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Fun questions, Brian, and some interesting answers.

The question you asked that interested me the most was "who defines and
populates a genre?" And I was struck by three of your answers, want to
think aloud about each of them

* "that a definition...relies heavily upon the existence of gatekeepers"
this is old style: the way English literature used to be taught, the way
the canon used to be managed--a group of experts decided. No go, no more.
Why the internet is so exciting for so many of us; we're becoming our own
gatekeepers (Friedman writes compellingly about this:
/exchange/bookshelves/friedman )

* "depends far more on the reader's state than on the author's intent"
this is modern style, akin to what we in the lit-crit business call
"reader response theory":
/exchange/courses/genre/s08
it's not til a reader--many readers, actually--encounter a story and make
meaning(s) of it that it lives, becomes the text that is valued and passed
on

*might be just "a collection of tools"--
this is where we are now, I think, in the making (up) of new genres. I've
learned from evolutionary theory that a species can only be defined
retrospectively. You never know ahead of time what you are going to
get/what you've got. It's only looking back that you can see how any
particular assemblage (of "tools") is differentiated from other
assemblages....

So your account of the current definition of the genre of alternative
reality games seems right on the money to me. Accurate, useful. But how do

--"cohesive narratives that emerge from joint authorship between the
audience and the creators, that have a level of persistence and leave
behind an artifact that others can experience, that is functionally
similar to the community experience of live theater"--

differ from the way a literary theorist (of the reader-response
persuasion) would define a novel? Or a blogger a blog? And hey: what's
your definition of blog, or the definition that was used to club yours as
"fake"?

So, no, I don't think you're using genre in a too-loose sense. Maybe your
sense isn't loose enough. What's the use of all this policing, anyhow? Why
does it matter who's in, who's out? Revenue? Marketing? Hm...not so very
interesting to me....

 to you?