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It's not the kind of thing that will play at the New York Film Festival anytime soon, but some games are starting to feel a lot like what get called ''the movies'' by the vast majority of consumers, evoking a nascent, electronic Hollywood where the pleasures of the multiplex are reproduced in a set-top box. Final Fantasy is a sprawling sword and sorcery game, familiar to anyone who ever tried to fight their way out of adolescence with a handful of Dungeons & Dragons dice, but with its broad-but-tiny characters engaged in outsized struggles, its righteously straightforward narrative, and its glossy virtual eye candy, it not only matches your average midlevel genre pic but also beats it in one very important respect: you're the star.

If you want to give a name to FFVII's novelty, you'd have to use a previously oxymoronic phrase: interactive movie. Like any Hollywood movie, FFVII is less the product of individual vision than corporate investment and manpower, costing in the $10 million to $20 million range and using the talents of over 100 technicians, most of them animators and character designers who put together the game's many full-motion video sequences. Cool video sequences are basic ingredients in most games--even the non-narrative fighters and shooters offer them as goads and rewards for mayhem--but in role-playing games like FFVII, the movie within the game unfolds in animated sequences that interrupt the flow of play, providing exposition, alternate endings, and rewards for an obscure find or a difficult kill. A game like Final Fantasy surpasses the rest of the pack, though, the way any good, big-budget Hollywood movie would--with scale. Strung end to end and without the hours of traveling and monster killing, a tape of the full-motion sections in FFVII would be about four hours long [EBOG note: This actual runtime is closer to three hours.] and look like a well-executed digital anime: a very, very long movie (are you listening, Kevin Costner?) with characters, a recognizable plotline, and dazzling views of surreal, digitally animated vistas (a city built in the shape of a cannon, or a misfired rocket ship tilting on its pad like a moon-bound Tower of Pisa, minutely rendered curlicues of smoke drifting from its belly).

Unlike the cinema's one-way string of directed pleasures, the movielike gems inside the game have to be fought for and discovered, the player's skill and decisions opening up certain options while foreclosing others as the game and the player work together to produce a coherent story whose visual and narrative limitations are often smoothed over by the pleasures of game play. That's why although FFVII's visions of small-screen apocalypse (your job here, as in most genre entertainments, is, of course, to save the world) might not compare to ID4, and its characters' deaths (replete with sad, trilling soundtracks and the slow-motion roll of pixilated tears) might not carry the same punch as Darth Vader's death in Return of the Jedi, they do provoke an emotional response. They've been earned by wit and luck over the 70 or so hours it takes to finish the game, an investment that sutures the user into the story in a way that previously only books or episodic television have achieved.

Hollywood itself has always had a vague interest in interactive moviemaking, various corners of the film industry seeing a bit of the future but finding themselves unable to do much about getting there. Attempts have been made to jazz movies up on the receiving end, but they've almost always been reduced to the status of gimmick by a basic truth of the medium: movies often play in theaters. Would-be interactive paradigm shifters have tried to work with the primal scene of the darkened communal screening space and have ended up with niche jokes, weird echoes of the script-by-committee production process (audiences choosing the next scene by pushing a button), or winking attempts to widen a film's sensory bandwidth (3-D, putting fart smells on scratch-and-sniff cards).

Even that barrier will fall, though, and someday soon. Online interactive play spaces, like the Web site based on the old-school Ultima role-playing games, allow thousands of users to inhabit the same universe, fighting, living, and building up their hit-points in a reactive universe that mimics the communality of the moviegoing experience. Ultima Online doesn't look as good as Final Fantasy or even Spawn, but eventually it will, at which point Hollywood will have a smaller range of pleasures to call wholly its own, namely art lensed through a director's distinctive vision or, on the other hand, simultaneous experience in an atomized, electronic age--the celluloid industry eventually having to sell itself on the body heat in theaters.

The thing that strikes me most while playing today's games and watching today's movies, though, is that old boundaries and borders between different parts of culture and media only grow thinner while pleasure (like William Gibson's information) gets freer, moving between venues that are simultaneously more personalized and more far-flung. Arguments about creativity wax and wane, but you can't deny that the broad pleasures that used to be confined to the movies have become spread pretty wide, popping up in theaters to be sure but also contained in soundtracks, action figures, and, of course, video games. Nine times out of ten, the movie version beats the game, but there are other times (whole weeks even) when the game isn't just better--it's the movie, too.