>>1975 >Limbo I did like limbo, granted I was like 13 back then but it's more of a puzzle game than a walking simulator.

>>1975 There's PT, and then there is QT and "egg-likes", where the entire point of the game is being an interactive funny meme museum. I really didn't get the hype around PT when I saw it for the first time. It seemed like a normal run of the mill indie horror game to me.

>>1975 (OP) I get what you're trying to get at, trying to critique linear narrative/adventure games in terms of lack of interactivity and replayability compared to other vidya, but you definitely need a larger reference pool, because this >Lack of any clear goals, objectives, and/or restrictions needs a stricter definition. The titles you bring up are skewed towards the Western cultural sphere, so I may be reading too much into your potential worldview, but Yume Nikki for example would qualify under these criteria, yet its influence cannot be denied. So would Hundred Line, which released a bunch of months ago, but its scope clearly eclipses the "experiences" you describe with a hundred different endings and some RPG elements tacked on. What about RPGMaker games? What separates Kojimbo's Policenauts and Snatcher from Metal Gear, beyond the "game" elements? Hell, your criteria could be applied to bullet hell shooters like Dodonpachi and survivor-likes. And of course visual novels and disguised VNs like Phoenix Wright, Detention, Danganronpa, VA-11 HALL-A and Gnosia. Do they get a pass for throwing in token minigames or allowing you to walk around when they're clearly intended as "interactive experiences?" Bringing things back to the Western hits, Mouthwashing and Iron Lung have been huge phenomena despite being railroaded as fuck. Telltale and Quantic Dream, beyond obviously wanting to put out movies and animations but wanting that gamer money, wouldn't have gotten anywhere without Sierra and Lucasarts, but why is Monkey Island a "real game" and not Dispatch and This is the Police? I think it's undeniable they've all contributed to the tapestry of vidya, so it's difficult to really determine what you're trying to describe here.

>>1982 >so I may be reading too much into your potential worldview You're reading too much into it. I will admit that the defintion is not "perfect", but I was trying to exclude as many games as I could with the points I was outlining. Like I think Myst may qualify based on my criteria. And I even worded some of the points with the expressed purpose of removing most visual novels since, based on the one's I've played, they do have wildy branching narratives (As opposed to the superficial choices most "interactive experiences" like Life Is Strange offer) and have definate failure states for the expressed purpose of punishing the player (Some have a bad ending as soon as an hour into the game). The point I was trying to get to with the OP was asking if there are any "interactive experiences" that actually add anything to the media of video games since it seems like majority of the ones I'm aware of don't.

>>1982 I guess the perceived pretentiousness and the writer's/designer's ability to tell an interesting story are the biggest factors here. Much like a visual novel, if they fail on either of these two fronts, the limitedness of the experience becomes overly apparent. Except that the limitedness is front and center in a VN, whereas it's more subtle in a walking simulator, and so it's more egregious when you finally realize it.

>>1982 >Hell, your criteria could be applied to bullet hell shooters like Dodonpachi and survivor-likes >Lack of any clear goals, objectives, and/or restrictions >Lose/fail states (If one exists) are largely an *inconsequential *nuisance rather than a punishment for or judgement of the players How the hell do either of those genres connect to those two points?

>>1996 A lot of why I brought up bullet hell shooters and survivor-likes is mostly to critique and poke holes in OP's criteria in how those two points aren't defined well enough for people to understand his point. For bullet hells and survivor-likes, for example, generally speaking both genres don't actually tend to explicitly tell the player >you need to do X and X >you need to shoot X and X and collect X in tutorials, hence technically they can fall under "lack of any clear goals." For example, David Cage games from Quantic Dream actually do provide explicit objectives and goals, and there are lose/fail states, just that they determine the ending rather than explicitly setting the player's progress in the narrative back (if anything, QD titles are notable in actually writing in different outcomes as opposed to railroading). So does Silent Hill: Shattered Memories with its puzzle sequences. Limbo outright has traditional lose/fail states. I think what OP is trying to get at is that he wants to tackle "interactive art" (which honestly should be how he worded the OP), but he muddied the waters by roping in adventure and narrative puzzle games which are arguably more complex.

