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"if people want to argue about the importance of gameplay to game, go make a game that's only gameplay" masterclass in strawman i commend it. here, let's translate this to other mediums

"if people want to argue about the importance of prose to poetry, go make a poem that's nothing but prose" "if people want to argue about the importance of imagery to painting, make a painting that's nothing but random imagery" see how swiftly this argument falls apart when you realize you're treating gameplay as a system of buttons instead of an art in itself? obviously a video game is a collection of different mediums composed into a single piece and all of those mediums matter, but guess what!!! gameplay is one of those mediums!!!! if gameplay wasn't one of those mediums games wouldn't be art, they would be things that have art in them! if you believe video games aren't art and just things with art in them, i respect your freedom to have an opinion and also have no interest in engaging with you about any kind of art ever at all

Also like, even if that wasn't true. People very visibly do care about "pushing buttons on the correct timing," even despite how obvious a reduction that is. Esports. Speedrunning. TAS playthroughs of games, the drive to find glitches and bugs and exploit them as much as possible, the drive to optimize low tiers in fighting games, making off-meta builds and strategies, the idea of challenge runs like nuzlockes and "can I beat Mario with only one button"s and time trial modes and literally fucking high scores in the first games ever made. And these, just like sports, can be just as interesting and meaningful to people as art. Obviously they're not the same as "Pure Art" (whatever this silly reduction of things to a games-art spectrum actually means) but from the pure, brass tacks battles of strategy and perfect execution, which is already extremely interesting and intriguing on its own or else there wouldn't be a gigantic market for them, stories just naturally emerge from the nature of human beings engaging in an activity involving other human beings or an obstacle to be overcome. You might not feel like sports are bigger than just the game when you kick the ball around. Ken Griffey Jr.  felt it when he led the Mariners past the Yankees who he swore never to play for. Bob Beamon felt it when he completely shattered the world record in long jump after his track career nearly disappeared due to the racist policies of track clubs across America and being dropped from his university track team for boycotting. Lebron James felt it when he returned to the city that hated him so much and brought them the city's first championship (in any sport) in 50 years, and everyone who's ever cared for a sports team literally ever has felt it. All of these stories emerged entirely through people in gyms or on fields making their bodies move in specific ways on the highest level they could and how it affected their lives. If you want to pretend like none of this has any actual meaning then you can go ahead and think that. If you want to pretend nobody cares about sportball or e-sportball go ahead and think that. Be the news anchor who told the first person to beat Tetris as tribute to his father to "go outside." 

I said Metal Gear Solid because it's simply the one more people know. It's funny that you use that as an example because the story of MGS is also notorious for being a near copy of MG2, so like, the point about "more than gameplay" is moot there. Almost everyone at the time entered the series with MGS first, if people entered the series with MG2 it would have been innovative for its gameplay too.  

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls play drastically different, what are you talking about? The areas are more linear unlike the more interconnected Dark Souls world, the crescent grass functions different to estus which changes its usage in the game, there's item burden, there's world tendency, NPCs matter more. Just because they both have stamina bars and you can roll and swing a sword doesn't mean the gameplay is the same.

The same applies to Doom and Wolfenstein. Go play Doom and Wolfenstein back to back and tell me the gameplay is the same besides you shoot gun at people. Doom is as similar to Wolfenstein gameplay wise as it is to Halo. Even just the addition of character momentum changes how you play entirely, and thus the feelings and ideas evoked by each game (see even just how differently Doomguy and BJ are characterized in their subsequent remakes. Hey, another example of gameplay being able to convey ideas on its own!)

Does Ico being a "spiritual sequel" to Another World make Ico's gameplay not at all unique or different? Like???

Hey, mind telling me why DMC3 is superior to DMC? What exactly people think makes DMC3 a better game? Is it, perhaps, the gameplay????

Like even besides all of that what even is the point that you're making? Yes, games build upon eachother's systems and add to them with their own concepts and ideas. That's how art works. "Cloud Atlas is derivative of Slaughterhouse Five because it also utilizes a non-linear narrative and therefore the framing device doesn't actually matter to the novel" What Are You Talking About

Gameplay isn't a set of interacting buttons you press to get through a movie and that's the part you don't understand. It's an intrinsic part of the medium in itself that is needed to create the experience. Truly great games are great because they are more than gameplay the same way paintings are great because they are more than strokes on canvas, or books are great because they are more than prose on a page. No game is great without gameplay. They are no longer games. Gameplay obviously always mattered. You've missed the point of the artform.

Complete misrepresentation of what I said and yet you're still wrong somehow. Gameplay can tell stories and convey ideas and feelings on its own. Obviously art without meaning isn't worth anything. I just don't understand why people can't understand that gameplay can convey that meaning. 

