Goddamn, I don't get the vitriolic user reviews of that game. As someone with severe depression, I thought it was pretty accurate, and I lived the way she explicitly crossed out choices at times.
Accuracy is fine, doesn't make it a game or fun. A learning example, sure, but not a game.
Unless you consider having depression a game.
Well, fun is subjective, and clearly plenty of people have enjoyed it, so I dunno. I think "game" can be pretty vague, and it's not like anyone's really claiming it's a "video game".
Zoe Quinn and several media outlets consider Depression Quest a game.
"a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck."
a videogame is defined as follows "a
game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or other display screen."
Seeing as Depression Quest does not conform to the definition of "Game", it is not a videogame. I'm glad you enjoyed it, but that doesn't make it a game. It's an interactive novel at best, but even that is stretching it. I don't consider myself playing a game when I'm browsing TVtropes or wikipedia... Depression Quest falls into the same category, for me at least. And I thought "fun" was not the objective of DQ. It's supposed to be some sort of pretentious introspective stroll down depression-lane, as if everyone experiences it the same way. I found it to be presumptuous, annoying, and poorly done. Most of the pictures seems to be taken from google images, and if they were actually photographed by Zoe Quinn herself then sorry but she's a shitty photographer. It felt more like something a highschool teacher would make their students read for educational purposes. No fun was had.