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CONCLUSION
Video
Game Studies is hardly a discipline yet, but moods are changing.
New Media theorists seem ready to take on the multifaceted mode
and eek out a place for it in their research. Still, turning toward
the academic world for guidance on gaming doesn't seem quite natural
(despite the position as player of most video game researchers).
Being a highly intimate medium about which users tend to feel
passionately, it is difficult for one to abandon the pleasure
of playing and enact a serious critique. Perhaps the most helpful
angle through which to approach video games is reception studies.
By understanding the personal connections with the medium - how
certain individuals interact - we may be able to alter the many
misconceptions about it. Interfacing with the game machine is
never just that. It is a sexual stimulant; it is a social stimulant.
It is an acting out of aggression; it is a training simulation.
It is an escape from the constraints of time; it is in an ego
boost. It is a connection with the youth generation; it is an
alienation from it. I have isolated my greatest concern with gaming
as its allowance to be consumed as if it were a movie. The two
forms are far removed from one another, yet it is not an appraisal
of their worth that I feel disconnects them: they are both media
which greatly impact culture. They are separated by the practices
they engage in (simulation or representation), but the consumer
does not separate them as such in practice. Allowing them to take
up the same cultural space and praising their similarities undermines
the true worth of video gaming. The industry perpetuates this
confusion which is directly responsible for both a lack of great(er)
innovation in the medium, and of its rejection by much of society.
When interactive media is accepted as just that, and heralded
for it, we will stop collectively writing it off as a child's
toy, and aim to fuller understand the potential changes it puts
forth.
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