interesting article for consideration from Polygon writer Kazuma Hashimoto. here’s the opening:
In February, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sat down in an interview with YouTuber SkillUp as part of a tour to promote the next installment in the Final Fantasy series. During the interview, Yoshida expressed his distaste for a term that had effectively become its own subgenre of video game, though not by choice. “For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said. He stated that the first time both he and his contemporaries heard the term, they felt as though it was discriminatory, and that there was a long period of time when it was being used negatively against Japanese-developed games. That term? “JRPG.”
Most games aren’t simulations. The difference between a simulation and a game that isn’t a simulation is that… the game is usually way more fun, and a simulation is usually very difficult to play. Take racing games. Cars handle way differently in racing games than in real life, which someone will find out if they try to drive a race car simulator and find themselves quickly spinning out. (Hopefully they learn it on a simulator. I’ve seen people learn it in real cars; it is an expensive lesson.)
so it’s a simulation of a car that works a bit different from real life
The opposite of simulation is arcade, “simulation” meaning “as close to real life as we can get it” and “arcade” meaning “let’s optimise this for gameplay instead”.
Don’t try to dictionary your way around genre descriptors that’s not how they work.