That makes sense. People watching a movie don't want to be reminded they're watching a movie. People reading a book don't want to be reminded they're reading a book. Performers on stage don't want the audience to see that it's just a stage. If you're telling scary stories around a campfire, no one wants you to point out that you're statistically very unlikely to encounter a mass murderer out here in the woods. The point is the feeling, the engagement, the way the world melts away when you're telling a story with your friends.
Except that for all of those things besides games, avoiding any such reveal consistently and almost universally makes them better, and nearly any sacrifice necessary to avoid such reveals is worth making. Actively sabotaging the functionality of rules in order to never, ever let someone think they're playing a game will
destroy the ability to play the game effectively. It will still be "playable" because "playable" is a below-rock-bottom, Mohorovicic-discontinuity standard, but it will actively and aggressively prevent enjoyable gameplay. Games
need rules, and unless you're playing Mao, players need to
know the rules in order to play. You can never
not have at least
some awareness that you're playing, unless you're genuinely deceiving yourself. Hearing a story told, or watching a movie, etc., you can at least pretend that the tale is not constructed by the teller, that it's a genuinely faithful recounting of a real event. Playing a game,
you are necessarily using rules to affect the game. There is no physical or mental possibility of believing that an icosahedron showing 20 is faithfully recounting the tale of a warrior landing a telling blow against his enemy.
