Magic in the machine

Here's a prediction to startle anyone over the age of 18: according to market analysis, sales of computer games are poised to overtake sales of CDs. On reflection, it shouldn't be such a shock. Computer gaming is right at the heart of popular culture.

In 20 years the video game has raced from arcade to home to the hand-held gizmo that drives everyone else on the bus to distraction. It has even made it into the art gallery. The Barbican's new exhibition, Game On, takes the viewer on an interactive journey from the first primitive games through to today's RAM-rich challenges. This is more than a show of software-flexing - these things soon turn into collectors' items. But can we imagine a games room in the V&A, next to the church plate? Could we even think of computer games as the newest and most all-encompassing art form, a medium in which imagery, music, dramatic tension and skill merge into one?

Gaming has moved on from the primary colours and flat, diagrammatic images of Space Invaders and Pac-Man, towards complex soundtracks and shifting imagery. They have become cinematic to the extent that movies now strive to make themselves look like the computer games.

The 1999 film The Matrix touched a nerve precisely because of this elision of the language of film and the language of gaming. It suggested a world where the game itself offers a more profound reality that the world "outside". Equally, there's a beautiful scene in Grand Theft Auto III, one of the most memory-hungry of the new games, where the sunlight hits the virtual ground refracted as if through the star-filter of a camera lens. But this scene was not shot with a camera. There was never a sunset. It's all illusion. An illusion referring to the history of illusion.

In many ways computer games offer something that works of art have been attempting since the Renaissance. Art historians have commented that the German Romantic painter, Casper David Friedrich painted from what would appear to be an impossible perspective - as if he were floating high above the ground. And think of Picasso, wrestling with the possibilities of cubism, trying to see from all angles simultaneously. The artist wants to be all-seeing, everywhere at once. The new games let us see the world from wherever we wish. Indeed, they let us construct that world completely.

Lara Croft isn't just an action hero, she's the ultimate male fantasy: upmarket, with improbable breasts and great at sports. But it's not just drop-dead looks that fuel the fantasy; it's equally about the position from where we're looking. In this game I can be in two places at once - I can observe her like a voyeur, or I can interact to the extent of actually becoming her. Lara from all angles. Cubism by another name.

For the most part, gaming has been tagged as "toys for the boys". There's no escaping the demographics. It's a culture of displaced violence and fantasy. You count the bodies, you win or lose. Cute characters - Mario the cuddly plumber, Sonic the hedgehog - dis-guise the job at hand. It's violent stuff, the logical successor to Tom and Jerry flattening one another with rolling pins, then popping back into shape. It's a world where you have to live with the consequences of your actions only for as long as you are plugged in.

Gaming is so much its own world that objective descriptions outside the game's frame of reference hardly make sense - exactly what we say about path-breaking works of art. Pokémon, the game that spawned the card-swapping craze, appears to be a cult of mysteries so complex that no adult could begin to fathom it. It's a post-Darwinian vision of evolution: one character becomes another and that becomes yet another, depending upon the game's own conditions and criteria.

Indeed, games such as Pokémon point to the only viable alternative to the shoot-'em-up formula. They offer the chance to build the whole world from scratch and watch it grow and mutate. It's the ultimate creative dream: where one click of the mouse can have monumental implications for world history.

This is total immersion drama, with all the trimmings. Perhaps Quake III is the true successor to Wagner's epics and Hollywood's blockbusters. We tend to use the word "spec-tacle" for these art forms, because it implies not only excess but also a position from which the awestruck viewer might absorb the action. Computer games tell the same stories all over again, but it's not the spectacle from afar: it's the view from right inside.

? Andrew Renton is Slade Curator at University College London