexity than say Total War. Making it look very shallow by comparison. Such heavy mechanics tend to seperate Grand Strategy from Strategy.
I’d say the same for 4X. Look at Aurora4x and compare it to say… Sins of a Solar Empire. SoaSE looks extremely shallow by comparison simply due to the complexity of the latter. I mean you have to design a stupid amount of stuff just to make torpedos exist. And terraforming involves manually tweaking the atmospheres chemical composition until it is suitable for your species to live on.
Aurora4x is considered by some people to be 4x and Grand Strategy game due to its mechanical depth.
A video game defines as a game played by electronically manipulating images, so no, I only use modern definitions. As open words can be, they meant different things in the past and they mean something else now.
I see CoG as choose your own adventures personally. It is how I explain them to people myself. And I refer to UnNatural as one too. But I seem to be the minority here.
You’re right there. Words and their meanings evolve over time with their usage.
Gay used to mean happy quite a long time ago. Certainly doesn’t mean that anymore and anyone who would use it these days would just confuse people. Awful used to mean something that inspired awe, and it clearly doesn’t mean that anymore either and so on.
Everything changes as time goes on. I’m sure our definition of video games will be invalid eventually due to how things evolve. Simply the nature of things.
What defines as what is still present time, and before the definition evolves, there is quite a clear image of what a video game stands for as of today, no matter what it stood for yesterday or what it shall be tomorrow.
@MizArtist33 and I are doing an IF panel at a convention next weekend, and this thread is super interesting in that essentially, we and other ambassadors need to introduce others to IF. So where is the starting point? For most of us, at least those of us in our 30s and 40s, it was CYOA. I struggle to find another starting point that is as widely known.
Yeah, but CoG has the word “games” in their company title, as do Delight Games, Tin Man Games, (did) Telltale, etc. Other studios use the term “Stories,” like Tales - Choose your Story. So it’s inherently confusing, especially to newcomers.
Let’s face it, we can’t even decide if they are “books” or “games.”
Some folks here think “IF” necessarily means “you create your own character.” But it doesn’t mean that.
Maybe we just need to keep using the term “Interactive Fiction” and explain that they are stories where the user can affect the narrative, and leave it at that?
The problem is that is Half of what IF is due it could include parse games that barely have narrative on them as Some strategy ones and for instance Stuff like combat rogue likes or as I said directly a fighting system to use to calculate D&D or any other Rule books of a table top. That’s If too and have no story at all.
I mean, out of CoG’s nearly 200 stories published, I don’t think they’ve ever once used CYOA in their descriptions, and rightly so in my opinion. And yet, they’re one of the biggest IF companies.
I’d say for many of the post-90’s crowd, it’s Telltale Games and visual novels. I personally was very into indie text adventures starting around 2004, when I first had access to a computer and it was one of the few things it would play without stuttering and crashing. Playing old adventure games on Gametap (God, that’s a throwback) gave way to looking up more contemporary authors, like Emily Short and Adam Cadre.
I’d also argue that choice-driven RPGs in the vein of Black Isle Studios ar eanother possible gateway into full-blown IF.
Oof, speaking of that broad definition of interactive fiction…
I write interactive fiction, but then again I am less focused on the game aspect than many of the stories here. I think people will use what terms they are familiar with when describing things for people, an interactive book is easier for me to describe since how may has played a cyoa compared to read a book?
@malinryden Funny thing you say that as I see your game as one of more dynamics and balanced. Still my main issue is the fact My pc is not my pc as you have made unknown almost everything from my character personality and mentality. And for role playing is a nightmare. Because my character tend to act out of character because of that. Still very good writing and plot planning there … Lots of potential… and a risk. Still I hope series doesn’t only have the end mostof your Thread fans desire.
