I have never liked the use of the word dramatic to describe moments in games.
Drama has two meanings. The first is casual, and means simply exciting or tense. The other means the artificial construction of a play or a story such that it delivers a calculated tension and meaning. Games may certainly deliver the former, but they are woefully bad at delivering the latter, and game designers frequently (and often wilfully) confuse the two.
Furthermore, to implicitly use the word dramatic means that you are not able to really escape the orbit of the excitement that is associated with stories and describe game excitement on its own terms. Is Tetris dramatic? How about Left 4 Dead? Or Mario Kart?
It is difficult to therefore really say games are an art that stand on their own two feet because we are spending all of our time defining that art as a subset of something else, and it's a very ill fit.
Thauma, on the other hand, comes from thaumaturgy rather than dramaturgy. Thaumaturgy is (according to Wikipedia) "the capability of saints to work miracles". I can think of no better way to describe the indescribably surreal and magical feeling that playing an amazing, absorbing game evokes.
Hence: Thauma. Thaumatic. Our magic. Our special artistic quality that may or may not correspond with yours, but which has its own identity.
The subtitle of What Games Are is Magical Engineering. Thauma is why.
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