what is a video game

[grue]

A ton of games are devoted to reproducing the most mundane aspects of life as realistically as possible, and besides that, the borders between emulation via game and emulation via other mediums are very thin. (...) What I'm arguing is that the way that interaction is framed through mechanics carries more significance than the mere fact you're emulating a universe with different rules.

The thing about impossibilities isn't simply fantasy. Sims are a good example for this. You can be playing a plane flying sim, for example, that does its best at being as "plane-like" as possible. The "game" there is pretending to be a pilot, namely, by people who don't have the means to. I am able to "fly a plane" without the burden of killing people and causing millions in property damage in case I did badly. I imagine that a pilot that comes home and plays a flight sim for fun would also get a kick out of the lifted responsibility. His impossible conditions are met differently from mine: my impossibility is actuall being in a cockpit, his impossibility is doing it in his underpants while being free to crash without consequence.

This is to me the fundamental characteristic of video games. Now you can say that there's a lived experience in flying a plane through the power of imagination from a book and I agree, but you'd be missing the "game" quality there. You're drawn into a world but you have no interaction with it, zero, it plays out in front of you and you either go with the flow or you set it aside.

Now I agree interaction through mechanics is fundamental but I would argue that that is fundamental to "games" as a whole. All games are about interaction and mechanics. Only video games do it through impossibility. You can't do impossible things in a board game - you can imagine them, you find ways to act upon them, but what you actually do is a very possible dice roll or card draw. And by "possible" I mean working within the limits of reality. "Video games" are a subset of a larger "Games" category that is definitely all about interaction/mechanics/fail state and whatever.

Now I imagine computers also follow the laws of physics so video games are absolutely an illusion. The impossibility isn't real. That's why I call it an emulation (even though the dictionary tells me this may be the wrong word to use here).