Open any Reddit-story Short and you will most likely find gameplay footage underneath the voiceover: Minecraft parkour, Subway Surfers, someone driving in GTA. Almost every tool in this category ships it as a background option, and there is a decent reason it became standard.
There is also a reason we do not use it, and the two things are doing different jobs.
What gameplay footage is for
It is there to occupy the part of your attention that would otherwise decide to scroll. Constant motion, no narrative demands, nothing to interpret. It keeps the eye busy while the ears do the work.
That is a real mechanism and it is not stupid. If your story is mediocre, motion under it buys you seconds you did not earn.
But notice what it is not doing. It has no relationship to the story. The same footage sits under a wedding drama and a workplace revenge story without changing a frame. It cannot be funny, because it does not know what is being said.
What a reaction meme is for
A meme placed on the punchline of a specific line does something gameplay cannot: it makes the joke land twice. Once in the words, once in the image, at the same moment.
That is the entire mechanism of the format when it works. The story says "she moved me to the kids table", and the image agrees with you about how absurd that is. Two beats stacked on one line.
It also fails differently. Gameplay footage never lands wrong because it never lands at all. A meme in the wrong place is actively worse than no meme, because the viewer registers the mismatch. We have published ones that missed, latching onto a word instead of the joke, and a viewer told us so in a comment: "Ok i think that one not a meme." He was right.
The test that separates them
Watch a gameplay-background video twice. The second time, the footage is exactly as meaningless as the first.
Watch a well-matched meme video twice and the second pass is where you notice the images, because the first pass you were following the story. That is why the format gets replayed, and replays are a thing the Shorts feed pays attention to.
This is not an argument that gameplay backgrounds do not work. They demonstrably do; whole channels run on them. It is an argument that they are a floor rather than a ceiling: they stop the scroll and do nothing else, forever.
The practical cost of each
Gameplay footage is free and instant. Drop a clip under the audio and you are done.
Meme matching is the expensive one, which is why most tools do not attempt it properly. Finding the image that fits this line rather than this general topic is the part that takes a person thirty to sixty minutes an editor, scrolling through a folder of saved reaction images and trying them against the timeline. Tools that do attempt it usually place something related to the paragraph, which lands somewhere in the neighbourhood of the joke without hitting it.
That gap is the whole reason Memecut exists: the matching runs per line, against a library of real, recognisable memes, so the image arrives on the punchline rather than near it. It is not perfect, and we publish our own miss rate rather than claiming otherwise.
If you are choosing
Use gameplay if your priority is volume and your stories are interchangeable. It is fast, it is proven, and nothing about it will embarrass you.
Use reaction memes if you want the video to be funnier than the script is on its own, and you are willing to accept that some of them will miss. The format has a ceiling the other one does not, and the cost is that it can visibly fail.
What you should not do is use both. Motion under a meme is two things competing for the same second of attention, and the meme loses.