I wouldn’t call myself an avid gamer. I don’t play them excessively, but I have a ton of respect for them as an artistic medium, and I follow the industry with a close eye. They’re becoming a huge staple of contemporary society. No longer are video games solely associated with the nerdy and socially inept types. Everyone’s a gamer now.

Whether it’s playing “Halo 4” on an expensive home console or just a round of “Angry Birds” here and there on a smart phone, it’s all video games, and the majority of people now take part in them on a regular basis. But for some reason, plenty of people, even many of those who play games, think they’re nothing more than a way to kill time. And personally, I think they deserve a bit more credit than that.

If you ask me, video games are just a modern method of storytelling. We have always loved hearing about fights between good and evil, adventures into the unknown and the like. They open our imaginations and appeal to our sense of wonder.

What makes games amazing and different is how, instead of following a story and characters, they allow us to experience them first-hand. We’re not watching the hero. We are the hero. It’s so much more thrilling, and more satisfying to boot, when you get to pick up the Sword of Awesomeness, kill the dragon and spend the treasure on whatever you want.

Sure, it’s a way to kill time, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s interactive and works our brains in ways that books and films can’t. For those of you who have played “Portal,” you know how difficult those puzzles can get, and working out a solution takes time, planning and careful execution. There’s nothing like this in a book or movie. You don’t have to plan out how the hero’s going to invade the fortress or carefully time where and when they need to jump. Those mediums do all that for us and let us watch what happens. Video games hand you the pencil or camera and say, “Here kid, you tell us what happens.”

What’s more are games that implement choice systems into their gameplay. Now you not only control how the hero gets from point A to point B, but also what point A and point B are going to be. I remember my friend discussing a choice he made in “Mass Effect 3,” where, by choosing to save one race of aliens, he accidently condemned a different race to their doom, something he didn’t predict. He thought he was doing the right thing, but there were unforeseen consequences to his actions. You’re not going to brood over the decisions the hero makes in a movie because you’re not the one making them, but that’s why games can affect us on more personal levels.

Can video games be held on the same artistic levels as literature or film? Not yet. They’re still going through puberty and have not yet fully matured into a true art form, but there’s immense potential there. Games can be a great medium for exploring philosophical concepts like moral choice, free will, human relationships, a person’s mental state, and a number of others. I’ve already seen many of those concepts being utilized in video games, and every time they make me stop and think. People need to realize that not all games are mindless wastes of time. On the contrary, they’re becoming more intellectual every year.