But that's exactly the point, it is useful, but let's first get to the evidence.

All right, let me be clearer.

I'm holding up a ball.

What are the ratings on this thing?

Is it a Toy or is it a Game? We know it's not a Simulation (or is it) though it has definitely been involved in Narration though does not necessarily impose one by its presence.

Remember, this is supposed to be useful for RPG design and the general deconstruction of game play of all sorts. To be fit for task, it has to be able to describe things – and if the things that it can describe are terribly narrow or require a certain context, that needs to be stated up front as a condition of understanding the metric.

I maintain that this set of metrics is not particularly useful for describing the elements of a game. In part because we have already determined that games are the subject that were looking at. If we're going to try and classify entertainment engagement behaviors, which is what you seem to want to push toward, then you need to be able to look at a ball and tell me whether it is, inherently, a Toy or a Game.

Which you cannot.

The only context in which the metric is meaningful is an actual state of play, dynamic and current, and only representative of the mind of one of the players.

A race's no toy, it's a full blown game.

Pure assertion, and not entirely how people actually engage.

If I'm running around a track alone and I am curious about whether I can beat my own time, is that a toy or a game? Or simulation, given that there is no multiplayer competition occurring on the track at the time? If I'm running around a track with other people, and we are curious about who crosses the finish line first but not actively attempting to, is that a toy or game? If there are two of us running around the track and I'm curious about whether I will go faster this time than the last time I did and the other person is interested in doing it faster than I am, is it a toy or a game?

It seems obvious that the only important issue is the intent of the user and the tools in their hand can be used to any sort of occupation.

Is D&D a toy or a game? Your immediate urge is going to be to say "the game," but we all know that there is a considerable part of the player base that's just there to socialize with their friends and pushing miniatures around on a map is less important to a lot of them than interesting conversations with NPC's; they are engaging with it as a toy. It has no internal, intrinsic nature.

But if being a toy is inherently binary with being a game, your system don't work. It doesn't describe things that we can observe as true.

If an infant plays with a ruler it don't mean we have measurement. Just kicking a ball (playing with a toy) don't automatically give you football (you'd need the goal of getting the ball to through goal frame).

Football doesn't immediately give you a goal, necessarily. Or at least the goal that's meaningful. Backyard football with your buddies? Just an excuse to rumble in the dirt and have moments of competition, but you are engaging with the ball, the rules, and each other essentially as a big toy?

Your system doesn't hold. It doesn't describe the observables. It assumes and asserts binary division where there is none.

The question is what is the focus of the game; if you had to grossly simplify it to find the only the single most important thread (even if that thread were a non-thread between threads as in opposed mechanics: you must earn and spend $ becomes you must manage $).
Weird combinations do happen, but what is the whole?

When you must contextualize your claim down to the point where it is meaningless, you really should abandon your claim.

If trying to describe the world requires you to turn the things that you're describing into a homogenous mush before you can apply your metric, you cannot expect to measure anything but the grossest, least differentiated, least individual things about whatever your subject was before it went into the grinder.

In particular with modes of play and human experience, that's a recipe for being complete crap.

It's also one of the reasons that original GNS Theory was, surprisingly, complete crap. It could describe portions of play and modes of play, but it couldn't describe games in general, despite the fact that its most cultish practitioners really wanted to. They were obsessed with the map being the territory.

That's never a recipe for success.

And I say: Yep. No reasonable assessments here. Not academic categorization. Instead, stimulation. (The "wow I never thought of it in that way")

I'm all for engaging in gedanken experimenken, but it really needs to at least be consistent if you're going to pursue the line of discussion and disputation. Without actual consistency, what's the point? Unless you're feeling around for an idea that actually has a shape rather than just sticking your hand into a dark hole and announcing you found something, why talk about it?

And if you're going to talk about things just because they're interesting, doesn't it seem that it should be sensible to avoid the structure of asserting assessment or academic categorization, especially if you just spent 20 minutes doing both?