I feel that the term of "video game", while historically a perfectly servicable term for electronic entertainment programs, I believe that the medium and industry has matured enough to the point where the term is actually starting to constrain creativity and conceptual iteration. To call them "games", of course, implies that there is some kind of goal or state that the user is trying to reach or maintain within the program, not to mention that it ingrains the idea within developer's heads that they ought to lead their users towards some kind of objective with constraints and obstacles in the way.
Now, I am aware that the above paragraph is autistic & pedantic as fuarrrk. But a conversation like this requires a degree of linguistic precision, since the whole point is that there is no other established term for computer programs meant to be artistic in some way. Hell, I've used three different circumlocutions for the catch-all term of "video game" already. For our purposes today, I will use the term "interactives" to refer to anything which we would call a "video game".
Why does this matter? I hardly object to the idea of some guy creating an interactive where the user is given the explicit goal of blowing up all the aliens on a spaceship, nor even calling that interactive a game. But I think of other interactives that don't have any real objective or instructions given to the user, or worse yet, felt like they had to tack on some kind of implied goal in order to qualify as a game. A prime example in this category would be Minecraft. There were light failure elements from almost the very beginning, of course, with the player having to gather all the resources to build by hand & defend themselves against monsters, but everything after that was fairly open-ended. It still very much is, I suppose; after all, there is no actual force in the interactive, mechanical or narrative, that forces you to fight any of the bosses. But their very existence implies some sort of external end goal they should work towards & upon completion, it is pointless to continue. The problem is that Minecraft's combat is simply not interesting or entertaining by itself at all, & serves mainly to just add friction in the resource-managing process (which is hardly a bad thing). But to insert some kind of ultimate climax into the whole experience, especially one centered around such a marginal part of the interactive, simply distracts users from what makes Minecraft actually interesting, such as its weird array of mechanics that can be assembled together for any number of purposes, or even just the amount of effort and time required for any given building project.
Besides that, there's just a number of interactives I can think of just off the top of my head for which the term "game" just does not quite fit. Most prolific one is probably picrel, but there's also Prodeus, Everything, Galimulator, Universe Sandbox, and so on. Of course, games as they exist now more than have their place. But I just wonder what sort of experiences or objects of philosophical contemplation we've missed out on with the idea that an interactive has to have some kind objective tacked on to it.
As for what term would be ideal for superseding "game", I've already suggested one, but if you think there's a snappier and/or more descriptive term for what I'm getting at, I'd be interested to hear.