Do you think a game console is a toy?

[Alby_da_Wolf]

-Ack!- said:

160rmf said:

I play games with my console, i play games with my basketball, i play games with cardgames, i play games with toys

I play songs with instruments

I watch movies with dvds, blu rays.

I make calls with my phone

I drive my car

You can play games with your computer, smartphone even a piece of paper but these products are not designed to play games as their main function

I wish it was in Finnish because as I explained we have entirely different words for playing with toys and playing games. "Leikkiä" refers to toys, a game of tag etc. "Pelata" refers to video games, board games and sports, but I forgot to mention that we have a third verb "Soittaa" which refers to either playing an instrument or playing a song for example from Youtube.

 

Leikkiä = Toys, game of tag and hide & seek etc.

Pelata = Board games, Video games, and sports

Soittaa = Instruments and other devices that play music.

And yet you can't say that hide & seek is a toy. Same way you can "play with your food" / "Leikkiä ruuallasi." Yet your food doesn't transform into a toy, unless they made a new transformers line-up "Foodbots". ;P

Well in English there are "game" and "toy", and in Italian "giocattolo"=toy always, while "gioco"=game almost always, but sometimes also toy and in some cases also sports, mainly team ones and ball ones ("gioco del calcio"="calcio"=football, "gioco del tennis"="tennis"=tennis, but we DON'T say "gioco dello sci", but just "sci"=skiing).
We could add that you can use a toy in its simplest function, like making a toy car run, but you can also use a toy to play a more complex game, for example that same toy car can become an element of a more complex fictional world. A game can be palyed with toys, tools, instruments, other objects (like, for example, chess and many board games, but also the original, real world, Capture the Flag, not the videogame one) or just nothing, like hide & seek.
We could consider a console a general-purpose toy, mainly used to play games, but secondarily used for other things too (since 5th gen, IIRC).
I guess a few people (mostly young male adults) are uncomfortable with calling a console a toy because they don't want to admit they play with toys, but others are because a console is a toy so general-purpose that they feel it's reductive to call it just a toy.