And this is where the positive use of “video-gamey” becomes especially frustrating. Pragmata is praised in many reviews this way because it feels good to play and because these systems click in a “satisfying” way. But instead of explaining that alignment the language at our disposal stops at recognition and calls it a virtue. You could perform the exact same appraisal after watching some videos of Pragmata. “Video-gamey,” then, is not analysis. It is identification. It’s safe. Nobody has ever been wrong about a video game being a video game. It reports back the obvious and leaves the work untouched. Our task is not to point at mechanics, but to account for what they do. Not to say that a game feels like a game, but to show how it feels at all.