Wikipedia defines a game engine as "a software-development environment designed for people to build video games. Developers use game engines to construct games for consoles, mobile devices, and personal computers. The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine ("renderer") for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, scene graph, and may include video support for cinematics."
Recently, we've seen game engines be used more and more for the latter. As many of us use game engines to create our final projects, you may have noticed the abilitiy for the video game engine / maker to create a cinematic visual rather than an interactive game. This can be done through the use of cutscenes (where the player has no control but the game still continues / characters move), sequential text output, or in some cases, the game engine having a cinema mode specifically made for creating videos and visuals rather than games. Below is the sequencer editor for the Unreal Engine.
More and more examples of this emerge such as our readings / assignments for Week 10 (Machinima, Red vs Blue), the infamous Shrek is Love video, or other examples like Sims or Minecraft music videos. The Unity Game Engine has also been used to create visual effects for movies, completely ridding the game engine of it's "game" aspect. In these examples, the tool used to create games has evolved into a tool used to create movies, videos, and cinematic pieces in general. This leads to my question which ties into what we learned on the first day of class: What makes a game, and what separates a game (i.e. an art game) from other forms of visual art besides having player interaction? For example, is Twine a game, and if so, is the player having a choice the only thing that separates it from being a text / visual story?