This essay is an unabashed rip-off of this wonderful essay by the indomitable video game theorist Alex Kierkegaard but applied in greater detail to the tabletop space. So go read that, learn from it, and report back when finished. … You finished? Great! Let’s get started. ‘Gameplay’ is one of the worst words ever. Now typically when I don’t like a term or phrase in the gaming vernacular I just incessantly whine to my friends until they claim to agree with me to get me to shut up, but for this particularly cancerous cluster of phonemes I’m going to approach the situation with as much clarity and gravity as I can muster. Why? Because I whole-heartedly believe that using the word ‘gameplay’ severely damages people’s abilities to have effective conversations about games and game design, and thus the art form as a whole. The biggest problem with ‘gameplay’ is that the word is so exceedingly vague it seems to serve no semantic function other than putting up a smokescreen in front of an opinion that the person using the word doesn’t know how to adequately articulate. And you know what they say: behind sloppy talking is sloppy thinking. Did someone say that? Well I’m saying it now. I often hear ‘gameplay’ defined as the interaction between the player and the game, or the overall feel of a game while playing it. To that I say a word THAT broad is useless. We don’t have a word for the overall feel of a movie, or what it’s…