Elden Ring showed the risks involved in allowing players to race past enemies and skip large expanses of virtual territory to engage in a boss battle for which you are not, perhaps, fully prepared. Yes, there is a sense of illicit excitement involved in sidestepping a game designer’s meticulously crafted play arc. As the people behind a thousand successful YouTube channels know, everyone loves to break apart a videogame and gain a forbidden advantage. But there are dangers to designing in ways that allow for players to skip significant portions of the work: they might miss key information, overlook useful items, or simply lose out on experience that is essential to prepare them for the forthcoming fight.