That depends on the player.

Some people think 'Paper or Plastic' is an interesting choice; some think only something as extreme as 'Live or Die' counts as interesting.

Obviously "interesting" isn't a useful criterion, but CYOA books are definitely games by your suggested definition.

If the game environment promises interesting discoveries, then yes.

Making a choice in game is interesing if something depends on it. If you have some goal, that your choice can bring closer (or wrong choice can send further). And you should have some information about rules of the game, otherwise you basically make random choice, which is uninteresting. And, of course, you should have ability to choose in the first place.

So, basically, it's what you wrote in your first comment. Having nteractivity, rules, goals - these criteria are closest to universal definition of the game. Some gamedesigners include conflict, some don't - since conflict emerges automatically if in the game you can win (achieve goal) or lose (fail to do so). Essentially "series of interesting choices" is all three points packed in one.

You can learn more here:

It is not necessary.
https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/withoutagoal/

Many great video games have very little or zero goal.

... life is definitely a game. But a quite shitty one. Granted, it has awesome graphics. But the plot, while exciting at some points, is mostly tedious and slow. And it's a rogue-like without the possibility to start a new game. When you die it's game over forever! And the world it is set in is totally not believable! I mean the choices that all those NPCs across the world make, especially when voting. Ridiculous! As if anyone would actually be so stupid! ;-)

There are cooperative games without conflicts (unless any activity is a conflict against constraints : gravity, language, etc). There are games without real goals (apart from going "wheeeeeeee"). There are games without rules (just toy as you go). And there are games that are not interactive, or require also to broaden the notion of interaction to include observation, or thoughtfulness.

But it doesn't really matter. Because the archetype of games may be all four, and the constellation of fringe cases that eschew all these elements can still be games by association. Like "art", it's not something for which you'll find a clear definition. It's a family of things, that have in common a series of different shared traits, but two items may have none of these traits in common : they will be linked by intermediaries that have independant common traits with both of them. Like : "item 1" is both A and B, "item 2" is both B and C, "item 3" is both C and D, and this makes "item 1" and "item 3" belong to the same list.

But we usually define "game" as a gratuitous activity that takes place within a "bubble" (of time, space, etc) and that follows certain set of rules that applies only within this bubble. A set of rule that are independant from the outside world's and everyday's "real life". And what's in that "bubble" has no consequnces outside of it. But you can already guess the limitations of that definition : what about professional sports, are they "game" or are they "real life" jobs, etc...

And then, there's the famous classification of games. Agon (competition games), alea (games of chance), mimicry (games of imitation, play-pretend, etc) and ilinx (games of vertigo, sensations, etc), with the awareness that most games are a mix of those, and that eveen anuimals are known to play games of the mimicry and ilinx categories. Again, with some amount of real world benefits (mimicry is training, for instance).

So yeah, Caillois, Wittgenstein, etc. The definition of "games" has been quite the topic in anthropology, philosophy and linguistics. You're in for a ride...

I think 'game' is a very subjective definition. As Telika said, smarter heads than ours have tried to define it. But I'll try a very broad definition. Broadly speaking all activities fall into one of three categories: biological necessities, work and leisure.
- biological necessities are things like eating, breathing, sleeping and excreting.
- work is everything that you do to earn a living. I.e. everything enabling you to fulfill some of the biological necessities.
- leisure are all activities that do not have any immediate 'use'. Art-appreciation, sports, slacking off, playing. (of course, there are always people who are paid to do one of those. For them some typical leisure activites can become work)

So, games fall into the 'leisure' activity range for most. I would further split the 'leisure' domain into 'active' and 'passive' leisure, with games falling into the 'active' category. (Watching movies and listening to music would be examples of 'passive' leisure). Active leisure can either be aimed at creating something. For example creating art. Or it can just be about the activity itself, without the goal to create something. Then it's a game.

And that's already it: a game is an active leisure acitivty, that doesn't aim to create something lasting. In that sense all sports, that isn't done professionally, is also games.

Would SimCity qualify as a game? There is no goal besides the one you have in your mind.

Anything that's digital and interactive could be a game if you make it one.

Any sandbox game, or game with a sandbox mode, doesn't strictly have a goal. Of course, it's up to the player to set their own goals.

