aah, this is nailing it. It helps to differentiate from game-like experiences and special purpose apps.

Another interesting term from the wiki link is "active essays":

> The related term "active essays" was used by Alan Kay to refer to text-based explorable explanations

But I don't know if by text-based he meant strictly no visuals. Like just ASCII art? :-)

It looks like this might be the original paper by Kay, can anyone provide a link that isn’t behind a paywall?

Search results seem to indicate he was referring to text based plus interactive components something something Java(script?). I’m not a programmer and know less about the history..