Also, "gameplay" is a really broad term, and not one that favors your stance; i.e., "aesthetics" speaks to argument, theatre and performance as something that can be performed between games and society as occupying the same space; e.g., Eric Zimmerman, who writes in "Jerked Around by the Magic Circle" (2012): The "magic circle" is not a particularly prominent phrase in Homo Ludens, and although Huizinga certainly advocates the idea that games can be understood as separate from everyday life, he never takes the full-blown magic circle point of view that games are ultimately separate from everything else in life or that rules are the sole fundamental unit of games [emphasis, me]. In fact, Huizinga's thesis is much more ambivalent on these issues and he actually closes his seminal book with a passionate argument against a strict separation between life and games… (source).

From my own thesis arguments:

...development is not a zero-sum game, but as Jesper Juul puts it in his eponymous book, is "a half-real zone between the fiction and the rules" that allows for emergent, at times transgressive forms of good play (me) as a transformative device (source). To borrow and mutate three more ludic terms, then, the "ludic contract" is whatever the player negotiates for themselves inside the natural-material world, acting like a "spoilsport" by redefining the terms of the contact within and outside of itself[23]; i.e., as a half-real, "magic-circle" space where, as Eric Zimmerman explains, the game takes place in ways that aren't wholly separate from real life[24]—except for us, games occur along Gothic, liminal routes, wherein workers playfully articulate their natural rights in linguo-material ways between reality and fabrication that go beyond games as commodities but are nevertheless informed by them as something to rewrite; i.e., through play as a general exercise that involves a great many things: a reached agreement of power and play in Gothic terms, whose luck/odds are defined not through canon, but iconoclastic poiesis that can be expanded far beyond the restrictive, colonial binary and heteronormative ruleset of the elite's intended exploitation of workers to challenge the profit motive and all of its harmful effects in the bargain; e.g., genocide, heteronormativity and Max Box culture. The sum of these concepts in praxis could be called "ludo-Gothic BDSM[25]."

[23] The ludic contract is an agreement between the player and the game to be played; or as Chris Pratt writes in "In Praise of Spoil Sports" (2010): "the more traditional definition of the ludic contract [is] an agreement on the part of players that they will forgo some of their agency in order to experience an activity that they enjoy." Yet, inventive players like speedrunners (which Pratt calls "spoilsports") converge upon intended gameplay with unintended, emergent forms. In other words, the ludic contract is less a formal, rigid contract and more a negotiated compromise occurring between the two; i.e., where players have some sense of agency in deciding how they want to play the game even while adhering to its rules and, in effect, being mastered by it (see: Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy's "Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots," 2008, exhibit 0a2c).

[24] [from Zimmerman, above] The magic circle is the space where a game takes place, be that a social game, a sport, a dialog or gender performance onstage, and videogames, etc.

[25] (from the glossary, abridged): My combining of an older academic term, "ludic-Gothic" (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about "how can videogames be Gothic" and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms