Get with the computer program! A boy plays video games at the Science Museum. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty
Here at the Guardian there are apparently only seven forms of arts and entertainment. Art itself, television, books, theatre, film, music and even the little old radio get a mention. There they are, at the top of your screen, the limit of our cultural world catalogued succinctly.
In a recent blog, Lindesay Irvine actively argued against the possibility of one of my favourite ways of telling stories - video games - ever being included in the categories on high. He warns against airport novelists cashing in on a generation of stoned, violence-obsessed morons. It's a stereotype that couldn't be further from the real artfulness possible in gaming.
Video games are, unlike the poppiest of music, still not something broadsheet newspapers feel comfortable treating as anything close to real art. If they feature at all in the review sections, it's on a half-page at the back written by someone who seems to have attended the Dick and Dom school for journalistic expression.
To adults who play sophisticated games regularly (such as those over at the Guardian's Gamesblog) it is an old contention that video games can be art, and tell a story in a way nothing else can. To everyone else, it seems madness to think those digitised and extra gory versions of Rambo IV could ever do anything subtle. OK, so there is a mountain of idiotic guff made into video games and most are the top sellers. But are the book charts any different?
When the popular novel was as new an idea as video games, the great and good were certain, as they were with early cinema, that no sophistication could come from this prose business, especially the sort of filth Samuel Richardson scribbled about.
They were proven wrong, as doubters will be about video games. As happened with comic books becoming graphic novels in the 80s, each year there are more developers willing to take risks with storylines, develop more complex moral situations and generally raise the bar so high that it's becoming plain ignorant for anyone interested in stories to ignore them.
Ragnar Tørnquist is the Neil Gaiman of the game world. His The Longest Journey series (two games so far) takes place over multiple universes, from a future - oddly iPodded - Earth to a fantastical but corrupt magic land.
The format Tørnquist employs allows him to mess with his audience's head. At one point, after playing for several hours in a normal world, your character is drugged in a nightclub and wakes to find herself on an infinite monotone surface, an old mansion creaking in the distance. Try to run towards it and it doesn't get any closer, but suddenly the ground beneath you cracks and a pit appears, sending you hurtling down through empty space. Moments like this make me wonder what will happen when a Beckett or a Kafka comes along in the game world.
Some of the most artistically (and commercially) successful video games of the last few years (the Half Life series and Oblivion) contain compelling stories, but I admit that, stripped of their interactivity, you'd be left with two pretty terrible books: sub Orwell and Tolkien respectively. They work because they make their world liveable and delude the player into thinking the pre-written plot has been their decision. Just imagine the potential for storytelling if a real present-day Orwell decided to use the video game format. Douglas Adams is probably the only real writer to seriously try. His attempt wasn't too successful, either artistically or commercially. But there'll be more.
The makers of Bioshock, released last year and designed by Ken Levine, have probably come closer to real art than anyone else so far. Bioshock is a terrible name: any sensible person would expect the idiotic. Instead, they get a game based around Promethean myths and the work of Ayn Rand, set in an abandoned art-deco Atlantis. It's outstanding, and about two-thirds of the way through makes a brilliant point about freedom of decision that could not be delivered using any other art form.
Lindesay laughed at the idea of a Martin Amis video game: I think it would be the first interesting thing he'd done in years. No one has yet attempted subtlety in games; the quiet drama of humble lives. Where's the video game version of Mr Phillips?
Instead, for games that don't have a weapon in sight we look to the early work of Lucasarts. The name is right: it remains the most genuinely artistic accomplishment in the Lucas empire. Tim Schafer produced for them time-travelling B-movie parody and surreal history lesson Day of the Tentacle, biker comedy Full Throttle and, greatest of all, Grim Fandango. Fandango was stunningly beautiful, taking the calaca style figures of the Mexican Day of the Dead and telling a four-year tale of the afterlife in which you get to play the grim reaper. More importantly, it was wonderfully, tightly and wittily written.
We need more real writers getting involved in making video games, not fewer. The results could be astounding. It will happen. Elitist suspicion of a new way of storytelling will only last so long, and I doubt the next generation of writers, who grew up on the likes of Beneath A Steel Sky, would have so many prejudices. Heaven only knows what a great writer could do with this new format. I can't wait.
