If you care about games, you already know that some of the game industry’s biggest players headed to Washington today to meet with Vice President Joe Biden in a summit about gun violence. The industry was invited to talk about what it plans to do to reduce mass shootings in America — alongside the NRA, which is doubtless waiting expectantly for other people to assume responsibility for its business and culture.

You should not feel particularly good about this, even if you’re of the school of thought that thinks we have an obligation to “join the conversation.” Ian Bogost’s Atlantic article today is absolutely essential reading on the sad state of games’ relationship with policy-making; it considers Kris Graft’s fiery Gamasutra editorial yesterday alongside Casey Lynch’s widely-circulated counterpoint at IGN, and the IGDA’s arguably narrow-sighted letter to the vice president.

It’s a complicated state of affairs for sure, made moreso by our emotional relationship to our work and the strain of being repeatedly trotted out to answer for it every time a horror erupts. On one hand our commercial industry — to your average person our most visible and economically-powerful arm, still —  makes a good deal of its money participating in the systemic problem of the fetishization of guns and violence. If games are to be respected as a part of culture whatsoever, we don’t get to bury our heads in the sand.

On the other, entertaining the misguided dialogue whenever the possibility of a causal link between games and mass shootings is dragged out for the evening news is a depressing rejection of the breadth and nature of the work we do.

Today I published an interview with Games for Change co-president Asi Burak, who shared insights on how the landscape for games as tools of education, communication and social change has evolved since he released PeaceMaker, regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine, five years ago. I don’t expect the interview to crush traffic and comment records.

Burak tells me that despite increasing interest from nonprofits, government organizations and corporations in using games to communicate, educate and inspire, the interest and passion from the skilled game development community is harder to capture.

This is partially because there’s no money in it, and partially because devs seem more interested in more pure applications for their work — “pure” is Burak’s choice of descriptor, and mine is “either an ascetic devotion to design as discipline or a slavish devotion to ‘making cool entertainment’.”

PeaceMaker was groundbreaking because it offered people interested in an incredibly complicated conflict tools that they couldn’t get from the news or from any other medium — the opportunity to go hands-on with a variety of factors, and most importantly, to experience the issues from perspectives other than their own. It catalyzed education and conversation — Burak, a native Israeli, told me he spoke and collaborated with more Palestinians in his work on that game than he did over all his years in his homeland.

And in response to a request to take responsibility in a shattering tragedy, our industry executives are sitting at a table with the NRA and with an administration that sees them as little better than profit-obsessed nonsense-mongerers, a perspective it hasn’t adjusted no matter how many copies of Portal or Journey or we’ve tried showing them.

What do game makers really need to do here and now? The way to engage people who don’t understand what games can do is to show them. Really show them.

Here we have a complicated issue regarding arguably the 21st century’s most wide-reaching and relevant communication medium, and instead of using this medium they’ve mastered, game developers are writing angry blog posts and defensive comments.

Says Bogost in his article today: “If the White House is really interested in games, they could start using them as sophisticated communication tools to help break out of politics as usual, instead of using games as convenient rhetorical levers when the need arises.”

Who’s making that? Unfortunately, I wonder sometimes if people who make games are really interested in games.