For example, let's say you're playing a game of Checkers. That's separate from real life. You can't buy a captured Checkers pieces on eBay and then in your next game of Checkers, start with more pieces than your opponent. Being able to do those things would cause the game to break down, because the game would no longer be a contest of your wits in Checkers, it would be a contest of your existing wealth. You can't purchase points in a basketball game, you can't purchase mulligans in golf, etc. A lot of people in the blockchain/NFT space seem to be of the position that games don't currently let you purchase things with real money or sell them to other players for real money because they lack the technical capabilities, but that is not and has never been the problem. There's also the "trading an item in one game for an item in another game" but that's equally useless, it's the same thing but with a barter system, and the barter system would eventually just give way to money anyway. The problem is that introducing those mechanics causes the magic circle to break down.
By contrast a metaverse is a metaverse because the things happening in it are not in a separate, isolated space. Both games and metaverses are virtual in nature, but what makes something a metaverse is the lack of a magic circle, while what makes something a game is the presence of a magic circle. The metaverse is a virtual facet of reality; games' whole thing is that they are not reality.
A metaverse can contain a game, but not vice versa. Plus WoW is entirely owned and operated by one entity; a metaverse is pretty definitionally a situation in which any party can create their own space without needing the permission of another party, kinda like anyone can create a website without needing the permission of any party. Well, of course, you need an IP address and if you want people to be able to reach it, a DNS record and if you want SSL some certificates, so that's not a perfect analogy, but the web isn't really decentralized anyway (for these specific reasons).