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Notes -
You had to add on a whole lot of details to the chess example, though. What about someone who has only ever played chess in private against bots and continues to do so indefinitely? Do such people exist? How would we know? I certainly know that I play some single player computer games like that, in ways that literally no other human being on Earth knows that I've played that game, which means that I leave behind no evidence that I played these games regardless of social validation. And my stating that I play games like that could serve as a proof-by-construction that I actually played those games out of a desire for social validation, as a way to have something like this in my back pocket to bring up as an example in a social interaction with someone else.
To me, your analysis seems isomorphic to those who claim that literally everything is political, on the basis that, no matter what topic they're given, they're able to use some chain of logic to connect it to some form of politics. If the bar to cross for being "political" is that someone can make a logical chain that connects it to politics, then the term "political" becomes vapid. Likewise, if all that takes for someone playing some game to be "about social validation" is that you can create some logical chain that explains how that person could be influenced by social validation in some indirect way connected to the game, then "being about social validation" becomes vapid.
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