And it reads "Whenever you see someone post a bad take about defining games or gameplay, you enter rant mode for the next 90 minutes."
"Just saw someone say good games can have bad gameplay" yeah and I've seen people say all JRPGs, Visual Novels and Gone Home don't have good game play, so define your terms bucko or stop making ubiquitous-sounding statements that are just cover for the comment "bad games are games I don't like."
This drives me up a wall, because like. What is "bad gameplay?" Is bad gameplay anything that isn't fun, doesn't control well, doesn't feel good? But some of the best most memorable gameplay I've ever encountered is miserable.
It's pathetic. The industry has so much potential, so much room left to grow, and yet at every level it's plagued by people who conceive of it as an infant would, with no thought for the value of anything beyond what will personally amuse them. "Good gameplay" is not a uniform thing, that you can define in a dictionary, it is calibrated and tuned with intent to help the greater work accomplish what it needs to accomplish, with tradeoffs and compromises in service of a greater whole, even if "fun" is nowhere within that scope.
It is not lost on me that the people who were decrying the existence of "Walking Simulators" (a really interesting and deep genre, now that the label has been reclaimed) in 2013 suddenly had cough ethical concerns about games reporting in 2014, and who push back on any sort of representation in games to this day.
