Sure it’s a game, cheesepickles. It’s called “Eternal Recess.”
Give yourself some credit. 
- I lived in a city that was built in a sort of fluid flow around unblastable hills and wooded areas, plus lakes.
Every patch of unbuilt land was a planet, the streets were interstellar space, and my bicycle (or sometimes just the air around me, if I wasn’t using the bike) was my spaceship. I spent a lot of time exploring nearby space, and the palnets with them. It usually ended up being a mix of exercise, exploration, sitting and thinking about whatever was on my mind, and civil engineering. I built truss structures out of branches and other materials, walls out of rocks and sticks, rooves out of downed limbs or leaves (but not the stuff that was still living!)… and whatever I could find.
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At school, when it rained, the gravel-and-dirt schoolyard would be filled with puddles, and little, tiny flows of water. Using the flow patters of the water, I would mentally map the topography of the schoolyard, in some cases in minute detail (like, groups of sand grains in particularly intersting puddles). I’d see if it changed over time. I’d alter the flows, by building canals, reservoirs and dams. When challenged at why I was playing like that (and afraid of being seen as childish) I claimed that I was doing the school a service, by draining the schoolyard. (That way kids wouldn’t get their shoes wet and their clothes dirty.) I disguised my true, creative play with lip service to an overall goal of specific directions to drain in. My mother would often wonder why I wanted to wear my rubber boots when yesterday’s rain wasn’t going to continue today.
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I’d go home and do the same thing with the ditch. Study its flows, explore all its tributaries to their sources in the woods, dam it up, dredge it, build embankments.
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And of course, you can do all of that in your bedroom with Lego bricks, if it’s raining.
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I used to smash at the rocks in the back yard (the large outcropping exposed to the air) and imagine I was mining. I’d inspect each extracted fragment, declaring certain shiny bits ‘nickel’, others ‘copper’, and a few rare ones ‘probably iron’. there ‘were’ hidden trace amounts of other, more special metals, but I rarely saw them. I never actually got around to smelting or refining my ore… I just used it to build stuff (see #1), or as tools to smash more loose.
Imaginative, explorative play gave me time to think, and allowed me to process a lot of what I’d read and heard beforehand. Plus it was fun. Imagination rocks.
On winter nights, I used to turn all the chairs in my room upside down (this was a very important part of the game, don’t ask me why), close the curtains, and turn out all the lights. And then I’d sit on an upside-down chair imagining the scariest things I could think of, and watch the darkness around me thicken and take on the form of all those scary things …
It was a successful evening if I could last ten minutes without jumping up and running screaming for the light switch.