Nah man, you confused who wrote what- I'm not the original poster, I'm just a commenter. I believe if you reread, this will shed a different light on my responses.

Is it a Toy or is it a Game?

Depends on the context.

Football doesn't immediately give you a goal, necessarily. Or at least the goal that's meaningful. Backyard football with your buddies?

Backyard football isn't football.

By football I meant European football (soccer, if you're American). The point I wanted to make is that football is all its parts. The ball, the team, the goals, the time - that's all part of the (core) game. We can then extend observation of football as an activity and include audience, training, news etc. The point is still the same: Context is the part of what we're talking about, in this case games. Playing catch is not running a race. Backyard football isn't football.

Is D&D a toy or a game?

Definitely a game, it says so on the tin: roleplaying game (rpg) system. Roleplay in general on the other hand I'd call play or a performing art if it's all fancy. Dice I'd call toys (This is Koster, not Edwards.), but not in the context of a roleplaying game, there dice are a randomizer generator (kind of like verb vs predicate).

If trying to describe the world requires you to turn the things that you're describing into a homogenous mush before you can apply your metric, you cannot expect to measure anything but the grossest, least differentiated, least individual things about whatever your subject was before it went into the grinder.

I agree that op misses the point, but this what you said is also not true and I explained why and how in the comment I linked you. Yes, it is true description is vague (highly abstract), but that still doesn't mean it is useless.

I believe what I find fallacious in your responses is sciences vs humanities. GNS and such theories are not science and are bad in that respect. What they are good in is something else. The burden of proof to prove scientific claims can (i.e. must to belong to a serious category) be applied is on you, since I did not subscribe to such metrics in my claims. :P (i.e. no, I don't want to play by that ruleset, i.e. play that game) Again, I believe you confused who wrote what. We can be scientific about it, and that is why I write in this why (humanities vs natural science).

So what purpose can they serve you can find in my comment (root, directly to op) in the conclusion part (so as I don't repeat needlessly), but briefly: describing is meh, creativity is great, mushy no problem.