Like most high-schoolers in the early 1980s, I spent a fair amount of time at the video arcade.

My favorite games were "Tempest" and "Centipede." If those games were occupied, though, I'd occasionally pop a quarter into "Ms. Pac-Man."

After successfully navigating through two screens, there would be a little break in the action.

It was a little love story, which began: "Act 1: They meet." Subsequent chapters were shown after I completed more levels (which wasn't often).

Unfortunately, in the intervening three decades, video games haven't progressed much beyond "Ms. Pac-Man's" little romance in the fine art of storytelling.

I know this statement will make hardcore gamers angry. Gamers take their games quite seriously, as I was reminded when I reviewed the movie "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" (an adaptation of a popular video game) and declared that storytelling — whether in a film or even in a theme-park ride — have "a beginning, a middle and an end," while video games "only have a beginning and a middle."

Here's one typical comment from The Salt Lake Tribune's website: "What video games has Mr. Means played? Even the original Super Mario Bros. had an ending."

I'm not the only film critic to find himself at war with gamers. Roger Ebert has been battling them since 2005, when he opined that video games can never be a serious art form like movies or literature. "There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control," Ebert wrote.

This is the same argument — about "authorial control" — that prompts me to say video games do not tell stories.

The Tribune's TV critic and tech columnist, Vince Horiuchi, disagrees with me on this. (He sits in the cubicle opposite mine, so we have opportunity to disagree over a lot of things.) He tells me that video games do tell stories, because their designers create scenarios and characters that are compelling and relatable.

That may be, but creating the setting for a story compares to storytelling the way a blueprint compares to a building.

Telling a story requires a storyteller, and video-game designers surrender that role to the game player. The player is presented with choices in the narrative, to go left or right. With each choice, the narrative changes, so the ending (should the player survive to reach it) will be different.

That may make for satisfying game play, not to mention repeat business. But it's not telling a story.

There are games that have only one path to the conclusion. Such games don't give us stories to cherish but mazes to solve, and the game-play is incidental to the narrative. They are not too far removed from the preschool TV show "Blue's Clues," and the scenes where Steve looks at the camera and asks "Do you see a clue?" — the game will go on, whether the preschooler at home shouts at the screen or not.

Video games can be fun, diverting and entertaining. They can even be beautiful. But no video game — and I'm sure gamers will quote title after title to me — delivers a complete story. They deliver the building blocks of a story, and leave the rest to the player's imagination.

Sean P. Means writes the Culture Vulture in daily blog form, at blogs.sltrib.com/vulture