I won't get into whether certain titles already mentioned in this thread are games or not, but I've been exposed to the likes of Quantic Dream's recent output, The Last Of Us, Life Is Strange and Until Dawn a lot lately, thanks to my partner really getting into these... Being a million miles from the kind of AM conversions I prefer, they drive me absolutely mad to watch - especially when they're being "played" for hours at a time! However, one positive thing I will say about these is that because so little appears to be happening behind the scenes, it seems as if the developers have room to push hardware on a graphical level, so at least they look relatively decent.
Poor Life is Strange. One of my favorite recent "games" getting pooped on. LiS is very much a game. Then again, it all depends on how you define a "game" and what exactly makes something a "game." Does it run on a console/PC? Do you control it with some apparatus plugged in or somehow communicating with the console/PC? How much interactivity is there? How many cutscenes are there? I think we need to define what a "game" is first, but that will be subjective. Maybe "Interactive Drama" is a subsect of video games, but is that genre allowed to be a game? Technically if we're going to speak on games "playing themselves" didn't the combat in KoTOR do just that? Press attack button and the characters automatically engage and you can let them run their course. Of course you can choose power attack, etc. but the fact remains that the combat pretty much plays itself and combat is the majority of the game IMO. I don't think anyone here would argue KoTOR's status as a game. Furthermore it's a game that relies HEAVILY on story-telling and graphical fidelity. So, "game" or no "game?" One last note on LiS: what were people expecting for $20? For a third of the AAA asking price there was at least 6-7 hours worth of single player content, more-so if you exhausted everything and got all the achievements. That's not including alternate choices giving parts of the "game" a very different feel. Maybe "interactive drama" is better but that should be a subsect.
"There's the boss up ahead!" (x) Fight Boss 3 hours of dialog (x) Pick up Fork (x) Throw Fork Move LS in a curve! "You haven't seen the last of me! - Boss" 6 more hours of dialog @americandad Agreed. These games have been around for some time. I thought it largely died out in the 90s and became a niche but it seems to have had a rebirth (much like VR, oddly enough.. skipped a decade).
