I love this question, and will spend quite a lot of time thinking about the ramifications. An adjacent question that I wrestle with a lot is:

- What's the dividing line between a game and a task?

This comes up a lot nowadays due to the 2010-era explosion of "skinner box" games on mobile platforms e.g. Candy Crush, or presumably Farmville and Clash of Clans.

I saw a lot of people around me get addicted to these games, and seeing how much time they put into them made me pro-actively avoid them at all costs. I figured there was a good chance whatever psychology at play captured their attention would likely capture mine as well, and it didn't seem like a fulfilling use of my life. Later, I generalized this to quickly identify any games that felt more like a "task" than a "game". An example of one that I played for awhile but then identified as such is "Link the Dot"[0] (a classic "Pipe drawing, connect the dots" game).

I started getting somewhat worried about the validity and generalization of my mental scheme (game vs. task, avoid tasks) when I realized that some "good" games end up being mostly task-based. I played through Monument Valley all the way through. At first it felt very game-like, but after the first 2-4 levels, I had fully grasped the concept. After the learning phase, the rest of the dozens of levels were essentially just performing rote tasks again. As both the Pipes game and Monument Valley are at their heart "puzzle games", I started to wonder if all puzzle games could be construed as "tasks", hidden behind varying layers of obfuscation. That didn't sit well with me, and I felt something may be off about the "task vs. game" model.

Over the next several years of paying attention to this, I started noticing that so many games that I love at least have some aspect of "task". In Starcraft (Gold/Plat/Diamond), the first 2-4 minutes of every game is essentially just completing a rote series of tasks according to a rigid flowchart - and success is greatly determined by how precisely you execute those tasks for 2-4 minutes.

4x games like Civilization become exceedingly bogged down in tasks in the late game. Space Trader games like Escape Velocity have me flying cargo back and forth for hours between two systems dozens of times to farm enough gold to buy a good ship/weapons.

For now, I've decided that the "game" part of any game are the novel aspects of it. This can change over time. Tic-tac-toe is a competitive game when players are naive about strategy, but becomes a task once you learn its rules and nuance. Creativity and freedom of thought is the essence of something being "play", and IMO the requirement for being a game. But what is a game to one person can easily be a task to someone else, or even to the same person after they learn enough about the game.

I also now believe that shallow time- and grind/diligence- domain tasks exist in otherwise deep games to hook into human psychology to provide a heightened sense of accomplishment. This may be a necessary aspect for many games, for example open-world RPG's. It may very well be an essential part of good, honest game design to include some aspects of skinner-box mechanics as part of a much larger universe. If so, maybe that's driven by the imperfection of the human brain, and is somewhat of a constraint for game design. Or it may be that it's purely a crutch for imperfect game design - maybe games really can achieve high accomplishment through creativity of play alone and eschew all monotonous tasks. I think there's TONS of room for future games to utilize advanced AI's like AlphaStar to enhance gameplay by removing 99% of the non-intellectual actions - and this is one of the most exciting developments I see coming in the eventual future.

I came across this article[1] which explores some of the relationship between skinner boxing and game design, and thought I'd link it here. It also goes into some of the pitfalls of overly classifying everything as a skinner box.

I also have some thoughts on Factorio, Cities: Skyline, fighting games, and twitch FPS games as well that I don't have very well structured yet. Loot boxes certainly are another aspect lately which may not directly lie on this continuum but may be another dimension.

So for me:

>the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you work with tools?

My answer is that it's a spectrum from full creativity of thought to a purely rote repetition. Likely all things lie somewhere between the extremes.

0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindone...
1: http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful-distincti...