Narrative games are real games

Real Games This might be a slightly extreme take on my part, and I’m sure there are reasonable folks who would disagree, but I don’t think that there’s any level of interactivity that a game needs in order to be a “real” game. Yes, the word “game” has weird origins because we associate it with stuff like chess and basketball, but it feels like a very meaningless semantic thing to get held up on. For me, narrative games are games. Experimental art games are games. Interactive movies are games. “Kinetic novels” where you only advance dialogue and make no branching choices are games. Games are games even if there’s no lose condition or win condition. Games are games even if they don’t test your skill. Games are games even if they don’t let you change the outcomes. It’s okay if you don’t like those types of games, I’m often not in the mood for them myself. But I don’t think a lack of interactivity makes something definitively “not a game.” Again, there can be semantic splitting hairs if…