Watching the latest season of 24 with increasing apathy, punctuated by bitter, incredulous chuckling, I realised that a lot of TV execs still don’t get it. They think that, since they are competing with videogames for viewers’ time, they have to make something that is just as hyperactive and contemptuous of the audience’s intelligence as they imagine videogames to be. The truth is that 24, in its long downward spiral into crayon-scrawled decadence, is now far stupider than many videogames. From the heights of season two’s finale (a feast of finely choreographed unarmed combat and then shooting that paid knowing homage to Lee and Norris in Way Of The Dragon), 24 has become a freakshow of moronic and illogical tactics, with cause and effect floating morbidly untethered. Jack kills a hitman adversary by throwing a screwdriver hard enough to pierce a Kevlar vest. Tony prevents his colleague from shooting an FBI agent, only to kill the agent himself with his bare hands. Jack and Tony pick off a couple of thugs in the docks by luring them into an ambush of silenced fire; and then, instead of continuing this winning tactic, decide to engage the rest of the enemies all at once even though they are still vastly outnumbered. None of it makes sense any more, cries the impotently fist-pounding viewer.

The irony is that for a large proportion of the audience, what makes sense to us in such fictional situations is what we have been taught by videogames. Years of trial and error with the increasingly subtly engineered systems of shooters and stealth games (even though they are rarely as ‘realistic’ as the gleeful punishment meted out by ArmA II) have made me a much more demanding critic of filmed action sequences. Often in the cinema, an analytical subroutine of my brain will signal that, in some sense, I have been in a situation like the one currently being played out onscreen, and it’s only because the celluloid enemies are stupider and less skilled than any you find in videogames on difficulty settings higher than ‘I have never played a videogame before in my life’ that the heroes get away with it.

Maybe, to take the optimistic view, this is a way in which videogames can keep filmmaking honest. Not that directors should slavishly imitate games, but they should respect the higher standards of coherent action that games have inaugurated. The Bourne trilogy stands out as an example of contemporary action filmmaking that does not insult the enhanced kinetic intelligence of a modern audience, as did Casino Royale; unfortunately, Quantum Of Solace threw it all away again. No decent videogame would ask you to believe in a hysterical Frenchman half your size as a respectable final boss.

In return, of course, filmmaking should keep videogames honest. If I get bored with Fyodor Exposition’s speech about how this used to be a bustling café full of love and laughter blah blah, and so I decide to take some potshots at Germans in the street, the game ought to come up with a more sophisticated response than merely printing ‘Your actions got Sgt Reznov killed’ and forcing me to reload. The game is punishing me for my impatience with its own narrative failings. What’s more, COD: World At War’s portrayal of the Japanese – all sadistic torturers or “Banzai!”-screaming nutters leaping out of the grass and trying to bayonet you – is remarkable in its complacent pandering to decades-old xenophobic American stereotypes of the perfidious yellow foe: stereotypes that filmmakers such as Eastwood have been justly tearing down.

A tangentially remarkable aspect of Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, Inglourious Basterds, is that it is perhaps the least videogamelike war movie made since videogames have existed. It is a World War II epic with no large-scale battles of the kind that games have become so good at. And the classical savagery of its extended suspense is executed in two virtuosic scenes of people sitting around tables: one only has to imagine the absurdity of ‘controlling’ one of these characters through a dialogue menu system to realise that the drama depends absolutely on our position as helpless spectators. The entire film is a masterclass in what only cinema can accomplish, and should serve as a reminder that videogames ought to tend their own garden rather than copying the neighbour’s topiary.

My ideal future for videogames and movies, then, is one of mutual respect and education, in which each form keeps an eye on what the other can teach it and then goes back to concentrating on what it does best. The alternative future is one in which films are really bad action games, and games are really bad films. That’s already part of our confused present, but it needs to stop. “NOW!” as Jack Bauer would scream, before casually torturing a nearby waiter and decapitating Osama bin Laden with a foam Frisbee.

Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net.