“The whole game is optional” is a nugget of Twitch wisdom that has been passed down for generations.

Or maybe it’s an offhand comment Spleebie made sometime, I don’t know.

I heard it on concision’s stream during a discussion about Factorio, and analysis of which strategies are required to beat it, and which are optional.

On the one hand, I fully understand and appreciate the idea that this pithy phrase is intended to convey. But on the other, I don’t believe I fully agree with it. And I thought that it merits additional discussion.

The idea is simple – people play games to enjoy them, and they have agency to decide how they want to enjoy them. Especially for single-player games, people can do whatever the heck they want with them. They can choose to figure things out on their own or get help, they can choose an easy difficulty setting or a hardcore one, they can put in cheat codes.

More to the point – they can choose to do these tasks and forego those tasks, and they can choose… Not to play the game at all. The whole game is optional. As such, it is not useful to refer to some parts of the game as “optional” and others not.

Perfectly sensible. But there is something missing, and I’ll describe it from my own point of view.

I, too, play games to enjoy them, and at least a part of my enjoyment is the sense of a shared experience with other people. If a game is meaningful to me (as many are), I take comfort in knowing that there others for whom the game is also meaningful, that enjoyed the same experiences that I did, that I can talk with them about those experiences.

It makes my gameplay a part of something bigger, and satisfies the basic human need for connection. For me, in particular, my most natural way to connect to others is through games. It’s what drew me to watch streams on Twitch, and eventually stream myself.

But for any of this to work, there actually needs to be a shared experience.

Imagine the following – I meet someone who says they played and enjoyed The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, one of my favorite classic games, and the most popular one in my Twitch circles. I enthusiastically start chatting about the game, and quickly discover that they have never made it past the Zelda escape in the beginning of the game, or even entered the castle. They just had fun walking around in the rain with Link’s character, swordless and shieldless, throwing around bushes and talking with guards that block access, but otherwise are not yet hostile.

It’s great that that player enjoyed doing this. Good for them. But their experience of the game and mine have almost nothing in common. There’d be virtually nothing for us to talk about, and no way we can truly connect over the game.

I’d expect a player who professes to have played ALttP to at least have beat Ganon, or come close to it. That way I can know that they enjoyed the same things I did. It’s less important to know that they 100%ed or accessed secret rooms.

So I claim that it is, in fact, useful to demaracate some parts of the game as optional, and some as a core part of the experience that anyone who has played it should be expected to be exposed to. Just so that we know where we stand and who it is we are interacting with.

Mind you, “expected” is not the same as “obligated”. If anyone wishes to ignore such-and-such parts of the game, by all means, do so. But you should be prepared to be the odd one out, and expect difficulties connecting with others regarding the game.

The whole game is optional, but if you do opt to play it, you would do well to actually play it.