When do you call a game a Game?

(Quoted from Artful Gamer)

In his fantastic article (please, read it first!), When Do You Call a Comic a Comic?, Kenton Smith reasons out the essence of comic books. Kenton laboriously works through all of the usual options: it is an expression of the imagination through illustration, a “juxtaposition of words and pictures”, a non-linear narrative medium, a dynamic moment expressed in a static frame?

I think Kenton’s original question sets us off in the right direction. The question isn’t “what is a game?” (that leads straight into the territory of the confusion I mentioned earlier), but rather, when we’re doing some activity – when do we know that activity is called gaming?

Developers no longer should focus on trying to get “the right mechanic” – but rather to try setting up a certain kind of experience for the player. If you want the player to play an adventure game, do not introduce control schemes that draw out an FPS experience. If you want the player to experience your game as an RTS, create a space in which their eyes are drawn in all four cardinal directions of the screen, waiting for the ensuing invasion. If you want your game to be experienced as an RPG, you better be able to draw the player into a world they experience as real and meaningful. In the end, the designer has to know a lot more about how players experience a game than what the rules of the game are. That’s why playing your game over and over again – and allowing other people to play it – turns a mediocre game into one worth talking about.