It might be theoretically correct in the same way that it is correct to say that “a building is just a bunch of bricks on top of each other”. But there are thousands of different buildings with different reasons to exist which offer drastically different services and serve different purposes. A video game like Elden Ring is built from the same “automation” pieces as the LS command in my terminal, but it would very disingenuous to say they’re basically the same thing.

That is an incorrect comparison. A building, all buildings, are dwellings, but they are no more or less the sum of their parts than anything else. It’s not about the construction materials. It’s about the utility.

Not OP but I think it is correct comparison.

Dijkstra's quote succinctly summarized the arguments:

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."

With all due respect to Dijkstra, whether or not something is interesting is subjective.

I wonder if his point was that the question didn't need to be answered for whatever they were discussing at the time?

His point is that question ultimately boils down to a semantic argument over the word "think/swim", which may be interesting to a linguist but is not philosophically meaty in the way the question implies.

> It’s not about the construction materials. It’s about the utility.

I think I missed your point. Wasn’t that exactly what I said?

> The only purpose for software is automation, which is the elimination of labor. Getting that wrong directly influences your quality of product more than any other downstream factor.

I take it you never played a game in your life?

Devil’s advocate:

Fighting games are just better versions of Rockem Sockem Robots.

And 4X games could be fancier versions of Settlers of Catan.

What “labor” does a “fancier version of Catan” eliminate?

Do you mean baseball, football, tag, board games, cross words, Sudoku, Dungeons and Dragons, or something else? There are many games that are not electronic. So, what separates those athletic and paper games from electronic games? Automation.

No, I obviously don’t mean those, buddy

Video games automate whole chunks of play, be that imagination with graphics and sound effects, other players with virtual enemies and allies, let alone all the automation that goes into multi-player games.