Game Studies Year One

After reading Espen Aarseth's piece on the beginnings of game studies I feel confirmed in my stance towards games as an art form despite the majority of the points he made, in particular regarding how games differ from old media, being obvious and natural to me. This most likely because me being a new millennial and having grown up with games with them just existing like any other media despite it still being an emergent study. Also the fact that video games being the newest form of entertainment by a large margin may be part of the reason why critical study of games took a while to take hold. Games have been around commercially for nearly 40 years now and only by 2001 do we start to get a widely accepted critical study of them, and at the time of conception film and TV had an already well established critical consensus with music and literature having even more so.
Something brand new like gaming is strange especially compared to the status-quo, despite the natural progression of writing, to sound, to picture, to moving image and then encompassing all of the above and allowing an audience to interact with it. These multiple dynamics make games far more difficult to contextualize as a whole because games can be so broad. A film consists of having a narrative displayed with visuals and defined with audio. So three dynamics. Neglect in any of these aspects could sour the whole product. A film with bad writing is often considered a bad film, regardless of how good its visuals may be. Games however are slightly different as the interactive element of them may surpass this norm from old media. A game with poor writing, poor visuals and bad music may still be considered good if it is fun to play. Alternatively a game with very little interaction such as Dear Esther with excellent visuals and narrative may considered good also.
Games are ultimately the sum of their parts and one aspect may outweigh other negatives.