Why, exactly?

I find the complaint odd.

Conway's Game of Life is a game. Chutes & Ladders is a game. Figure Skating is a game. Rollercoaster Tycoon is a game. The Sims is a game. Chess is a good game.

I feel you cog. I vaguely remember excitedly loading up Conways 'game' of life .exe on DOS as a kid only to be sorely disappointed.

Tho, to be fair, the moniker "game" was applied to Conway's creation more as a joke than a matter of definition. But I nonetheless can't come up with a definition of "game" that excludes something like CGL without feeling shamefully ad-hoc.

@exy I think the broad term for these is 'cellular automata' I once used random noise + X generations of a different ruleset to generate cave like structures in a procedurally generated roguelike (for my final project in college)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6sV2XaCB8k&t=73s

That's true, Purple Cat! (And map generation is the most fun programming task in the universe.) I'm willing to call cellular automata games.

When you're 8 years old and you see a floppy marked "GAME OF LIFE" you think it's going to be the fucking board game.

And yet thank goodness it wasn't!