saw one of those steam reviews where they rate the game on a dozen different categories via checkboxes next to lists of little quips, and the middling ranking for "gameplay" was "it's just gameplay" and i feel like i'm gonna be thinking about this for the rest of my life or at least the next 20 minutes. like on some level i kinda get it, sometimes a game is simply something you do to while away your time while you wait for the day to end, some games are just a sort of tepid but palatable sludge. but on the other hand: what the fuck does that mean?? what is "just gameplay"???
like. i'm having a hard time even wording my interrogation of this idea because there's just such a vacuum of information here. the notion of "gameplay" is an ocean of concepts as deep as the fucking combined imagination of humanity, and the idea of something being "just" that is so like. i can't even parse it. what is this default state of "gameplay" that you imagine? mario? assassin's creed? MMOs? what does it mean for gameplay to be so perfunctory that it just rolls off you completely and leaves so little impact that you can't even be bothered assigning as much as a "good" or "bad" to it, let alone any actual description? why did you choose this semantic void as a universal way of expressing a game being middling to play?
the moral of the story here is that steam reviews are an abyss that should be tread with utmost caution lest you lose yourself to madness and we all knew that already
