what is a video game

[GeorgeBubbinzInSpace]

no really, what is a video game. philosophically, how does it differ from a book or a movie? i am not talking about the tech

what are the boundaries to a video game? what crosses over into another medium?

i think about this a lot and id like to hear what people think. whats a great example of "this is it. this is a game"? i have many answers but i will type them later

I'm not going to think about this weird question too hard until I hear what you think, but the most obvious difference is interactivity. philosophically, doesn't it depend entirely on the individual game? they are all obviously an art form, but that doesn't mean they are equal. super mario bros. isn't exactly comparable to any book above a 2nd or 3rd grade reading level. 

as far as boundaries go, I'd probably say the most glaring problem is character development. in a novel, a character's personality is explored and explained over the course of hundreds of pages, (generally speaking) through exceptional and sometimes obsessively reviewed use of language. it is actually pretty difficult to read an entire novel without being somewhat emotionally invested in some aspect of it, whether you like it or not. in a video game, I think it is sort of an inherent, maybe mostly unavoidable problem for character's to be so complicated, simply because you have to build a story in a way that it is purposefully interrupted (repeatedly) by gameplay, loud noises, music, graphics, etc, thus removing the consumer from an emotional scene at the blink of an eye. when movies do that (take you out of the movie, with some poor directorial or stylistic choice) it sucks. remember that game The Last Of Us? I never played it, but I read and saw a lot of reviews. what was the most common thing you heard? first, that the story was deep, and emotional, and consumers were invested in the characters and the story. what was the second most common critique? that the gameplay suffered because of it. it was boring. it seems to me like the best games find a way to pull both of them off, (I can't think of an example of this off the top of my head) or the story is so simple a child could follow it, and the focus was on amazing gameplay, or worldbuilding, or economy, all that good stuff. the simplest games are some of peoples most favorite. CS:GO, try to plant the bomb and make it go boom or defend against that. moba's, capture other teams big castle thing, and so on. so, what is a game? I guess in my opinion a game is a creative idea whose focus should almost entirely be on interactivity. interactivity with the world that was built within the game. that is how video games achieve immersion, I think. if you can do an absurd amount of things within the world provided, you're gonna have fun. games are a fun distraction. books and movies are [usually] introspective one's.