I don't recall exactly when this started bothering me, but it recently got to the point where I can't ignore it anymore...

I don't recall exactly when this started bothering me, but it recently got to the point where I can't ignore it anymore. I am talking about the word 'gameplay', which I believe is the single most useless and misleading word in videogame terminology. But let me explain myself before you start booing.

Consider the following sentences:

This book has good bookread.

This record has good recordlisten.

This movie has good moviewatch.

So yeah, I've just made up three new words: bookread, recordlisten and moviewatch. Now these words may sound stupid to you, but that's not all there is to it. These words are also useless. To demonstrate this I'll rewrite the above sentences without using them:

This is a good book.

This is a good record.

This is a good movie.

I don't recall exactly when this started bothering me, but it recently got to the point where I can't ignore it anymore. I am talking about the word 'gameplay', which I believe is the single most useless and misleading word in videogame terminology. But let me explain myself before you start booing.

Consider the following sentences:

This book has good bookread.

This record has good recordlisten.

This movie has good moviewatch.

So yeah, I've just made up three new words: bookread, recordlisten and moviewatch. Now these words may sound stupid to you, but that's not all there is to it. These words are also useless. To demonstrate this I'll rewrite the above sentences without using them:

This is a good book.

This is a good record.

This is a good movie.

See where I am going with this? Just keep in mind that people have been discussing books, records and movies in the English language for a long time, without ever feeling the need to invent ghastly word-constructs like "bookread", etc.

At this point some readers will doubtless be thinking, "But, man, there are just things I want to say that can't possibly be expressed without using the word gameplay".

You are wrong. There is nothing one might want to say that can't be expressed without using the word gameplay. I could start going through random videogame publications picking examples, but I'll just do one of the most frequently occurring ones and trust you to figure out the rest. Here it is:

"This game has great gameplay but shitty graphics."

This means exactly the same as:

"This is a great game but it has shitty graphics."

The story has features good storytelling

I saw good cinematography at the cinema

She sings a good song

what the fuck

And now we come to the misleading part. By far the biggest problem with the word gameplay is that it's too all-encompassing to be of any use. When you say "this game has bad gameplay" you are not really giving me any more useful information than if you had simply said "this is a bad game". Besides, it seems that different people have different ideas of what gameplay is supposed to mean; there is nothing like a widely accepted definition (check also: dictionaries). So, to the eyes of an astute reader, the term has come to basically signify that the writer cannot be troubled to specify what it is he likes or doesn't like about a game.

In the end, sloppy use of words promotes sloppy thinking, and before you know it you are spouting nonsense such as "The most important part of a game is the gameplay". If this sentence doesn't sound dumb to you it's because you've been brainwashed from seeing it in print a billion times. For perspective, this sounds just as stupid to a normal person (i.e. one whose common sense has not yet been perverted by constant and long-term exposure to inane videogame-speak) as the sentence "The most important part of a movie is the moviewatch" would sound to me or you.

Is this pasta or should I reply to it seriously

>Let's discuss the rhetoric of this book.
Although someone like OP wouldn't understand anyway.

Gameplay is how the game plays.

It doesn't matter what you fucking call it, Mario games play better than Sonic games is the same thing as Mario games have better gameplay than Sonic games.

Moviewatch is how the movie watches.

Bookread is how the book reads.

really should have just made it a food analogy

What doesn't bother icycalm

It's like when you say, 'this cock feels so good in my mouth.'

Okay I'll assume you're being serious.

The difference is that games are games. Books, records and movies are just works of art that you experience. Games are interactive.

I don't agree with it but I'll use a common example on Cred Forums where people say that Planescape: Torment has a great story but bad gameplay. Their point is that you could make a good book out of it but actually playing it isn't fun in and of itself, but is rather something you just do because you have to to progress the story. That's the meaning of saying that a game has bad gameplay. It might have other things that are good. The graphics and soundtrack might be so amazing that some people want to experience it just for those things, even though if you stripped those away and just were left with the actual "game" it would be boring as fuck. There are actually tons of examples of this. Shit like Uncharted where there is no real challenge and it's repetitive as fuck. Nobody really plays it fro the gameplay, they play it because they like having the sensation that they are moving an epic adventure story forward.

