Overall this article was insightful and interesting, however there is one quote on page 197 that I very much disagree with. “Ironically, the reader paging through the Balzac or Dickens, or, for that matter, Judith Krantz, has entered into roughly the same immersive state, enjoying the same high, continuous cognitive load, as the runty kid firing fixedly away at Space Invaders“. While I do attend to the fact that the first video games had a more fixed nature, similar to that of a book, I strongly feel that the immersive quality about that is/was much greater then the simple reading of text. Now don’t get me wrong, I do think that reading can be very immersive and encompassing however, the physicality of a video game, the actual movements that are required to be part of the interactive catapult the video in the immersive score far beyond that of a novel.

Also in this article is a quote by Csikszentmihalyi on the idea of “flow” in video games. The idea that we become completely absorbed and lose sense of self, time, and reality become distorted. I see evidence of this every-time a friend or family member beings to play a video game that they enjoy. It is an alternate reality that allows the person playing to escape from the constraints, responsibilities, etc. of their usual life. It takes them away and lets them be someone else for a while, with different problems (or none at all) different expectations, different everything if they so choose. It can be very freeing and tieing this into religion, acts as a sacred space or ritual in that it removes them from the profane mundane ordinary everyday life.