What makes a video game a video game?

[F5-thought]

I am interested in how different video gaming communities interact with each other, and as a lead into that I am asking this question to several communities: What qualities and characteristics are most important to video games?

Feel free to be as broad or as narrow with your answer as you wish. In order to avoid biasing anyone's answer, I will not respond to the thread. If anyone wishes to contact me, I can be reached at refresh.thought.blog@gmail.com. Periodically during the weekend, I will be reading everyone's answers and archiving them via archive.today. Thank you very much for your time.

 

[TheRiddler]

This is a dead horse, but I'd say that interactivity is what makes a game a game. If you have control of any internal element of the experience, I'd say you're playing a video game. And this interactivity is the biggest factor separating games from, say, film or television.

 

[Gray-Philosophy]

I think by definition it is any type of interactive game played on a video media device (electronic device with a screen). Chess on the PC also qualifies as a video game in this sense, regardless of its boardgame origin.

 

[Megamatics]

The question isn't if something can be a Video Game, because all it ever needed to be was an interactive virtual experience. With these games like Gone Home we need to start seeing them be rated like games. Being artwork isn't the only criteria for a game. I would say a game like Another World was a piece of interactive art, but a terrible game. Journey was probably the best of both worlds because it had a great game to go with the aesthetic push.