"Wargaming" was a pasttime, a hobby. People got together and played wargames, like Jutland and Sniper!. Then along comes D&D. Old D&D used a lot of the same old strategy game rules that wargamers were used to, but applied a fantasy overlay to them. And then it did something unique with persistent characters and levels. And in order to distinguish what it was doing from the rest of the wargame hobby, the term role-playing game was coined. Which is all right and proper. That's the way the system is supposed to work. A new genre presents itself, and a new category is named to help define it for people.
But, a couple of decades later, and defining things and getting people to understand what they're potentially buying is no longer the goal of marketing. Now, the goal is to muddle things as much as possible in order to gain as many sales as possible, and then cash out. If people get mad that you misled them into buying something they didn't want, so what, you've already got their money, and maybe even also left the company.
So, along comes Biowarian epic #10 (they're all the same, who cares which one specifically), which is a game genre that really should be called a storybook action game, or a new term should be made to define its category. But that's no longer how the system works. Now, everything is an RPG. And so, so many things are now an RPG that no simple definition could ever hope to encompass it all. To actually define things properly, someone respected would have to sit down and start laying down proper categories again, doing as what should have been done the past two decades.
