What is a “game”? English is a Deficient Language

I was having a discussion on the Prismatic Wasteland Discord about RPGs as "gamey games" vs "storytelling".[^1] Once again, I am reminded of a particular deficiency in the English language when discussing games. As I have discussed this previously, elmcat suggested that I blog it, and following Seraphina's example, I am going to do this. In English, the word "game" has an incredibly broad meaning, and so, discussing whether something is a game or something else can often be unproductive, because such things could often be categorised as some sub-category of games anyway. Instead, it would probably be useful to have standardised subcategories, but that's likely to end up like the "Standards" XKCD script, at least outside of academic contexts with a shared baseline. Instead, I'm going to complain about the English language, because my native Danish has a very neat distinction built in. There are two different Danish words, each covering subsets of what we in English would call "games",…