Steven Poole on why videogamers have everything to play for

In Kathryn Bigelow's multi-Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker, a bomb-disposal expert spends his downtime playing Gears of War, a videogame that features "bald space marines" (in the creator's own unimprovable description) shooting hordes of sci-fi monsters in the face. It might seem strange that a soldier would choose to wind down with a fantastical recreation of his day job, but at least in Gears of War the challenge is always fair. Or, as Tom Chatfield writes in his survey of videogames: games might involve a lot of effort, but the payoff is that "effort is always rewarded".

The efforts of game-makers themselves are richly rewarded: Christmas hit Modern Warfare 2 has grossed $1bn worldwide, while elf-and-safety roleplayer World of Warcraft rakes in that amount every year. Even so, there remains a reluctance in mainstream culture to take videogames seriously as a medium. Chatfield's book is aimed at that attention deficit, with a two-pronged argument. First, games are interesting in themselves, as constructions of space, logic and ideas (games are "a kind of playground for the mind"); second, they are interesting in their potential effect on other realms. Chatfield analyses the ground-level experiments in law and wealth-distribution conducted by players of online games, and investigates the possibility of using gamelike structures to produce empirical results in the social sciences, as well as for training in fields such as medical triage or school maths.

Chatfield concludes that our attitude to videogames should be one of "a muscular and discerning critical engagement", though he might himself have been more critical. He has a slight tendency to oversell games' significance (are they really "uniquely transporting" compared with other artforms?) or to echo PR claims about particular games (no, Flower is nothing like a "poem"). When a Facebook game developer confesses that his job is about "figuring out what the desirable behaviour is on the part of your players", there comes no authorial counterpoint. Indeed, Chatfield sometimes slips into corporate-speak himself: games, he reports, are "the fastest growing area of global expertise in how to entertain, retain and connect 21st-century consumers", and they have even achieved an "encroachment [. . .] into the whole notion of lifestyle and media consumption".

Chatfield's emphasis on games' fecund variety, on the other hand, will be valuable to non-specialists: he writes evocatively not just about Grand Theft Auto but about indie gems such as Passage, where your quest is meaningless and you die after five minutes. His comparison of videogames to installation art, meanwhile, is striking, and he even manages to make World of Warcraft sound interesting – though his awed description of a particular sword as being "the length of a full-grown orc" is rather lovable nonsense to someone who doesn't know how long orcs grow.

As I know to my cost, people with an interest in games are often asked to rebut the same old criticisms – eg, that videogames force children to massacre their classmates while preventing them from learning to read. Chatfield's approach to these issues in particular is sparkingly intelligent and nuanced. As he rightly points out, "the best games are a trigger for discussion, reading and writing – not an end to it". Overall, Fun Inc is a fresh and engaging contribution to that ongoing conversation.

Steven Poole's Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames is published by Fourth Estate.