MRY
Wormwood Studios
This is all just raw say-so that makes no sense.MRY, games aren't a collection of toys, rides and knick-knacks for you pick and choose what you want to play with. I think this all comes from the misunderstanding that somehow "side content" means "have nothing to do with the rest of the game". While developers have treated it as such, it shouldn't be, it should still be a part of a larger whole. We don't pay for a ticket to an amusement park or museum, we pay for a whole game which we expect to be at least cohesive. The book analogy still works, like it always has - you don't pay for jumbled chapters and stories that don't have anything to do with one another and you can skip what you don't want. Unless it's The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and even that book's anachronistic chapters are still connected to each other.
The thing games are least like, or at least ought to be least like, are pre-defined, linear experiences meant to be undertaken the exact same way for every audience member from start to finish. Nothing about a book is like playing a game. There is no interaction, no choosing, and little diversity of activity. The defining quality of a game is that the player is in control (within the confines of the rules); that he chooses (among the options provided by the game); that the game responds to those choices. This essence is not in books. To find it in books requires you to take a view of reading that itself is like what zombra is talking about: in other words, to say that the reader will sometimes skim, sometimes pore over things, sometimes stop to ponder the imagery and implications and sometimes race right past them.
There is no perfect analogy between RPGs and ~RPGs because of that ~. But books are way off. While I think the defining traits of an RPG from a descriptive/cladistic standpoint if we're trying to differentiate between RPGs and adventure games, say, are trivia like HP and XP and GP and equipment, from a broad experiential standpoint the key thing about RPGs is that they present space through which you can move as you choose, encounters that you can approach using different skills, and a vast quantity of content that is locked by your choices (much of this content is trivial -- this combat formation vs. that combat formation, this helmet vs. that helmet -- but some of it is significant).
These factors make the most analogous things not books, which have no space, no choice, no variety, but various real-world spaces, whether we're talking about galleries, theme parks, or even hikes. A hike is a nice example, actually, because often it will have spurs and loops that you can choose to bypass, informational placards you skip, vistas where you can stop to look or not, and an endless depth of detail you can choose to engage with (say, using a book of local wildflowers) or bypass. At the same time, like an RPG, a hike often has a start and an end and a main "line." But if someone said to you, "I've given upon on hikes, there's just too much botany to study, too many placards to read, it just gets too boring," it would be a reasonable response, "You know, you could just skip those." And it would not be a reasonable reply, "But you've just proved hiking is stupid, if you're going to skip the flowers and placards why not just walk on a treadmill or better yet watch Thor: Ragnarok!" Nor would it be a reasonable reply, "Then the Forest Service should just pull up the placards and have only one kind of flower because it's too distracting."
I think we're on the same side even if we're disagreeing on the details -- your vacuuming post that follows is exactly how I feel. Some of what Zombra describes is a way of maximizing pleasure by skipping "generically" worthwhile parts (by which I mean, someone might reasonably like them), but much of the problem is that these parts are not generically worthwhile at all. It's more like saying, "Sure, there's trash all over the hiking trail, but if you train your eye to look past the trash, you can still enjoy the hike." The number of people who can maintain that discipline is slight, so the more reasonable thing is to scream at Forest Service to pick up the trash and to tell people to stop littering.