If you don't know who John Scalzi is I will help you rectify that sad state of affairs right now.  He's an excellent science fiction author who broke onto the scene in 2005 with Hugo-nominated Old Man's War.  The novel is classic military sci-fi, and has been compared favorably to both Halderman's Forever War while Scalzi himself is touted as the second-coming of Robert Heinlein, but it has been updated for modern readers who are a bit more cynical and demanding than the audience of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi.  Scalzi followed up Old Man's War with a couple of worthy sequels and also branched off into other types of sci-fi including the humorous novel The Android's Dream and the much-ancticipated Red Shirts.  

So Scalzi is sort of a big deal.

This made me really interested when he brought up the topic of first-person shooters on his blog.  He's been doing an advent calender for Thanksgiving during November, and for day 13 he is thankful for first-person shooter games.  I was especially interested in one of the reasons he gave for his love of FPSs:

The second reason: First person is far more immersive for me than the games in which the player is represented by an entity onscreen, whether it’s a person or a spacecraft of a ball of goo or whatever. When I play a video game, I don’t really want to play as Mario or Lara Croft or Desmond Miles or Niko Bellic or whomever. I want to play as me. Now, in first person games you’re still often supposed to be someone else, like Gordon Freeman or Master Chief or Chelle. But in point of fact you’re playing the game from the point of view of you— eye level with no object in the way of interfacing with and navigating through the game world. The characters can call me Gordon Freeman all they want; I know I’m me.

Scalzi goes on to applaud the strength of writing in recent FPS titles:

These days it’s more unusual for a shooter not to have a story than to have one, and these stories are often as engaging as any you’ll find in a novel — not in the least because game studios are now frequently following Valve’s lead and hiring science fiction novelists to plot out their stories.

FPS titles still have a long way to go before they reach their potential, I think.  And the trend isn't all good on that front: plenty of high-end FPS games still tack on a single-player campaign as an afterthought.  (Battlefield 3, anyone?)  The FPS framework can be a means to multiple ends.  A game like BF3 doesn't necessarily need a strong single-player experience, since the primary emphasis is on games in the sense of competitive events.  But, like Scalzi, I believe that one of the strengths of the genre is the ability to tell compelling stories.  Even fantastic games like Bioshock that really push the envelope of story telling still haven't come close, I think, to reaching the pinnacle of what the genre is capable of.