Modern video games are a superior storytelling medium to books, cinema, and the spoken word.

Well you made the standards kinda high by typing so much. All well, here I go! My argument is rather simple. Many video games, if not most, the game-play is made more important then that of story telling. Many games that are out don't even have a plot! As Pro says, video games tend to be more interactive, and one could learn easier by doing interactive things over not. My argument against this is that, studies show that interactive teachings do work better then non-interactive ones. But people tend to play games for the fun of it, many people, if not most, don't even put a thought forth into the plot. They tend to be more mesmerized by the game-play and 'fun' aspects. Due to this the plot isn't nearly as easily seen by the 'gamers' in comparison to those who were to read a book or watch a movie. In books or movies, the plot is practically the main thing that you're reading or watching it to see. The 'story telling' in it is made to be somewhat obvious and 'high tech' (foreshadowing, ect) Certainly more then games make it anyway. Video games may be the only thing that uses all of the possible learning methods in this discussion, but as I said before, it doesn't matter if one aspect greatly outshines the others. Pro states that with video games one can retain the 'moral lesson' easier, I'll keep the same argument to go against that. The only difference between this 'scope' the Pro talks about in his 2nd assertion, is that you'd generally be playing in a first person view. In my opinion that doesn't give video games an advantage in this topic. Video games have their way to show the scene and story, but so do books, movies, ect. I also want to state that books, and especially movies are better at expressing emotion then video games, which in a way can help them with their story telling. If you can empathize with the characters then you can have a much deeper understanding of what they do. Pro in his 3rd assertion goes into how video games define... everything pretty much. But again, I think that books and movies generally are equal in this way, if not better. They do it in a different way, but generally they put more detail and information into it, so in that way I see them as superior. In his 4th assertion he goes into how video games, in a scene, has different timelines (Using my own words, so hopefully I don't confuse you.) I say different timelines because you can pick a story by doing something in particular in your game and it would take you down one of a few story lines, or timelines. That's just an advantage of the 'first person view' type of thing that video games tend to give you. For one, it doesn't improve how they 'tell the story' it just give you more options. Secondly, books and movies just tend to have a different type of narrative, and that in no way makes them inferior, it just attracts a different audience perhaps. Pro makes the argument that that people don't tend to get addicted to things like books and movies, in comparison to video games. For one it doesn't support the topic of this debate. Two they're addicted to the game-play generally. A example 'MW3' Most people play the campaign once or twice, but then they generally play 10 times that time online. That's 100% unrelated to the plot. People play video games for fun, not the plot. With all of this said I'm comfortable to say that books and movies are not inferior to video games, especially in the 'story telling' aspect, and if anything, they're superior.