You don't need to be good at playing something to understand and appreciate the design behind it. Hell, I die way more than I should in Souls games, but I absolutely love the design philosophies and carefully crafted environments and atmosphere
And that's not a good critique. Said novel doesn't usually come with a dictionary to teach you those words, or include author's notes that help ease you into that style of writing. Plus you can still read the novel, just like you can still play the game.
My analogies always get picked apart. Stuff like movies and books, even if its themes and symbolism are up for interpretation, happens in a linear striaght forward line.
Games are far more interactive than other forms of media. Theres a lot more going on at any given time when the player input affects the progress. Whether you understood a scene in a movie or a complicated paragraph in a book, you can just skip that and proceed. Video games hit a roadblock if the player doesnt process what to do next. Thats where hints, markers and waypoints come in which are decisive themself.
Especially as games get more ambitious, open ended and technical, people will have varying degrees of playstyles and opinions. Once again not like movies or books where everyone experiences the same thing but comes out with a different interpretation. In video games a person can have different experiences which bring them to even more wildly different interpretations. These experiences are shaped by the players abilities, to name a few: hand-eye coordination, problem solving, situational awareness and analysis.
Not everyone has the same skillset or mindset and if a game requires more of a certain skillset or mindset which the player doesnt have or isnt willing to invest in, it will heavily influence their opinion of the game.
Take Uncharted 4 for example. Its a narrative focused game which is more of a slow burner. Its meant to be intimate with lots of quiet time to bond with characters. Because that is not the mindset I had coming from Uncharted 2 and 3, it heavily influenced my opinion of the game in a negative way. I wanted more of the exhilerating high octane action but because I didnt have the right mindset the game didn't click for me.
I can also tell you that some people go into a game absolutely trying to nitpick everything about it. I have a friend whose like this and getting him to try new games can be an absolutely miserable experience because he just sits there complaining instead of acknowledging the good parts. I brought over BotW for him to try out and he dismissed the game off the bat because the game uses the top face button to jump. Without even giving the game so much as a chance he had already dismissed it. A glass half full vs glass half empty situation.
. My response was motivated by people calling him an idiot or inferring things about jealousy or whatever. I think those reactions are totally out of place when watching any person's first interaction with a game, especially in an informal context like this. Knee-jerk reactions should not be evidence for *anything*, short of randomly dropping racial epithets.