Game or Toy

This question bugs me a bit, but it's important, so here goes.

Is ______ a game or just a toy?

Let's try SimCity, Minecraft, Falling Sand or any number of great electronic toys in this blank.

As a philosopher and a game designer, I should be really excited to talk about rewards structures, goals, and all sorts of things that are actually important in addressing this question.  Unfortunately, like most philosophical questions, there's a shortcut that's good enough.

If it's fun, if it's engaging, it's a game.  Sorry Raph, but that's close enough for now.  Any definition of game seems to leave little holes that slip through the cracks, or they tend to leave out strange interactions like Peek-a-Boo that most people regard as games.

It's a fun question, but it has the problem that most definition exercises have. The reader already knows, a posteriori what a game is, and any humble definition is a hollow attempt at some form of correlation with the understanding the masses have already formed.

For the future and current game designers, I would humbly ask both you and I to consider the Will Wright.  Wright thought that city planning is pretty neat and made an electronic experience to contain that truth.  Let's both think of games more as containers for something neat and novel, and less as rewards structures.