This is a topic everyone can talk a lot about. This is a question no one can answer perfectly. It's easy to come up with thousands of game examples, and each of the examples reveals several elements a game would have, but there would still be a lot more. In this essay I would only talk about my personal opinion of what is a game and what are the elements that make up a good game.
To me, a game is an entertaining interactivity which has some rules to reach a goal, and this goal is not relevant to players' real life.
First, a game should be an activity audience or player can participate in. The user/audience/player can contribute effort to change the process and the output of a game. It differs game from other entertainment like movie, music or book.
Second, a game must provide some kind of entertainment. For players while playing the game, they should feel enjoyable, relax or achievement. Player should get any kind of satisfactions from playing a game. From shooting/fighting games player can relief the pressure, from role play games player can enjoy stories, from racing games player can get the excitement of speed, from puzzle games player could enjoy the self evaluation and satisfactions of the wisdom, from simulation/raising games player can enjoy the achievements. These are typical elements for typical game types, actually when take a close look at individual games, each game could provide some of the combination of these entertaining elements, which guarantees to attract player to join the game.
Third, a game must have some rules to obey. There's something you can do in the game, and there must be something you cannot do. Rule makes the game more challenging and interesting. Also rules can help player focus on the goal of the game, and would not get attracted by something not relevant at all.
That comes the forth point, a game should have a goal which would not affect the real life. Without a goal, player would lose interest very easily and get confused, which also make no sense for player to participate in. Some people might argue with games like Sims seems doesn't have a goal at all. Actually the goal of Sims is just not that obvious, but you still need to raise a person, make him/her live good and grow up well. These trivial elements are still goals of the game. Some people would argue another point of the goal should not affect the real life. They would say while playing gambling games people would take the risk of losing money which might affect the real life. But my point is, even without gambling with money, these games are still game. The gambling events are just the adds-on of the game, but not the elements of it.
So, with the definition of game, it's easy to think about which kind of elements could help to make up a good game.
For the interactive part, the more player can control, and the stronger player's participation would affect the game, the more player would eager to enjoy. That's why some open environment role play games are very successful. The designer should do the indirect control but it really would be appreciated that players have the feeling of control their own life.
For the entertaining part, of course traditional entertainment way could help a lot. Some jokes and tricks; a good background theme, a nice story, etc. Also the art style and quality would affect a lot of how good the game could be.
For the rule, the game balance should be very important for all the kinds of games. For FPS and RPG games, if the enemies are too strong players would be easy to get depressed, but if it's too easy then players are easy to get boring. It's even more important for multiplayer games because the unbalance system would make player feel unfair and not willing to return anymore.
For the goal, it's hard to define which kind of goal is good, but in my opinion, we need a goal in the game but it would be better that the goal is hiding in some place waiting for player to find out. It depends on different type of games, but it's true that people would be more happy if they feel like it's their ability to find out the goal and solve the problems.
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