Gamasutra - What is and what is not an RPG?

Well if you're not tired of the age old debate about what makes an RPG then head on over to Gamasutra where they have a guest blog about the lively topic.

What is and what is not RPG?

Article history

This articles was written before 4 years for one European not English web, before few years was translated to English and forgotten on my hard drive, until now. I think that is still pretty actual, only think which i would change are actual games names in examples, my opinion is still consistent.

Disclaimer: Translator wasn't native English speaker, sorry for that.
 
Introduction

 Quite often I meet statement, that one or another game is / was awesome RPG. Mostly they talk about action RPGs. Interpretation of this term, especially in connection with computer games, is quite bad, and situation isn’t better when you read description of this term on Wikipedia, where you can find some statements, with which I cannot agree.