>>2017 >For bullet hells and survivor-likes, for example, generally speaking both genres don't actually tend to explicitly tell the player <you need to do X and X <you need to shoot X and X and collect X Yes, they do. Even something like SC '92 Recca details exactly what the game is all about if you ever bothered reading the instructions. Compare that to these direct quotes from the manuals of Heavy Rain: <In Heavy Rain, you have complete control of proceedings - your decisions genuinely effect the outcome of the storyline, which can take a multitude of directions. And Shattered Memories: <During therapy sessions, try to relax and answer the doctor truthfully. Remember, the more open and honest you are, the more easily Dr. K will be able to help you. There are no "right" or "wrong" answers, and you won't be penalized for speaking your mind. By all means, take as much time as you need. In fact, here's the opening page from the manual for Myst, and you see them taking a completely different tone: <Myst is real. And like real life, you don’t die every five minutes. In fact, you probably won’t die at all. There are no dead ends; you may hit a wall, but there is always a way over or around. Pay attention to detail and collect information because those are the pieces of the puzzle that you’ll use to uncover the secrets of Myst. The puzzles you encounter will be solved with logic and information – information garnered either from Myst or from life itself. The key to Myst is to lose yourself in this fantastic virtual exploration, and act and react as if you were really there. Actually summing it all up, it seems like the one unifying point with a lot of these" interactive experiences" is that they sell themselves on the idea that there is no "wrong" way to play the game. Even a visual novel like Tsukihime takes some time after the "less than good" endings to lecture the player on different choices they could have made. Meanwhile Beyond: Two Souls is so uninterested in requiring the player to even have a fucking controller than you can download an app to your phone in order to play the game (With some I've heard even declaring that it controls better through that method). It's the other extreme of games allowing you to "Do anything". Where instead of giving you a handful of options when it comes to confronting a situation (And any of which could just as equally go wrong), it instead says gives you the illusion of a choice that doesn't change anything or a choice that's so obvious that you have no other alternatives. For example with Limbo, you NEED to scare off the giant spider using a bear trap and you have no other options. Meanwhile with Mario, you "could" kill Bowser by dropping him into the lava OR you could kill him with fireballs. With Resident Evil, you "could" kill the zombie blocking your path (Even with your knife so as to not waste ammo) OR just run around the guy and leave him be.

>>2017 >generally speaking both genres don't actually tend to explicitly tell the player It's kinda implicit just by the names of the genres >Shoot and don't get shot >Survive A lot of it might be legacy knowledge/skill that veterans take for granted, but they are intuitive enough to pick up and play without heavy tutorialization, then learn by continuing to play, trial and error, or (for survival) research. >and there are lose/fail states, just that they determine the ending rather than explicitly setting the player's progress in the narrative back Yeah I've heard this argument before defending Quantic Dream titles as games, an end goal and "fail" states separating them from the true film wannabees/walking simulators like Dear Esther/Gone Home. It's dependent on personal taste but considering the medium is centered around interactivity, David Cage's stuff among other pseudo interactive "experiences" still feels one step removed from that style of content due to what OP outlined above, interactivity doesn't matter because the game is a simplified CYOA or there was only one possible outcome. For me, I guess it's interactivity + how much is the intent "interactive art" vs game, like what OP is seems to be describing can hit close to Sony's "cinematic experiences" (narrative/visual focus, one monolitihic storyline route, checkpoints before basically every potential lethal encounter, and gameplay that's half walking sim/half watered down action), which I think can be as bad as pure "experiences", the old try both and appease neither routine.

>>1982 >trying to say shooters don't have "clear" goals. You're trying to play semantics with the word "clear," but hand anybody any bullet hell ever and they all know what you're supposed to do in it. They all know when they've lost the game (like you did just now). But yes, visual novels aren't games. Your argument about how Telltale games are descended from actual point and click adventures is legitimate, but it just goes to show how point and clicks stopped being about the gameplay eventually and the puzzles, which were the gameplay, got stripped back further and further until they were obviously only there out of some sense of obligation. So yes, there's a spectrum of interactivity and thus "gameness" here, but I think people on this site, and in general, frankly, are sick of people pointing to things that are technically spectrums and then trying to say that makes them impossible to define. It might be a spectrum, but we all can tell that Monkey Island expected you to actually have fun solving puzzles, thus actually doing gameplay, while Telltale games did not, they just wanted you to watch a story.