Yeah but gameplay pretty much comes down to "how the game plays"
It's the core of the game, where things such as sound and graphics don't fit.
Some people don't care about the graphics and such, so the gameplay is what compels them to get a game. As in what you do in the game, and how it works.
Unless you can think of a better term for it, gameplay works fine
QUOTE
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 sprouting nonsense like "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 is just as pointless as saying "The most important part of a movie is the moviewatch".
In closing, I'd like to quote a friend of mine who works as a game designer, and who will remain anonymous for reasons soon to become obvious.
As a designer, I dislike the word gameplay mostly on the basis that it's extremely vague and is the easiest "get out of jail free" card that a higher-up can use to not describe why it is he doesn't like the thing you just did. The problem with it is that it has different meanings to everyone, and mostly it boils down to "it is, or it's not, like my favourite game in some way". Some people maintain that gameplay is about controls, or A.I., or mechanics, or a balance of all of the above, but none of this is useful. I try to avoid using the term as much as possible, and instead go for a variety of much more specific terms, like mechanic, loop, system, world, rule, mode, flow, object, behaviour, and others, to get people describing exactly what the problem is.
This approach sometimes works, but often it doesn't because the person reporting the problem is simply too used to saying "the gameplay's wrong" and then pointing out extremely minor things that they see as wrong, many of which have nothing to do with the design (a favourite example being the exec producer who told me that the gameplay was wrong because he didn't like a particular explosion effect), waving their arms around like idiots, or using truly inane corollary examples.
So there you have it. If you are involved with games on a regular basis you stand to gain a lot by crossing out this useless word from your vocabulary, and replacing it either with the word 'game', or with more specific ones such as: mechanics, controls, level design, etc., as appropriate.
Woof!
(I agree with this parse of text right here!)
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