I can always comprehend this stance at the surface level but it’s always said as if playing vanilla playthroughs is the only way to engage with a game.
If you said you needed to be playing competitive or speedrunning yourself to be a fan of a game’s competitive scene or speedrunning scene, two subsets of a game as relevant as vanilla playthroughs, you’d get met with confusion. If I said you had to play a game’s story mode to be a fan of the story mode, I would get a standing ovation. 🙃
I feel like if you have to bend the objective definition of “fan” to keep the logic congruent, it’s not an actual consistent point. And no, watching a playthrough is not…in any way shape or form…comparable to straight up not watching a movie…why is that take so popular?
You watch movies, you read books, you play games. How hard is it to understand not engaging with the medium you call yourself a fan of is considered larp