If you take that definition of a goal, than pretty much everything has a goal, including eating, sleeping, going to work, practicing music, and any other activity. Therefore, the notion of a "goal" isn't really helpful for purposes of distinguishing games and non-games.

i could off course ask for examples for each of these, and as said, 'conflict' is more broader than just man vs man conflicts.

For the rest of the post, you are right, and I should perhaps have asked for "what is a video game".... there is a huge body of literature on different types of play and games, the games children play vs games adults play (playground games), psychology of play, history of games and so on... but I opened up for it so, yeah....

I know, I have been here before.
Yes, because it has a fail state - get fired. the goal is therefore not to get fired while building and maintaining the city.

It is a game. There are rules and interactions with clear goals. Just because it is predetermined does not make it not a game. Players can also try to "trick" the opposition if fast enough . It is interactive, because if a player stops interacting then the game stops. I film, for example, is not interactive as the viewer can leave the room and the film continues. But if a player in a game of war leaves the room....
If there is any choice and any interactivity, then it is a game.
I would judge as not a game, as you just removed a pillar - interaction.

Sorry, I do not know what this is....

Anyway - this whole thing started from you saying Proteus is not a game - why is it not a game?

It's the game (if that's even the right word for it) that is over as soon as it starts.

For a Windows version, create an empty file with the .bat extension and execute it; the result of executing that file is the "game" I am talking abount. (One way to create an empty file in Windows (IIRC): From the command prompt, type "tyoe NUL > NULL.BAT"; that will create an empty file. (Note that naming the output file NUL.BAT will not work; Windows (and DOS) reserve the name NUL, and anything written to it is discarded, just like /dev/null on Linux. Trying to create the file in higher level programs will give errors, and in older versions of Windows the errors could often be quite cryptic (fortunately I believe you get a better error message now).)

It doesn't have any interaction, but it doesn't have any non-interactive parts either.

That's not quite what I said. I was questioning its gameness, not making a decision one way or the other. So, my honest answer to the question is "I don't know", or better yet, "I don't know whether Proteus is a game in the first place".

Of note, Proteus's developer considers it to be a game, much like John Cage considered his famous work 4'33" to be music.

The exemples would include cooperative games such as a group of people throwing each others the ball and attempting to maximize the passes before someone drops it, or cooperative game of the "cadavre exquis" genre (with words or drawings) that are only about co-building an unexpected figure or sentence. Many "forum games" on gog itself are of that sort. There are games of pure luck that are not about skills (the "battle" game of cards, which is barely interactive as a machine could flip the cards in sequence for the players). Games of observation ("spot the differences" -without a pen- or "I spy with my little eye" or "count the trees from the vehicle's window") are interactive in the loosest sense, im which basically nothing in the world isn't interactive, making the word pointless. Ilinx games have no aim or objective, but the state in which you are when you perform them, on a swing, a slide, or generally running, twirling, hitting a punching ball, whatever. They may also lack rules, as most children games do.

All of it can serve as a basis for the subcategory of computer games, but, again, as in for Art, one has to stay careful of avoiding normative definition (good art, real game, true scotsman) and staying at a descriptive level (what people do as game, objectively, on Earth). And be aware of how our linguistic archetypes work (the first exemplary default image that pops in our mind when we think of a word, and which may be counter-intuitively different from other items sharing that name : say "bird", most people spontaneously think of eagles or sparrows, an image pretty remote from penguins).

And you won't find an objective description of the game item, given than people can decide to treat something as a game or not. I qualify as "games" most forum discussions that I see, where people play "political scientists" without caring one bit about reality or intellectual honesty : it's just a childish fencing game about defending one clan while pretending to think. Likewise, love can be a game for manipulative people theatrically instrumentalizing words that others use as honest descriptives of their emotionnal states. Usually, it's the lack of stakes outside of an exit-able bubble that makes the gaming mindset, I'd say. But realities are always multi-layered, and few things are one thing only (again, the exemple of the professional player).

Some classify spectacles as forms of games. There are good arguments for that (the ambiguity of play-pretend, suspension of disbelief, emotions about realities confined to the bubble of fiction, etc). But when you consider how many religious rituals are mostly spectacles (in particular rituals performed by orthopraxis, without required endorsement of belief), you can guess how far the notion of game can be stretched (it actually includes shamanism, for some anthropologists).

Is halloween a game ? What about "performing santa claus" ?...

Not much to add to Telika's comments.

This conversation is a game, itself, with the goal of semantic specificity: the impossible task of exclusive symbolic certainty, using a finite lexicon to describe an infinite universe, without overlap, redundancy or repetition. It's not possible to "win" (Gödel incompleteness 1931, obviously but also Alfred Tarski, in 1936, further proved arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic!); there is no "perfect score", but the fun is to achieve something as close to perfect as possible.
Nice inclusion of Boroditsky weak Sapir-Whorfism!

Actually, if you consider War a game, kinetic novel should be a game too. Even without branching player still needs to push button for narrative to continue (or set narrative to auto).