Write an ECTS p/review? I’d rather have my teeth filed with an electric cheesegrater.

It’s been winter for a whole year.

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Given the extraordinarily unattractive nature of this year’s European Computer Trade Show line-up, I’d like instead to spend this month’s column looking at an old question – are videogames art?

We’re always reading about how games make more money than movies or music, but we’re also constantly being told that they’re a far more "immature" cultural form, and that they don’t have the emotional or intellectual power of the more established artforms.

But is that, in fact, actually true?

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Is it true that games are emotionally and intellectually inferior to other cultural forms? Well, of course it is. You’d have to be some kind of moron to suggest that WWF Smackdown, Gran Turismo 3 or even Final Fantasy X offered even a tenth of the artistic power or merit of even the dumbest Hollywood blockbuster or Steps album.

But why? After all, games are created by exactly the same sort of creative, dysfunctional people as tend to become movie or pop stars. If anything, games designers have MORE creative freedom.

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So why do games never have the same artistic clout as books, movies or records? Well, there are two main reasons.

One is that obvious fact that in a book or a movie, you can’t control the story. Therefore, a lot of the emotional impact comes from the characters doing things that you know they shouldn’t do but are powerless to prevent. (Like splitting up and going out into the spooky woods, say.), With games, you’re in control, so you CAN stop them, hence no emotional tension.

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But the biggest reason why games aren’t art is, yet again, one which can be blamed almost entirely on the ludicrous rip-off prices that games publishers charge for full-price games and which you, the idiot public, witlessly pay.

Because the effect of games being 40 quid a time is that most gamers only buy three or four games a year, which means that most people only ever experience a tiny fraction of the games that are available at any given time. (And given how conservative gamers tend to be, a narrow fraction at that.)

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Compare that with music (songs from dozens of different albums on the radio and TV every day) or movies (several on telly every night, whole satellite channels devoted to them, affordable cinemas in every town) and it suddenly becomes easy to see why those artforms carry a far greater cultural impact.

People have a wide experience of the full range of music and movies that are available, and therefore the makers can explore far more creatively interesting themes and angles without immediately losing most of their audience.

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So if you’re as heartily bored of the videogames on offer these days (as most of you, judging by the letters pages, seem to be) as I know I am, then what can you do about it? Luckily, there’s an easy answer. Stop buying them.

"But that’s a stupid plan", you might be saying. "What would we play then?"

But I’m not saying you should stop PLAYING games. (And no, I’m not saying you should start stealing them or playing pirate copies instead, either.) I’m just saying, stop BUYING them.

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Because there’s hardly a game out there any more that you can’t finish in a weekend at the most. So what kind of idiot forks out 45 quid to play something that they could complete in two days, when renting it for about three quid would do the same job?

Even stuff like sports games that you play with your chums rather than "complete" – be honest, do you have any that you’ve played on more than 15 separate occasions? Because if not, all you need to do is rent it out any time you fancy a go.

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If everyone stopped buying games and started renting them all the time instead, everyone would have a much broader experience of all the games that are out there, and when they realised how limited the range was, they’d pretty soon start demanding games that were much more interesting.