It may be even truer of certain strands of video game journalism! I often read people arguing for the value of games then using as examples only the most esoteric indie games that are close to visual novels where the theme is delivered via sledgehammer. Which I often love, but they're not all games
So I think I mostly agree with this. I was more thinking about how a good story shouldn't be used to forgive bad mechanics, e.g. Indivisible (2019) is game that I want to love because of the characters and animation and the story, but the platforming made me tear my hair out.
But for sure I think if you're making a case for games as a medium and you're not focusing on the interactivity that's a huge mistake. But I want to gently push back against the idea that the interactivity of some of those esoteric indie games is necessarily negligible.
I get how something like a visual novel doesn't immediately seem like the hill to die on when there are more obvious points to defend. For example, two games I've been thinking about a lot in this context are What Remains of Edith Finch and Disco Elysium.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a mostly linear, story-driven game in which you make very few (if any) meaningful choices—for many players the only choice they'll really be aware of making is which path to take to get to the house at the beginning of the game.
It's the kind of game that might pejoratively be called "a walking sim," a term used to delineate what are seen as more passive experiences from "real games."
But the interactivity, the fact that it's you swinging the swing or chopping the fish and not just a video, is core to the experience, even if you're not making any choices. The game makes the player complicit in the narrative in a way that only games can.
Meanwhile, Disco Elysium recently had a wave of Discourse started by a guy saying it was "great art but not a great game." The tl;dr of his argument, what he clearly considered to be the coup de grâce, was the question "What's the difference between playing Disco and watching someone else play it?"
And as I said at the time, the obvious answer is the difference is you're playing. The way your brain processes playing a game is different than how it processes watching a game, even if you're not aiming a gun or getting nailing a quicktime event, even if what you see on screen is *identical*.
The reason I bring these games up is because I think if we look at games that are more like a visual novel, it seems clear to me that these same arguments still apply. Interactivity matters, even if it's minimal.
So I'm really hesitant to say a visual novel isn't a game because, at least based on the few I've played, there's something you get from playing a visual novel that you don't get from scrolling through a PDF of Locke & Key volumes 1-3 that you downloaded in middle school. To use a random example.