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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

>They may not be "games", but titles like Gone Home are still video games

They may not be games, but they're still games? I think whether or not Gone Home can be considered a game is highly debatable. I haven't tried it, but it seems that the elements that make a game a game are missing.

That it's available on Steam is completely orthogonal to whether or not it's a game.

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I'd strongly recommend looking into the Aesthetics of Play[1][2]. It's a framework that talks about eight primary reasons why people play video games, and only one of those reasons is "Challenge" (i.e., beating a goal). Games like Gone Home, Animal Crossing, The Sims, Minecraft, etc all reflect different play aesthetics, and are intended for people who enjoy different things than pure Challenge.

[1] https://youtu.be/uepAJ-rqJKA

[2] https://theangrygm.com/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-...

The expression "video game" came to be understood as much more than "games played through a video system". Even titles like Skyrim, RDR2 and Uncharted thrive much more on the role playing fantasy or on the narrative than on beating a system. These aren't just dressings anymore, like the medieval motifs on Chess, they are the reason we play those games. So yeah, the word "game" expanded its meaning, this kind of thing happens with language.

I'm curious what you are trying to get out of gatekeeping what a game is? Would you not consider children pretending to be someone else to be playing a game? What bout LARP [0]?

However Gone Home would even satisfy a definition of a "game" that requires there to be challenges. Much of the information is hidden throughout the house, requiring the player to find it and reconstruct the whole story. There are even locked off areas that you need to find keys for.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game

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