Theres a provocative article in the June issue of the consistently excellent Edge magazine, which argues games are not a storytelling medium.  Tadhg Kelly, of the What Games Are blog, says that the power gamers have to shape events in this medium detracts from the impact that such events would have in any other; in a non-interactive medium, such as film or TV, we watch events over which we have no control affect characters who have developed without our input.  Stories successfully told in such a medium have their impact because we, as passive observers, are made to care about those characters this is drama. 

In a video game, theres a sense of dissonance if one of my allies is at risk of death constantly during gameplay, and I protect him or her throughout, only to have him or her die in a cutscene as part of the plot.  One feels it should have been in ones power to prevent this, since it has been throughout the game.  Mr Kelly argues that games, given their intrinsic limitations and possibilities, work best as neutral depictions of significant or awesome (thaumatic) moments that the player is left to interpret.  This does seem to me more faithful to the interactive nature of games; the player moves events along, therefore perhaps it should be the player who decides the meaning of those events.

A personal example (Mass Effect spoilers): I destroyed the Collector Base at the end of Mass Effect 2, but not for the reasons the game assumes I did.  Shepard argues the bases technology is an ethical abomination and that humanity should find a way to stop the Reapers without it, but the Reapers have been presented as such a massive threat that, frankly, I wouldve been happy to use the base against them had I the option of turning it over to the Alliance.  I destroyed the base because the alternative was giving it to the Illusive Man, who by that stage was clearly an unhinged megalomaniac who was manipulating me.  I destroyed the base not because I objected to its existence, but because I distrusted the Illusive Man.  Yet when Shepard defends his (my) actions to him, he gives his (not my) justification for them.  That jarred.

And yet I think Mass Effect is a fantastic series for observing player agency and making it matter.  I think its mostly very successful in doing so, and I think thats one of the most important aspirations for designers: the capacity for games to take player agency and give it material consequences is whats unique about games as a medium, and maximising this capacity should be one of our major concerns.  Tadhg Kelly is essentially arguing that this capacity cant be reflected in a complicated storyline, and that consequently the best game stories are simplistic. 

My housemate and I have just discovered XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and have had great fun over the last two weeks customising our soldiers and even inventing the stories behind their nicknames.  I was heartbroken on my Classic Ironman playthrough to lose Major Oliver Merlin Williams, so-named for his near-magical healing powers.  Im sure Mr Kelly would call that sense of loss a thaumatic, rather than dramatic, experience, because his context was left to me to create.

And though Id agree with him, Id still very much like to believe that games are capable of placing me in the middle of a complicated story.  Id like to be given a rich fantasy or sci-fi world to explore, populated with complicated characters and factions, and within that world Id like to make my own decisions for my own reasons, with my choices in each playthrough spawning one of numerous rich endings.  Itd be a tremendous challenge, requiring a huge team of writers and a great deal of commitment from a large cast of voice actors, but this vision is not technically impossible. 

It is probably, however, practically impossible, and moreover the effort of producing all that content is unnecessary when, if Mr Kelly is right, games are at their best when theyre thaumas not interactive dramas.  That said, I dont share the implicit conclusion that all games should be this; at the end of his piece in Edge, Mr Kelly challenges game writers to write fiction without plot, deliver an impression of a character without context and make me feel the games tense situations without telling me I should, yet he cites the players hatred of Sephiroth as an example of the kind of thaumatic moment upon which he suggests games should focus.  I would argue hatred of Sephiroth comes very much from his context, his evil schemes, and especially his actions with respect to Aeris whom players have been protecting throughout the game, yet are ultimately powerless to save.  Indeed it was exactly this example I had in mind when, in the opening paragraph of this piece, I mentioned the sense of dissonance caused by having a companion unavoidably killed as a plot element when the player has previously been able to protect them from similar threats.

To me this suggests that nothing should ever be off the table in game design.  Journey is full of thauma no plot, no context, but a vibrant and gorgeous setting that has clearly seen a lot of history.  Its a fantastic game, but so is Final Fantasy VII, which is full of drama: dialogue, plot, exposition, the lot.  The industry is big enough to explore both avenues in design, and to continue its experiments in mixing the two the thought that a consensus should form around one or the other is an uncomfortable and limiting one to me.  Its great that Mr Kelly is highlighting the unique possibilities of games, but he shouldnt dismiss their ability to implement, complement and even develop the traditional devices of drama.

The pro-gun lobby in the United States likes to say that "guns don't kill people; people kill people". This is true, but irrelevant: the point is that people who want to kill other people find it much easier to do so when they have a gun.

This is the point that those in favour of gun control, and those who want to defend our hobby, should keep making. The gun lobby is trying to reframe the debate as a discussion about what causes people to become violent and disturbed: why do people seem towantto kill people? The answers, we hear from various quarters, range from violent video games, movies or rock songs, to inadequate diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, to drugs that induce depression and psychotic rage as side effects.

Neither side of the debate has covered itself in glory here, with the gun lobby's disingenuous attempts to blame everything but the guns, and their opponents for letting them. You'll notice in all his interviews with representatives of the pro-gun lobby, available in the links below, Piers Morgan fails to make the point I make above.

The gun murder rate in the UK is lower than it is in the USA because guns are much harder to obtain. The fact that the UK's violent crime rate is higher is, if anything, an argument in favour of tighter gun control: if Britain is more violent than America, but its per capita gun murder rate so much lower, then its control laws work.

The gun lobby sometimes says that people can kill other people with knives, too, and that you wouldn't try to ban them. Actually, some places do: in the UK it's an offence to carry a knife with a three-inch blade in public without a reason better than "self-defence". Furthermore, knives have a function other than killing; I can cut a steak or butter my bread with a knife; I can't with a gun. Guns are explicitly designed to kill other living things, which is why they are so good at doing so: they do it at range, and automatic weapons with large magazines do so very quickly. None of these things is true of knives, nor of video games, nor of almost anything else the gun lobby has tried to blame.

Regardless of whether or not games make people more violent - and as Gamespot has showed, the evidence that they do is spurious at best - you wouldn't pick them or any of these other scapegoats over a gun if you wanted to pick the best tool for killing as many people as possible.

It's pointless to condemn America's gun culture, as do many foreign observers of the debate; it's not going away. But it's important that the gun lobby isn't allowed to have the debate on its own terms, or to scapegoat the games industry and other businesses that are nothing to do with America's gun murder rate. If you're anti-gun and are having this debate with your friends, don't let them get away with blaming individual psychology alone, and if you're pro-gun, base your argument on the merits of gun ownership itself. I'm sceptical of the value of guns for self-defence and defence against the government, but it seems to me the gun lobby is at least engaging with the real issues here rather than trying to place blame where it doesn't belong.

Postscript: a small cross-section of the gun control debate in the last few months can be seen in the following YouTube videos, which have prompted me to write this post:NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre's speech in response to the Sandy Hook massacre,Piers Morgan and activist Jesse Ventura on gun control after the Colorado cinema shooting, Morgan's interview withLarry Pratt, Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, which prompted a petition to deport him by radio host Alex Jones,who Morgan also later interviewed.