`Movies are becoming more like video games." While this often-heard critics' remark is almost exclusively directed at big-budget special-effects movies, it doesn't really refer to their incredible computer-generated effects; it's a coded criticism of the films' lack of plot and the way relentless action often substitutes for narrative. After all, what could be as plot-less and childish as a video game?

It doesn't speak well for the games that they are the substandard against which bad films are rated. But if early computer games were seen as a bastardised entertainment medium only fit to be invoked critically, that surely has changed. Computer games have been acquiring narrative and atmosphere, the very qualities most often absent from the films they are rather ignorantly compared with. Sometimes the narrative element is irrelevant, such as the idle cutaway scenes to tie separate levels of a game together.

But recently, in a game such as Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, plot and gaming are blended: this is a movie-like game where different "camera angles" are integrated, the soundtrack changes to suit the action and the character follows a story path from boyhood to maturity.

Games' designers have looked to Hollywood for a set of techniques to aid story-telling and effects which add humour or heighten tension. The promise held out by the latest machines means the transformation of games to something more movie-like will only accelerate. Meanwhile, characters such as Link from Zelda, Mario from Mario Bros. and Lara Croft from Tomb Raider are carefully managed, almost like movie stars. Lara is already a "scientific ambassador" for Britain as well as a star of TV ads; her upcoming transformation to movie icon will be a belated confirmation of the way this character (like games in general) has outgrown its "just for kids" category.

The games' new cultural status is underlined by the way they are replacing movies as the scapegoats for youth violence. After the Littleton massacre in the US, a film like The Matrix can pawn off its gun-worship and glorification of violence on to the games (notably Quake and Doom) that it draws from.

Nowadays most games have a credit sequence, and their design and manufacture involve as many departments as a movie studio. Meanwhile, movies are originating inside computers. But the convergence can only go so far: cinema is a passive experience an audience can share - sit back, relax and watch; gaming is non-linear and interactive - you are involved, making choices, deciding the outcome.

The real problem with many of the films critics rail against is not that they are like video games. It's that they are bad films.