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I'm not bloody reading all of this without a proper abstract or thesis, but I skimmed a good deal of it. I think your definition for experience is basically "novella/movie/epic turned into a video game" compared to... well, everything else. The problem with video games is that it's an emerging art form so no one has any idea what to do with it. It doesn't matter if it's triangles shooting dots at floating junk or an interactive space opera where you bang blue aliens, it's still a video game at the core. But... you can say the same thing about most art forms. A children's story book might not compare to The Odyssey on some arbitrary scale of "is this an experience or a time waster" but at the core they are both books. Similarly, a portrait is different from a trompe l'oeil, which are both different from murals. They're all paintings, just on different scales with different techniques. So when Extreme is asking for a separation between time wasting games and "experiences" I think he's asking for those sorts of hard categories that I listed for other art forms. But we already do that in a way. You KNOW that a puzzle game is going to be radically different from an action/adventure game. You might already be thinking of two games: I thought of Tetris and the Zelda series. One is a classic time-waster, and the other is arguably an "experience." Sure, both contain puzzles but they present those puzzles in very different ways. I think I'll end this by refuting Extreme's comment that games carry no emotional attachment. Go sit on a couch with some of your friends and/or enemies and see if you aren't filled with the emotion of rage at the end of some Mario Party.