Why It's Okay That Someone Hasn't Played Your Favorite Game

gameinformer.com:

At the end of every year, gamers are faced with an undeniable fact: far too many video games are released in a 12-month span for anyone to reasonably play them all. It's literally my job to play video games and I bet someone could fill a reasonable top ten this year of titles I didn't even get time to touch. But even as it's a universal, undeniable truth, the revelation that you missed out on something popular is always met with the same incredulous statement.

“You've never played this?”

I understand the impulse. For instance, Baldur's Gate 3 took up so many hours of my 2023 that it's hard to fathom what the year would be like without it. This sentiment extends well beyond GOTY talks, though – some games are so fundamental to our taste or upbringing that it can be hard to process that people who did it differently exist. There are people who have never played a Zelda game or a Halo game, and I bet if you asked a middle school crowd, plenty of them have never played Wii Sports. But personally, any shock I experience is quickly overwritten by excitement. If someone I'm close to has never played one of my favorite games, then I get to do something even better than replaying it; I get to watch them experience it for the first time.

The earliest examples of this are undoubtedly tied to my relationship with my younger brother, Andre. A 6-year-old can't play games as well as an 8-year-old, so sometimes it would be a few years before he would experience a single-player game. While I probably initially watched him because he was playing games on the only TV we had, it eventually became a fun way to reexperience games I held near and dear to my heart.

Fast forward ten years or so. As I'm about to go to college, I buy a PlayStation