Coming to a console near you...

The latest product from the apparently inexhaustible James Bond franchise has all the ingredients fans have come to expect from the series. It has Pierce Brosnan as Bond, Dame Judi Dench as M and John Cleese as Q, Bond's long-suffering armourer.

The latest product from the apparently inexhaustible James Bond franchise has all the ingredients fans have come to expect from the series. It has Pierce Brosnan as Bond, Dame Judi Dench as M and John Cleese as Q, Bond's long-suffering armourer. It has a specially composed title song and it is written by Bruce Feirstein, who already has three Bond movies to his credit. But Everything or Nothing is not a movie. The screens it has been hitting over the last few weeks have been small ones - and its audience will have been relishing the opportunity to hit back - since Everything or Nothing is a video game.

There's nothing particularly new about this, of course; movie spin-offs have been a staple of the video-game industry since the early days. But what is clearly changing is the power relationship between the two forms. When A-list Hollywood actors are prepared to record original dialogue and have their facial features scanned for digitalisation you know that one of two things are happening: they're being paid serious money to do it - or they've recognised that this is a genre that has to be taken seriously. Either way, the case for gaming to be considered as a new creative medium is strengthened. There are other straws in the wind, too. Last month Bafta held the first stand-alone awards ceremony for the games industry - at which Call of Duty, a second world war shooter, won a Bafta face as the best game of the year - honoured for its realism and the quality of its dialogue.

If, like me, you're one of those people who like video games because they're not art, this won't necessarily be good news. Already the audience for games is rather sharply divided between those who regard them as a narrative culture in their own right - increasingly sophisticated in the stories they tell and the emotions they attempt to arouse in those who play them - and those who want to get on with turning zombies into digitised mince.

For the latter - people who happily take video games as a mere distraction - the aspirations to art are usually rather tiresome. They involve a sudden lurch from action into passivity - as the games' creators take their opportunity to show that they, too, could make a movie if they could just get their foot in the right door. For those who work in the industry, though, the argument is already over; they have their black-tie awards ceremony and can talk about "creative integrity" and "character development" with the best of them. By any measure, they argue, video games are now a serious contender when it comes to the imaginative occupation of people's minds. And though such colonisations are usually rough and ready at first, rude pioneers are always followed by more sophisticated practitioners. The gaming industry does not yet have its Tarkovsky, or even its Tarantino, but it's only a matter of time.

I fear that they are right, and paradoxically the contempt in which video games are still held - at least at the level of cultural discourse - is evidence in their favour. Everything or Nothing might have all the trappings of a new Hollywood release, but it won't be reviewed on Front Row or written about in the culture pages of any quality newspaper as its cinema equivalent almost certainly would.

And though not a few academics have fallen in thrall to Lara Croft and Metal Gear Solid, it's not easy to imagine any of them wanting an article about them on their publication list. Video games are ubiquitous in economic terms, earning more money than movies, but virtually invisible in what passes as polite discourse. And that means that their early history is almost identical to that of the novel and the cinema, two forms which now have indisputable title to high art but which were once irredeemably low. If you had been asked to predict Henry James on the basis of a cheap Elizabethan chap-book or La Règle du Jeu on the basis of the Lumière brothers film of workers leaving a factory, you might have been hard-pressed - particularly since there was no precedent for serious artists to work in prose or celluloid. And in both cases it took unserious artists - men who thought they were doing something far more commonplace - to show the way.

Video games will have a harder job to achieve the same kind of apotheosis, but as implausible as it might seem that Sonic the Hedgehog is currently paving the way for an enduring contribution to human civilisation, past cultural history suggests it would be unwise to bet against it. Gaming enthusiasts can already identify the auteurs of interactivity - and in another 50 years I would hazard a guess that any decently educated person will be able to join them. And those of us who just want some mindless diversion will have to find a different vice.