alt Hacker NewsGames unlike books can have depth in duration of playing. While possible to play a game for 500 hours and feel very different about it on hour 501 vs 51, while books (usually) do not deliver such a feeling. Thus "playing all the classics" has much more dimensionality and as a result, requires much more time than just literally playing it once through and being done.
Games work in very different ways. Some are narratives where unless you complete them it isn’t really true to say you’ve fully played them. Others are essentially skill-acquisition challenges - you don’t have to finish Sonic the Hedgehog or ‘beat’ Civilization to be able to say you’ve played them. And others are goalless sandboxes - the Sims or Minecraft, where what you get out of it depends entirely on what you put into it.