IT hit me just a few days ago, as I sat half-tearful watching the character I’d been playing since Christmas die on a lonely hillside. Computer games at their very best, I realised, are now as much a legitimate art form as the novel, cinema or television.

I’ve long thought games had that certain something – the narrative drive, emotional depth, creative vigour – to one day become elevated to the status of art. The truth is, though, that if games have the power to turn a player emotionally upside down, which they now do, then they’ve reached that place in our culture already.

My praise doesn’t come lightly – I worship at the altar of the novel. I write novels. To me there’s no higher art form. My heroes don’t kick balls or play guitar, they create worlds and ideas for me to lose myself in, to learn about people and places I’d never otherwise understand.

The novel, like cinema and the best television, hits you once in the heart, and then again in the head. It works on you at both an intellectual and emotional level. What makes any art form art is that it draws out feelings and thoughts you’d never otherwise have experienced, it opens doorways into other worlds, lives, minds.

Art is an edifying experience, in the true meaning of the word; it builds our interior world, and without our interior world we’d be no different to animals. Art gives meaning to our shared humanity. By any fair standard, I believe that gaming can now call itself art.

Games are no longer mere entertainment or rather games at their very best are no longer mere entertainment. Games have become capable of epic story-telling, of passing on moral truths, of changing you emotionally.

Many readers will shake their heads, but let me give you an example. All year I’ve eked out a game called Red Dead Redemption 2, the way I eke out novels I love and cannot bear to end. RDR is a western on a grand scale. It tells the story of a gang of outlaws at the twilight of the Old West trying to live a life already consigned to history. It’s got the spirit of John Huston and Sam Peckinpah – echoing with their films The Searchers and The Wild Bunch. It has the verbal dexterity and character depth of HBO’s Deadwood series, and the melancholy and menace of novels like John Williams’ Butchers Crossing and EL Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times.

If that all sounds macho, then I have to be honest and say, yes, many games still feel traditionally male. RDR isn’t macho, though, despite its setting. It’s rich in strong female characters. The most powerful figure in the entire story is a woman bounty hunter. The men aren’t mindless thugs, they have souls, emotions. The world is peopled with beggars, tycoons, the disabled, the lonely, the elderly, orphans, poets, scientists, journalists, doctors, shopkeepers; it’s culturally rich with the newspapers of the day, the political dogma of the day from eugenics to communism, vaudeville, songs, folklore.

Often the best games are female-led, like The Walking Dead, where you play a young girl trying to survive the apocalyptic end of the world. Here, there’s no shooting and running. Everything is about emotion and decision. Will you help this person? Will you hoard this food? Should you trust that adult?

I played this game with my daughter when she was 13. At the end, we were both crying like babies. It had the emotional effect of something like the final scenes of Titanic or Beaches. Those two films are a good measure for the level of art I’m talking about in games. It’s not Shakespeare - that’s not what I’m saying. Great games are like a well-made play, novel or movie. That’s good enough when it comes to the ambition of most artists.

I knew RDR was quite literally a game-changer about half-way through. There’s a point when the character you play – maybe the better phrase would be “inhabit” – develops a cough. Eventually, the character, called Arthur Morgan, a mix of gentility, violence, kindness and cynicism, is given a terminal diagnosis of tuberculosis.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I was genuinely upset. There were tears in my eyes. It may sound absurd, but then saying 100 and some years ago that you cried over a silent movie probably seemed absurd too.

I felt the way I do when a character I’ve come to identify closely with in a novel dies. I didn’t want it to happen. I was angry with the creators. I stopped playing RDR for a few weeks because I didn’t want to watch Arthur Morgan suffer.

What an incredible emotional effect, I realised. It made me think of some of my strongest reactions to other art forms. I remember first reading Hubert Selby Jnr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn as a student and being so outraged at the violence and cruelty in the book that I physically bit it and threw it at the wall, vowing never to read it again. Today, I read that book once a year, as it remains for me one of the most powerful pieces of 20th century literature ever written.

I’m not equating RDR with Last Exit to Brooklyn. Even at its best, the computer game cannot reach the level of the novel, and probably never will, nor ever can. It is, after all, a different form of art. The novel will never be opera, and painting will never be dance. Gaming must be looked at as an art form on its own terms, but it assuredly can at least now be acknowledge as a form of art in its own right.

As an aside, Scotland had a role to play in the development of this new and most 21st century of art forms. RDR was created by Rockstar Games. Rockstar Games has its own Scottish arm – Rockstar North, headquartered in Dundee, a thriving hub of a global games industry now bigger than cinema.

If Scotland is clever and nurtures this industry, we could one day have our own little Hollywood on the Tay, and all the cultural clout that comes with leading a new art form into a still young century.

Neil Mackay is Scotland’s Columnist of the Year