There are positive Steam reviews, too, but many are facetious. Some customers are irate. Why the hell is the media so fascinated by this $1 game which advertises “no controls"—a game about a mountain that listlessly spins and talks about its feelings and collects detritus with little regard for the player? How is that interesting, or even a game, or worth any amount of money?

Mountain isn’t in an established genre and there’s no agreed-upon measurement for its success. There’s no lexicon of words like “tactical” and “immersive” to consult. Writers like it because it hasn’t been written about yet. Writers are looking for a story, and Mountain is a new story. It’s critically relevant, like an unusual pop music trend.

Dismissing Mountain as "a screensaver” is a valid criticism from a consumer with perfectly normal expectations about what a game should be. I don’t fault anyone for being disappointed by Mountain. It has no win or fail state—it’s only a ‘game’ because calling it an ‘ambient interactive experience’ feels ostentatious. But the writers praising it, myself included, don’t see Mountain solely as a $1 entertainment product: it’s a story about subverting game conventions, and the animator who worked on Her, and emotion, and big questions about existence and computers and mountains. It might even be more interesting to talk about than to play, and maybe that’s the point, and—see? Now I’m doing it.