Actually, it has a goal - not go bankrupt as long as possible. But in "sandbox" mode where money don't matter, SimCity is indeed more of a toy and not game.

Your question, for some reason, reminded me of this:

"All these years of brooding and i still dont know what a photon is.
Every Tom Dick and Harry think they know but they dont."
Albert Einstein

If a game is that which we play or facilitates play (which most languages other than english do), then it should be more important to define what "play" is. The purpose of play (as discovered by psychologists) is to "normalize behavior," but it needs to be said that it's not as simple as saying that we normalize killing people in games where we kill people. Various animals even adopt a form of play.

Human children (mostly women) learn how to run a household via the simulation with their friends via a game called "house." How they re-enact determines what they feel comfortable doing, which is usually a reflection of what they have experienced. It's mimicry. If one child comes from a home where there is an abusive husband, it will come out in play when they take upon the role of "daddy." Same thing with violence towards "the children." And, sometimes it has to be "broken up" by the parents for "inappropriate behavior" if they happen to notice.

Men learn from wrestling around how to fight, how to block and cover, how to stop the fight and admit defeat to save their own skin at the cost of some reward (by saying uncle). In many video games, we learn not to attack others unless they attack first (thank you Bethesda), as well that we have to take cover and move around so as to not be easy targets and victims. We smack talk to learn how to scare people into not resorting to violence. We constantly tear things apart and put them together again, to simulate things breaking and our "duty" to fix them.

Now, obviously, these are based on gender roles, which seem to have either a social or biological basis (not sure which, but we seem to hold these things true while simultaneously expecting these things to change). But it's not as simple as saying that GTA makes us kill people indiscriminately (instead, it teaches us that the cops will likely kill us or arrest us if we do), but, instead, that if we live in world full of violence that is out to get us, it is only right that we play by the same rules. We even refer to war simulations in the military as "war games." You could even argue that porn is a game, under this (which seems to be why many say it's bad for us, 'cause it teaches us some unrealistic expectations if we are unfamiliar with reality).

Now, for those of you who like deeper conversations, i submit to you that the ever unsolved mystery of "where do gay people come from?" could easily be solved by applying the same logic. Why add that? 'Cause it's the first thing i thought of when i heard Dr. Jordan Peterson talking about play, among animal species and comparing that to what many homosexuals and bisexuals have told me about "when they found out." And i think that just makes the topic more complicated and fun, don't you agree? Now, i'm no doctor, but feel free to tell me if you're "non-straight" and you feel this doesn't speak of you. And, no, i'm not speaking of "parental intervention" as a "cure," 'cause we all know what happens when you take the toys from a kid for "bad play:" they just find another way, and, contrarily, i would argue that we should steer away from "trying to solve homosexuality" or trying to place any sort of moral stance for or against homosexuality in this regard, since this is a frontier that is largely not explored.

Here are some other examples of works whose gameness is borderline:

* The card game of War. It has rules, there's a goal, and there's a conflict; however, the game is non-interactive, as there is no point where a player's actions can affect the outcome. There's also Egyptian Ratscrew, which if you ignore the slap rule, also has the characteristic that no player's actions can influence the outcome. (Is the slap rule enough to turn a non-game into a game?)

* Visual novels. These might actually follow the rules laid out in the post, though a visual novel might arguably not have rules other than making the occasional choice.

* Kinetic novels. Take a visual novel, and remove the interaction. Is that enough to make it no longer a game? Or would you still count one as a game.

* What I call "the null game" (think /bin/true bit treat it as a game). There's a rule (the game is immediately over), a goal (finish the game, which of course happens right away), and there is no part of the game that isn't interactivel in other words, I could argue that it satisfies three of the four criteria. I could go further and argue that there is a conflict, as it is possible for a UNIX program to return a success or failure error code, and in the case of the /bin/true example, success is always returned.

So, which of these examples count as games?

By the way, as I mentioned in the other thread, this sort of discussion has happened in the field of music as well; John Cage wrote some works that he called music, but whose musicness has been debated by many musicologists over the years; 4'33" (a piece that is entirely silent) is a famous example of this.

Which is true in a way, but this would exclude all kinds of puzzles (including most adventure games). Because they are usually fairly linear and the only real decision is to puzzle on or quit playing.