Definitions of game are an old pastime within video game design, and are roughly as useful as definitions of chair; they engage us in a language game, but mostly don't serve a "therapeutic" purpose in the Wittgensteinian sense. All too often when these definitions get specific, they get stuck on a hypothesis around competition, simulation, technical attributes or other concepts that end up eliminating half of the things that are called video games. And equally as often, the proponents of such definitions will, rather than accepting a critique suggesting that the definition is unrealistic, smugly remark, "well, they are not Real Games."

But if I were to take a crack at some of the major boundaries that come up around video games specifically - the phrase "scene and feedback" comes to mind. That is, there is a scene presented, real or imaginary, and player actions automatically produce rules-mediated feedback on that scene through computation alone.

So that excludes mechanical actions like a pinball game, or human game masters(which do come up in online multiplayer often enough to make this a tenuous definition, but somewhat recognizable - we tend to not treat social networks as video games, even though they do resemble MMOs). It says little else about implementation, but the aspect of scene then comes to the forefront. Is Nim a "fictional scene" or is it just data? And are "real scenes", like controlling a robot from afar, actually still video games?

I think the scene question is primarily reflected by focus and player mastery. A game that's been solved like Tic-Tac-Toe is perceived without mystery or anticipation: to win play here, to draw play there. But something with a lot of essential complexity like Chess can draw players into obsession. And something like a painting app explicitly positions the content as data, something to be manipulated in totality, rather than as a scene that is "interacted" with according to rules. For productivity apps to be as interesting as a game, you have to provide your own ruleset, which is a good deal harder than just following one that's handed to you from a designer. Likewise, if the scene is literally just a real-world scenario, the game has no coherent focus and stops being game-like.

But, video games that are "quintessential video game" - the Marios and Minecrafts - adhere pretty strongly to this abductive hypothesis: they have a strong notion of scene, and a focus on direct, rule-based, computationally automated interaction. They have a specific lens through which the scenes are defined that supports the types of interactions being explored - Mario has levels that let him run and jump, Minecraft worlds are designed to support building and exploring.

What makes people willing to swallow Higinbotham's "Tennis for Two" or "Spacewar!" as video game and not OXO(1949) or Nimatron really is about the notion of scene and its associated fiction. Adding an action element immediately makes it more of a scene, one that is limited by your ability to react and manipulate the controls. Graphics and real-time operation accomplish this most easily, but text adventures and strategic wargames with no substantial graphics and turn-based gameplay likewise also produce enough of a fiction to be lumped in the category, albeit reluctantly so by the more graphics-obsessed.