Isn that waffling? Aren there at least a few absolute concepts that define a roleplaying game?
If I’m in a mood for dictating absolutes, any of the above could be treated as hard-and-fast, especially the “character-oriented” and “game” parts. It’s sensible, after all, to say that if you’re not playing a role, or if you’re not playing a game, you’re not playing a roleplaying game. Or is it? And even if it is, we then become responsible for providing a perfect definition of “playing a role” and “playing a game.” The minute we try to apply boundaries, however sensible, we run into problems. If we require a roleplaying game to be about characters as I define it, for example (where characters must have both personality and identity), we probably exclude original Dungeons & Dragons! In original D&D, character details like name and gender were optional (and implicitly a kind of frilly add-on); players made a unit: a Fighting Man, a Dwarf, a Cleric, etc.