You don't talk about the "moviewatch" of a movie or the "recordlisten" of a record because they don't have that kind of distinction to make.

This guy is fucking autistic because although there aren't distinct words for it, when you read a book there's a certain way it flows, and when you watch a movie there's a lot about the directing and filmography that makes it better than other movies. There's a fluidity to everything, and because games have interactivity, the flow of the controls is called "gameplay" I mean wow this guy is scaring me that there can be someone so detached from common reasons to use terminology. Damn.

>The English language can never evolve because I said so

Video games have the added element of interactivity that no other arts have, "gameplay" is the word to refer to the multiple interactive factors of video games.
Etymologically the word is very stupid indeed but it serves it's descriptive purpose, stop your autism.

Early icycalm is too autistic. I only like his later work.

>autistic
>OP makes a thread about the corruption of language
>you reply with a meaningless buzzword

>This book has good writing
>This record has good tracks
>This movie has good cinematography

Did you think this post through at all?

no, really that was implied as a literal definition. I should have said Asperger's. Sorry, I felt that his inability to interact socially with language was indicative of that.

Oh shit, who was it that seriously tried to spout this nonsense? Arthur Chu?

he's not talking about the actual content which can actually be critiqued, but about how said content makes you feel.

Icycalm was always a pretentious pseudo-intellectual.

You really are retarded.

Let's go through them in order:

Bookread. There are some seriously seriously shitty writers out there. They could have the best idea for a story in the world, but it will still be painful to read because the prose is bad. Conversely, there are a lot of very successful books that aren't particularly good stories, simply because they tell a simple story in a very pleasing way. For example: Harry Potter.

Record: think of your favourite music. Imagine now that in the mixing studio they decided to turn the bass to 0, drown the guitars beneath the drums and let the vocalists heavy breathing between verses make it into the mix. The music itself might be good, but listening to a record like that would be painful.

Do you really need me to go into movies? Bad special effects, poor sound mixing, lighting all over the place and terrible camera angles will ruin the worst film.

In short, you're a retard.

>I should have said Asperger's.
but autistic was just too good of a choice of words, wasn't it? A word so widely used around here that you could apply it to anything and reasonably expect people to go along with it. Elaboration just went out of style once people said "Eh, file it under autism, it's a catch-all meme word at this point."

OP I think I know what you mean but it really is easy to call this a semantics argument. Me personally, I always got pissed at the term "game feel", a term I heard Arin Hanson use a lot and then heard it spread out to lots more people. It's a term I also think people use try to express something that could be better expressing using different words, but feel like it somehow suits the subject.

I think at the end of the day, more people need to be more verbose and in depth with what they're feeling. And a bit less objective in fact (this game is objectively good/bad, it has more/less features so that makes it better or worse) and should have a wider range of appreciation and how to express that.

Let me give you an example of how to use the term gameplay.

>there are autoclicker games, but I don't like them since their gameplay sucks.
>what's wrong with it?
>you just click anywhere and deal more damage to enemies on top of constant dps you deal
>the game only requires me to do mouse clicks and plan my point spending to do more of the same
>i think that's bad gameplay
>if you think mouseclicking is boring why do you like cs:go?
>cs:go has interesting gameplay, here is why:
>movement, planning, anticipating, teamplay, communication, aiming, strategies, eco, recoil mechanics, weapon mechanics and much more
>these are all part of cs:go and every single match you do
>compared to an autoclicker the gameplay is a lot deeper, richer and diverse

This is how the word gameplay is supposed to be used in a conversation.

It's a "pasta" by Alex Kierkegaard.


On topic: I think gameplay as a word is acceptable because books only contain reading. Movies only contain watching (and listening to supplement the watching) but games can contain all of these and more and still be "games".