If TV fans are "watchers," does that make game players "doers"?

Over at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz reflected on a string on surveillance-themed TV shows and argues that our current obsession with live imagery has turned us into “watchers:”

Modern TV series reflect this, especially the shows that revolve around military action, national security, domestic crime and politics. These shows rely very heavily on surveillance and voyeurism. Their fixation is perfectly understandable; life itself is dependent upon surveillance, upon voyeurism, upon watching people you’ve never met live their lives on camera, unknowingly or knowingly.

It’s fascinating that the same can and can’t be said about game players. His argument that “our hunger for fresh images, fresh drama, is enabled not just by TV and Internet news but by the various sources of audio and video that feed TV and the Internet” is just as true for gamers as it is for everyone else, yet our ability to control our fate in those environments shifts the focus. We are privileged then that we are allowed some modicum of control over our game environments while other poor souls are bound to the linear formats of TV.

-Jamin Warren