There are serious problems with how easy it is to adopt the aesthetic of serious academic work without adopting the substance. Just throw a bunch of meaningless graphs and equations and pretend some of the things you're talking about are represented by Greek letters and it's close enough for even journalists who should really know better (to say nothing of VCs who hold the purse strings) to take you seriously and adopt the "it doesn't make sense because I'm missing something* attitude.

The paper starts with a weirdly bad definition of "computer game" too. It almost makes me think that (gasp) the paper was written by non-gamers.

Computer games are manually crafted software systems centered around the following game loop: (1) gather user inputs, (2) update the game state, and (3) render it to screen pixels. This game loop, running at high frame rates, creates the illusion of an interactive virtual world for the player.

No rendering: Myst

No frame rate: Zork

No pixels: Asteroids

No virtual world: Wordle

No screen: Soundvoyager, Audio Defense (well these examples have a vestigial screen, but they supposedly don't really need it)