After defending Aether's game elements I think I see how you could make a case for Small Worlds' game elements.  I could see it either way now and understand what alphonse was saying.

On one hand, there are puzzles.  You could see each world you visit as a puzzle to find the portal back home.  And the level being very maze-like is the challenge of the puzzle.  You solve the puzzle by finding the exit.

On the other hand, preventing you from going back is simply a way to improve playability so players know the experience consists of them going forward and exploring this world.  The maze-like path to get to the exit is a scenic path to allow you to see the whole world.

So maybe this would fully be a notgame if you could go back to the base right away?

But then if that's true, how does the experience end?  When you visit all 4 worlds?  Does that mean you'd have to start over once you realized that's all there was to it?  Or would there be some other way to end?  A sort of "final door" to go through?

And does not forcing you to go forward reduce playability?  Would an average player know what to do without being forced to find the exit?

What would be gained by removing the otherwise minimal game elements from this?

Welcome

Having to reach the end doesn't seem like a game-specific goal, though.  Not allowing the player to go back seems like a solution for playability.  If you let people go back, they might not realize that this is about exploring and be confused as to what to do.

As a notgame, it might be a weakness implemented in this way, but does not allowing the player to teleport back immediately prevent this from being a notgame altogether?

You could argue that the goal of any linear media is to get to the end; in TV specifically the viewer is forced to keep watching in order to find out the rest of the story.  Thus getting to the end as a goal does not seem specific to games.

I see jumping as an extension of basic movement, providing a slightly more in-depth way to explore a space.  The meaning of the jump action in this work would be that the space is more complicated than a simple plane, and thus it requires more effort to explore.  By jumping, you feel more like an explorer that has to squeeze into tight spaces and crawl up ledges and jump across them.  It adds an element of adventure to exploration.  To me as a notgame player, that's pretty meaningful.  I'd miss it if it wasn't there.

Hopefully I'm making sense here...

[My case]

http://jayisgames.com/cgdc6/?gameID=9

My case
There is an ending, but there's no explicit goal.  There are no puzzles, reward systems, and really not much in terms of rules.  The only rules are platforming controls, collisions, a fog-of-war + zooming mechanic, and teleportation.  I certainly don't consider those specific game-based things.

There's even a story, which is not told cinematically, but rather through the exploration itself.

Conclusion
This is a virtual, fictional interactive system with no specific game elements.  It is a notgame.

Impressionism seems to me like an empirical look at how the cones in our eyes perceive light.  I think by operating at such a low level of perception, it gives the image a visceral quality.  And that visceral feeling would be a great compliment to a notgame experience.

I think it makes perfect sense to think about modernism when you think about art history before modernism and how it relates to games.  The whole goal before modernism was to achieve photo-realism.  And then when the camera came, that goal was fulfilled.

Now in the mainstream games industry the goal (for the most part) is to achieve photo-realism.  And even for those that aren't thinking about photo-realism, they're thinking in a renaissance sense of space, where the view is a window into a 3d world.

A pretty clear way to come up with a different direction than that would be to explore how modernists thought of space.

Considering how popular the impressionist style of concept art is, I think it's a good place to start.

I think that's a good attitude.  It's understandable to stick with pixel art, but there's a lot more we can do.

I've been slowly starting to gather material for a talk that explores the philosophy of modern artists and applies it to games.  I think there's a lot of room to explore different art directions, and even apply those directly to games (or notgames of course).

Impressionism, Post-impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus, Expressionism, etc.  There's a lot of potential here.

Assuming I can find a concept artist to help me with my Bridge game, I'll be starting with Impressionism.

Your work has inspired me for a long time.  I even remember visiting your site back in the Flash days.  Thank you, and welcome ^_^

There's a very, very old word for pixel art: mosaic.

I've recently formed the opinion that pixel art enchants so many people because it's essentially a mosaic.  I'm sure there are books that go into great detail about why a mosaic is so appealing.

Another option for art style is rotoscoping.  That's what I've been experimenting with a lot with lately.  Just trace over an image in Illustrator.  I personally want to explore pixel-art-like aesthetics using vector graphics, so I've been leaving the vectors aliased.  I would love to make 3d pixel art someday.

The reason why pixel art is often used for art games is because the games are experiments.  That means they have cheaper production values, and because aesthetic quality is so important, as you say, pixel art gives the most bang for its buck.  The highest quality for the least effort.

Nice find axcho.  And I liked your comment on there, Thomas.

I added my own.  Here's an excerpt:

That seemingly minor detail is actually pivotal to my next point, which is that the game part of videogames isn't really unique to videogames at all.  Some game genres are more unique than others, but think about how you can prototype so many videogames on paper first.  That's pretty telling I think.  Technically, there's nothing unique to videogames.  The fact that they borrow from other media is part of the problem.  And because of that, you could argue that in order to create the most unique experience for a virtual, fictional interactive system, you'd want to use less of a game-like structure, as Thomas Grip points out.

This mindset is exactly the one great directors have when trying to create a unique experience on film through editing techniques.  They want to use precisely the unique properties of their medium, and to do that in a way that conveys a meaningful message.

And I concluded most gracefully:

In conclusion:
"make love, notgames." ^_^

Oh my, what a wonderful quote.  That is tumblr worthy.  Added!

I guess it would be interesting to do a contest with "Man gets out of bed in the morning" as its theme.

Yeah, that should be the next one.  It'd be interesting to see what people do with that!

Wow, great find.  It does seem to be more than the sum of its parts.  And I would argue that it would be much, much worse without such excellent music.  I'd say that's half the experience in this case.

Maybe he'd be interested in joining?

Yeah, that's kind of what I had in mind.  Tumblr is more appropriate for shorter content.  Articles will likely be long.

Thanks for clearing that up   Sorry to hijack the thread...