Sure, Hotline Miami has a story and uses text to explain that story but just like it would be a much lesser experience without the actual text conveying its ideas, it wouldn't be half the game it actually is without the gameplay helping as well. Anyone who's actually played Hotline Miami 1 and 2 understand that the reason its themes about needless and gratuitous violence and our ambivalence to the reasons behind it hit as hard as they do is because the gameplay makes gratuitous violence feel good as fuck without caring to give you the reason. You get less than half the experience of Hotline Miami by watching a longplay of it.

Really? VVVVVV's writing is what hooked you on the game? And the characters and rooms already are basically colourful boxes that are sometimes given details. It works because the gameplay loop of mastering rooms one by one is satisfying. Also, guess what, Yume Nikki has as little text as it could possibly have. The worlds are of course pretty but the game isn't a gallery of assets, they wouldn't matter at all if the gameplay didn't encourage you to poke through them and discover them. Also, fucking, tell me what Yume Nikki's story is. Tell me! I'd like to know.

Like, even though you're completely misinterpreting what I'm saying (of course games also need writing and visuals, just like a book needs a story and characters with structure on top of prose, thus the very clear and obvious metaphor you somehow missed) you still missed on the gotcha lol.

The opposite end of this is Hotline Miami without any of the gameplay which is watching a video essay about Hotline Miami. I'd rather play Ringtone Utah than watch any video essay ever, actually.

Love the list of games here. Amazing cherry picking at work. I can make lists too! Here, let me try.

 List of games that have amazing gameplay, are innovative for their gameplay as well, and are influential pieces of art for gameplay reasons:

• Doom
• Super Mario 64
• The first MMOs (and, by extension, the first online games in general)
• Devil May Cry
• Resident Evil
• Ico
• Yume Nikki
• Metal Gear Solid
• Parappa
• Vib-Ribbon
• Actually, Dark Souls
• And Deus Ex too, by the way

Doom and the groundwork it laid basically birthed the FPS as we know it today. Same for Mario 64 with the 3D Platformer. Yume Nikki helped shift the perception of what a game could do without a single word of story or dialogue. Metal Gear Solid expanded that perception in the other direction, showing how games could learn from other artforms while still retaining its identity as a game (not to mention the series being the progenitor and icon for the stealth genre.)

Dark Souls gameplay is exactly why it "ascended into gaming culture," what are you talking about? The game revolves around you exploring and understanding the world around you instead of the world revolving around you, which, by the way, the entire point of the game and the thesis it pushes is "the world will exist with or without you, do not try to change the current of fate for your own sake," and it does that with minimal dialogue. Wow! Gameplay can communicate ideas to the player directly? Who woulda thunk?

Deus Ex is literally famous for being extremely innovative. If you ask, like, anyone about it, that's the first thing they'll say about it. It literally won innovation awards at two separate events. It's the primo example of the immersive sim. Come on.

This one just shows you don't respect games as an artform and also secondarily that you don't know what you're talking about. Treating gameplay as a direct parallel to cinematography in film just does not work at all. Gameplay is much more akin to prose than it is to cinematography, in the sense that both gameplay and prose serve directly to inform and convey the experience of the art itself. Good prose can't save a book with bad structure, but a book absolutely requires good prose in order to be a good book.

Even within that comparison, though, gameplay is distinct, because crafting very mechanically tight and "good feeling" (for lack of a better term) gameplay can be the central point of a game in a way that really good prose just can't do for a book (see a game like n++ for an example of what I mean.) This is because games are fundamentally just more tactile than film or books, and in that regard a more apt example is the visual arts. You wouldn't argue a painting needs good writing to be a good painting, right? No, because you'd be completely missing the point of painting as an artform. The direct communication of an idea to the viewer through visuals is potent enough to be an artform in itself. n++ is much more like Untitled (Red) than it is like Ulysses (and much more similar to those than Citizen Kane) but it's also nothing like any of those things because fundamentally it's its own thing, which is a video game.

Ultimately, equating "gameplay can be the centerpiece" to "not all games have to be art" completely misses why games are unique as an artform and, honestly, just reads as thinking games can only be vessels for art rather than art themselves (which, I mean, that's what you directly state when you call a game a sandwich with a filling. What an awful metaphor that you constructed your piece around.) It's a disrespect to the medium. If you just want games that are books or movies, good news! Books and movies already exist. Games are their own thing and your thinking of what makes good movies simply can't be mapped to them the way you want it to. This kind of thinking is how we end up with more God of War reboots and TLoUs than n++es and Dooms and VVVVVVs and Ape Outs and Yume Nikkis and Hotline Miamis and things that just fundamentally take more advantage of what makes games unique.

tl;dr you thought that it was developers that didn't understand that games are art because they can be like movies, but it was actually you that didn't understand games are art in a way that making them like movies betrays! ha HA!