[jayjader]

Sure, if you're making a text adventure in the command line, then the REPL is basically your default game engine. That's where your i/o, computation, control flow, asset management, etc is implemented/centralized.

"Game engine" outside of the context of making a game is just a runtime (and/or environment), and I agree it becomes a bit meaningless (as a prescriptive thing).

It's like saying a CPU needs to have vectorized operations, or even a hardware multiply, to be called a CPU. It's true that in many, if not most, cases those are essential components. However, I find it more useful to define "game engine" as "whatever takes care of the game, physics, and display logic implementation for a particular game".

> Many a better approach would be to ask whether every game needs a game engine? So, by my definition every game _has_ a game engine. I think a more interesting question would be, "when does a game engine need to be considered as its own logical layer or compartment?"