For the sake of argument suppose games are rightly categorised ontologically with
tools. Using an appropriate analogy, we could have the following example of your two questions (where we are interested in understanding if they are different or the same question.)
- What purposes are there for a hammer?
- Why do people choose to use hammers?
What would be your take on that? (Again, I'd like to respond to more of your post, but let's start here.)
Well....that would be kind of a problem, because I don't actually agree that they are "tools," at least not in the usual sense of the word. But if you would like me to use that starting point, then I would say "hammer" is not at all the kind of "tool" that a game is--at least, not the
kind of game that an RPG is. Rather, the kind of tool I think we should be considering is something like a
pen or, even better, a
paintbrush.
Because "what purposes are there for a pen" and "why do people choose to use a pen" have RADICALLY different answers, mostly because while pens mostly
do only two things (write, or draw), there are many, MANY reasons why someone might choose to
use a pen. The writing or drawing is a
vehicle. The thing that the writing or drawing
expresses is the reason people choose it.
Hammers, by comparison, are incredibly simple tools. They do only one thing, and it's really hard to get particularly creative with that one thing. (Things like silversmithing exist, but I think you get what I mean. There's a reason we use the phrase "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.") Many other tools, however, have a huge variety of specific purposes despite only doing a limited number of things. Actual vehicles for example, as in ones that (in theory) drive on roads, really only work as transportation. But that can mean sports cars, muscle cars, monster trucks, cargo trucks, SUVs, offroading adventure type stuff, work vehicles, motorcycles, RVs...
The "purpose" of a vehicle, in a very brute sense, is to physically move from one location to another. But the reasons people would
use a vehicle for moving from one place to another are many. So...the two questions only become a single question when one chooses a tool that is of especially focused utility.
We could also compare games to other "abstract" tools, that is, tools that exist as created rules and ideas rather than as physical objects, to try to keep the analogy as close to the original thing as possible. Which could lead us to questions like:
- What purposes are there for mathematics?
- Why do people choose to use mathematics?
In a formal sense, the only purpose of mathematics is to reveal logical relationships between elements of some kind of system. But the reasons someone might wish to
use mathematics are incredibly variable, because
anything that can be quantified is, in theory, something that you can do mathematics to. People use it for optimization, prediction, verification, communication (as we are doing now), entertainment (as most TTRPG and computer/video game players do), research, crime, law, hell you can argue it's even used in arts because of things like poetry and music! None of these deviate from that fundamental, distilled purpose of "reveal logical relationships between elements of a system," and yet these cover damn near the entire spectrum of human endeavor.
