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I don't think I should stop playing video games, but I feel like, as consumers, as writers, we take them too seriously. In our frantic attempts to legitimize the hobby to everyone else, we push it too far. There are countless pieces on how video games make more money than every other industry ever, and how if you laid all the $20 bills used to purchase Call of Duty end to end, they'd stretch to Saturn and back. Any game with even a whiff of artistic integrity gets held up as a poster boy for video games as art. We freak out over 2D platformers making rudimentary attempts at portraying a theme beyond "shoot this lad's mouth off." Why are we so desperate to prove ourselves to "non-gamers"?Most of these trends are largely harmless, but I worry about writing that positions games as a panacea for mental and emotional issues. When writing about games as an ally against the forces of mental illness, we need to be more careful. An example of this done well is a 2013 piece by Dan Douglas called "Playing The Pain Away" for Midnight Resistance, which won a Games Media Award in 2013. You can see that Dan is very careful not to position video games as the entire solution to his recovery, and highlights where they can be counter-effective. He does indicate where and how they are useful, however, and I have a story of my own to contribute.Instead of counting my breaths and working out what shade of mauve my aura is, I had "jab, jab, pile-driver; jab, jab, pile-driver."
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