LOST...not the show

Understanding Gaming culture is as complicated as programming the games themselves and one of the biggest obstacles in aquiring knowledge about video games and studying the intertextual and peritextual elements of the field is the gaming tradition which is deep rooted in years of experience and breeds generatons of experts and dialogue. Especicially, the current young generation of college and more importantly post graduate students who have began there interaction with video games with the original Nintendo circa 1985 and continue on with their experience with the Nintendo Wii. Their are 22 years of developpment of games, versions, consols, characters, and players, all of which are subject to familiarity as either mentioned directly or indirectly within other games or media types such as cartoons or TV shows. This may be one of the reasons we have finally turned our attenton to textual studies within video games becasue of the numerous years of changes and recorded games and its "accessories" or the peritextual elements which document a developing gaming culture which adds to shaping current social elements and is also a result of today's values. For example, now that the Holocaust is over and even native Germans who once supported the Nazi regime accept its immorality, games like Resistance have come into being. I was first introduced to the game as "it's like WW II except the Nazis are now aliens and the American regiment left but only one troop got left behind." Textually speaking, this refernce may be nothing but a foundation upon which the creators formed their own plot line but when one views this game it is ignorant to ignore the issue of its nature, first person shooters and with that one is automatically linked to the chronology of development of first person shooters and in comparing the old to the latest to the future, a level of familiarity along with DETAILED experience is needed to mention not the obvious but the subtle changes throughout the games as a result of years of tracking these kinds of games. The issue I wish to surface here is the availbalilty and accessability of textual studies of any text in terms of their dependence to the actual work themselves and how such an esoteric group can be prevented from becoming elitists as we sometimes see Shakespeare scholars segregate themselves. There is a potential of a generation of uniqe first time experts on video games to slowly come into being and it is important to be as inclusive as professionally and productively possible to generate meaningful and relevent dialogue to the audience of the textual studes within a specific field as video games to prevent the displacement of the majority of the next generation of players who wil not be familiar with the earlier versions of games or consols and may feel lost in a hopeless effort to reconnect to the foundation of games.