Videogames have established themselves as an entertainment industry giant. Year over year the industry achieves new highs in audience engagement and financial profit. Despite this, the wider public and professional academic community still hold negative bias toward gaming and gamers. We recognize that the consequences of these positions result in more difficulties in conducting research into gaming as well as the banalization of legitimate positive and negative outcomes that gaming may yield. Videogames are a clear and easily accessible source of entertainment, but we must ask ourselves what it is that makes them so attractive and engaging. Many frame videogames as a medium that is very similar to film, with an interactive dimension. With that in mind, we developed a simple typology of interactivity, split into four categories of interaction and two additional features which combined together attempt to explain videogames as a source of entertainment. In this paper we have presented established and emerging media theories and have attempted to establish connections and overlap between them, gaming and escapism. Escapism is the human need to temporarily withdraw from everyday routine and stress into some activity with the goal being rest and accumulation of energy, which is why we hold that videogames have become sources and destinations of escapism. This thesis involved conducting a focus group among five university-aged participants with which we attempted to gain insight into participants’ knowledge of escapism, their motivation to play, their preferences based in genre as well as what positive and negative outcomes they had experienced. Data obtained from the focus group was analyzed according to latent coding in hopes that we could extrapolate the participant experiences with the established theoretical framework presented earlier in this work. The focus group concluded that the participants had the characteristics of an active and critical audience and differentiated between positive and negative consequences of gaming as well as forms of self-regulation and circumstances that led them to and prevented the development of problematic gaming.