The release of Con Air, The Lost World, Speed 2 and The Fifth Element have made this the summer of the major action movie. But the biggest blockbuster of them all was released in Europe six months ago: it's not a film, it's a video game console, the Nintendo 64.
More children now recognise Nintendo's key character, Mario the Plumber, than recognise Mickey Mouse. Sony says that some time this summer it will start earning more from its video game subsidiary than it does from film-making.
Game playing now ranks with movies, sport and music as the key leisure pursuit of the under30 population: in the US, 40 per cent of households have a Nintendo system. Competing with Sega and Sony, the company's systems have grown in capacity and ingenuity: the release of the 64-bit machine makes Nintendo the technology leader once more, although the choice of games is not as great as for its rivals' consoles.
Films and computer games are the two major cultural innovations of the 20th century. The video game has moved from the stone age to the nuclear era in less than 20 years. Its development parallels that of cinema, with the shift from silent movies to talkies to colour, and the domination of the global market by a few major companies. Early films such as The Lumiere Workers Leaving the Factory have their equivalent in pioneering games such as Pong and Breakout.
Today's systems deliver a truly cinematic quality, allowing the user to control "camera angles" to spectate from a distance, or take part in the action from your character's point of view.
New games exercise the mind, as well as the thumbs. Tomb Raider and other adventure and puzzle games require lateral thinking and deduction, as well as fast reflexes. Like cinema, gaming provides different genres - sports, beat-'em-ups and shoot-'em-ups, thrillers and horrors - although there is no real equivalent yet of screen comedy or blue movies. Humour is incidental, not intrinsic, and virtual sex is still a distant fantasy.
There is a snobbery that says that video games are for small boys and asocial teenagers. But contemporary twenty and thirty-somethings are the first generation to have grown up with video games, and they have not put away childish things. As the games have become more sophisticated, adults have become more involved. The links with sport and music have made video games cool: the average age of a gamer is now 23.
"I'm a kid, and I'll always be a kid. Most men are. I just admit it," says Bez (29). And it's not just men: Beverley (34) says: "I always used to do jigsaws when I was young, and video games are the modern equivalent. You can stay up doing them until three in the morning, and get the same sense of achievement when you finish."
Playing video games used to be seen as the ultimate sad and solitary activity. Yet gaming is a fundamentally social pastime. Among young people, games play the same role that music did in previous generations, acting as a mark of cultural identification and social competition, complete with a whole subculture. As the market for pop singles declines, and many people feel that contemporary music has lost its edge, so games are taking over in popularity and significance.
Equally, as modern films become blockbusters lacking either plot or character, it makes as much sense to play their equivalents interactively at home as it does to see the originals in the cinema.
In Newcastle in the north of England, rather than go out to the Bigg Market, unable to spend cash because he is on benefit, and liable to get beaten up because of his shaven head and tattoos, Bez and his mates stay in and chat, listen to music and play games together. He maintains that the group's common denominator is smoking dope. According to Bez, it's impossible to play games if you're drunk, while being stoned can be positively beneficial. Anyone who thinks children's TV programmes are psychedelic should check out Super Mario. And video games are notoriously addictive in their own right: when you play, time ceases, just as when you read a book or watch a film.
Many regard the explosion of video games as an example of "dumbing down" - the end of literacy, and proof of irreversible cultural decline. But this is clearly snobbery, the confusion of an older generation unable to relate to the new trends. No one says that games such as bridge or chess are social evils, and yet many video games involve just as much strategy. Playing them may not teach many transferable skills, but dexterity and problem solving are certainly useful.
Moreover, games have not replaced music, books or films, but are an additional medium: people like Bez and Beverley enjoy them all. Like the old-style Dungeons and Dragons, video games provide a role-playing environment where players can act out their fantasies or emulate their heroes, only with CD-quality sound and 3D graphics, rather than with paper and pencil.
Video games in themselves are not a social problem. However, the implications of their popularity, within the broader context of cultural trends, are certainly alarming. Whereas books demand an investment of imagination, games offer a ready-made world, like that of film. And this internal virtual environment is entirely secure. Whereas contemporary public spaces are saturated with danger in the popular and parental imagination, Mario World is safe, physically and existentially. Losing in video games is never absolute: failure is temporary. No one gets hurt, or risks rejection. In the real world faceless corporations rule our lives and we feel we cannot intervene to achieve change. In contrast, the video game world offers the illusion of autonomy and potency. But the possibility of choice and control is fake because the programmer has set the parameters. You can go left or right at the crossroads, but in the end you'll end up in the same place. It's just like politics, with the same grinning faces.
Video games are a symptom, not a cause, of social degeneration. As Mark Erickson of the Department of Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in England, argues: "We deify the technical in our society. We are in awe of the machine. But in doing this we are neglecting our creative potentiality. We're taking the risk-free strategy."
The triumph of Tomb Raider's Lara Croft and Mario the Plumber is part of the tendency towards the privatised, consumerist postmodern condition that is reflected in many other areas of life. We demand instant sensual gratification, voyeurism without danger, participation without involvement. Soap operas, tabloids, cyberporn, phonesex and video games offer us just that.
We live in a world dedicated to escapism, but we all remain prisoners. In the words of the Situationist philosopher, Guy Debord: "The Spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images. The Spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. The liar has lied to himself."
Dr Tom Shakespeare is a research fellow in sociology at the University of Leeds