Poetics alienation? Am i the only one?

The Laurel reading puts me in a quandary and on a soapbox.   I can't help but be sure that she is right in her thinking and I SO don't like it.  It is backward, it seems to me, and a case of the medium being the message and manipulating us malevolently (say that 5x fast).  What don't I like?  I am deeply uncomfortable with the way that the games suture the player into the narrative/drama.  I teach  this drama portion of the poetics in almost every semester precisely so that I can emancipate my students from it, after all the 20th century, in addition to birthing the concept of gaming, also gave us/me Brecht's Epic Theater and the Alienation Effect.    So it is all well and good that video games are organic with patterns, spectacle and of human origin but that is to be pitied, not admired. I am being facetious, yes, because I have my vices in narrative too, but is it a good thing that the narrative stream is so strong that we want to watch it or join it even as it washes us away?  Emotional manipulation without reflection on how we are being "played".  I admit that I'm in a mood about this...it's a puzzlement. I would like to be convinced that we know/think about what is happening to our brains as we play.  Peace.