What makes the essence of a game?

[Amake]

I guess if you took everything out of a platformer and reduced it to its basic concept, you'd have a Pong block running on a straight line and jumping over holes and blocks. I'd prefer to call that game the genre itself instead of being of that genre.

And it would be boring as skull-boring exploding worms.

And we are forced to conclude genres, on a fundamental level, suck.