Yeah, it's kind of obnoxious.

They have a "right" to demand it be changed.

Unfortunately, yes.

Of course, the flip side of that is that a lot of games are set up in such a way as to invite/demand those sequels.

Like, I wouldn't want a sequel to "Goodfellas" or "Psycho", but a lot of game franchises are clearly written in such a way that they don't really provide any sort of closure to the story's central…

Oh, I'm not arguing with you. I'm just clarifying (since a lot of the time, there's a tendency in these arguments to conflate everyone who didn't like the ending with a particularly loud, obnoxious minority).

I probably could've phrased it better, though, you're right.

Eh...I think the truth is a little more nuanced than that.

People threatening Bioware, "demanding" stuff, etc...yeah, that's silly.

People disliking the ending, even strongly? Totally legit.

On the next episode: "Are rabid coyotes a bad fit for petting zoos?"

Interesting. I'd generally regard the two examples you cite as puzzles, which you could definitely say is a subset of "game". (Though, the I Spy example differs substantially based on whether it's two people or one person and, say, a book.)

Still, that raises a bunch of other questions. What do we mean by…

That doesn't make me "wrong"; it means I have a different opinion from you.

That's the problem with trying to define "game" this way; virtually any criteria you use are going to have several notable exceptions. "Candy Land" is a game that a lot of us grew up with, and yet it contains few of the elements we'd actually…

For what it's worth, pretty much the entire HUD can be turned off. If you look on Youtube, there's videos of the games various options, which are...pretty robust.

It wasn't sitting in the dark.

They did a number of preview events at E3 of last year. They had a dedicated trailer for Gamescom. Another gameplay trailer came out in October. The "Stories from the City" trailers came out in December. They've been advertising the "Bank heist" preorder bonus pretty continuously.

I mean,…

Again, I'm not sure where you're getting "little advertisement" from. They've been releasing trailers -constantly-.

I mean, we're responding to a post about one of them right now.

I think, when talking about genre or medium classifications, there's a certain value in consensus.

The whole value of words like "game", "western", "movie", "film noir", "novel", etc. is that other people understand what you're talking about when you say it because of widely accepted criteria.

You're free to not think…

I guarantee you that's not how the tag is being used.

Any criteria beyond interactivity you use to define "game" is going to be entirely arbitrary and full of exceptions.

There's a big difference between a developer self-applying the "notgame" label and a bunch of people telling a game developer "no, your game isn't really a game because it doesn't fit some entirely arbitrary and nonsensical set of criteria".

Not really, because that still assumes they're not games, which is an incorrect assumption.

How terribly insightful.

I haven't missed it; I just think it's asinine and reductive.

It's telling to me that people almost never assign the "not a game" tag to things they actually like. It's almost always a way to legitimize their own disdain for a particular title.

So no, not really all that useful.

There are better (and more accurate) descriptors for those games than "not a game".

"Not a game" should be limited to things like, you know, benchmarking utilities or modeling software or other things that are actually not games, rather than being some asshole's editorial comment on the game not having enough murder in…