crazy is just a setting on a dishwasher

i think like 5 years ago I cared a lot if someone was a fan of a game that they had never played it but now I think it's kind of just a "who cares" issue - I just think sometimes you have to be specific with your wording when chatting with other fans of something like "do you PLAY x" or "do you LIKE x." Largely I just worry that the idea of someone being a "true fan" ties into ideologies of elitism and becomes a competition of who has given more of themselves to the product, like it's this dumb pissing contest of "those guys only played game 3, while I played game 1 2 and 3" . Games are just so multifaceted and so different than every other form of media that they become this weird thing where I think if you are just drawing fanart of your favorite scrimblo kissing the other scrimblo from the game that's like totally fine.

This kind of ties into the difficulty argument that we go thru everytime a kind of hard game comes out and there's saying I do like albeit a bit dismissive which is "you control the buttons you press" and it's a saying that refers to difficulty is all self imposed and largely just what you feel satisfies your feeling of "finishing" something - bullethells in particular the game ends when you beat the last boss, like any game. But they also allow for players to continue endlessly when they die, but there's a part of the community that does what is called a 1CC or the one credit clear where you complete the game in one credit with only 3 lives and NOT continuing on death --- I think asking "did you beat this game" becomes kind of a matter of opinion when you ask how they did it, if someone quarter feeds the machine to get thru the game in a single sitting versus the person who spent like 200 hours practicing the 1CC both answer the question they might both say yes or no, but then you can also ask the guy who not only 1CC'd the game but also did it on the hardest difficulty and so much of what is "beating the game" quietly becomes this arbitrary finish line that I think you yourself just have to decide