Hello again!
'event' is indeed a global - however, I don't know where exactly I would put it if it weren't a global - I suppose the gameStates object?
Admittedly I am bad with error-checking; I'll try doing that and see where it gets me.
Also, I didn't know you could use return; in a void function, how cool!
EDIT: I fixed it; it was a channel problem. However, I do believe some good error checking would have saved me some time - I think next week my goal will to be to refactor/error check my code 
thanks again!