About halfway into L.A. Noire, I turned against it, harshly. Its story elements range in quality from clumsily effective to extremely good, and the "adventure gameplay" elements of the investigations are surprisingly absorbing. But L.A. Noire's more GTA-ish gameplay elements — the shooting and the driving and the fist fighting and the moving around, in other words — are so pedestrian in conception and execution that it becomes easy to believe the rumor that all of these elements were late additions Rockstar insisted upon out of fear that L.A. Noire would be seen as too boring. In what is probably cosmic justice, the elements intended to prevent the game from being boring are easily the game's most boring elements. Take the "street crime" side missions, which typically end with a cut scene that shows Phelps shaking his head while the body of the guy he just shot is lifted into the back of the coroner's hearse. When Cole Phelps has shot down his third perp of the day, this bookend of putative sobriety achieves an inadvertent hilarity.

Equally hilarious are L.A. Noire's fist fights, the gameplay element most impressively devoid of interest. After the game's seventh or eighth fist-fight, I broke my no-more-video-games-but-L.A. Noire pledge and popped into my Xbox 360 a game about which I had been curious for some time, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, which some regard as a great twinkling light of video-game preposterousness. If anything, this undersells the game's feral charm. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a third-person shooter in which the player controls the Vitamin Water mogul himself. The plot is as follows: A Middle Eastern concert promoter, unable to pay 50 Cent an agreed-upon $10 million, convinces 50 Cent to accept a diamond-covered skull as adequate recompense. Unfortunately, 50 Cent's diamond-covered skull is stolen from him, which inaugurates a nation-wide rampage. The object of the game is to kill everything and earn money (killing people, luckily, earns you money), which makes 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand a rare game whose authored narrative is not at all disconnected from its player-generated narrative. Aside from the astonishing fact that 50 Cent agreed to the particulars of his portrayal within the game, the most interesting thing about 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is how fun it is to play. Its batshit-crazy story revels, hilariously, in everything the medium does not do well. I played the game through in two days, after which I wondered if the single most damning thing about video games is the fact that one could argue, legitimately, that 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a better game than L.A. Noire.

When I returned to L.A. Noire, I made the decision to stop thinking of it as a video game. Very quickly, something happened. In my notes I jotted down "L.A. Noire: the gay teenager of video games — i.e., 'It gets better,'" but this was a flippant way to process a real attitudinal readjustment on my part. When I stopped thinking about him as someone with whom I was supposed to feel any kinship, Cole Phelps became a deeply compelling character. You begin the game strongly assuming that Phelps has a Dark Secret, and he does. But that is not the most interesting thing about him. The most interesting thing about Cole Phelps is that he is an asshole who might also be insane. Early in the game, Phelps stands in the living room of a husband who does not yet know that his wife has been murdered. Phelps decides to tell the man about his murdered wife in front of the man's children. I originally regarded this as a bit of storytelling sloppiness, but no: Phelps does this because he is an asshole. How big of an asshole is Cole Phelps? In one of the game's World War II flashbacks, we see Phelps, who is fighting in Japan as a Marine Corps lieutenant, tell his disgusted troops, all of whom have lost friends to the Japanese, that the United States brought Pearl Harbor upon itself. Yes, Phelps is a Pearl Harbor Truther. Once you accept that Phelps is not your avatar but a guided missile whose damage you are constantly trying to mitigate, L.A. Noire gives you an experience unlike any other game I have played.

Near the end of L.A. Noire, its story begins to cross all manner of previously forbidden lines, among them the graphic depiction of a child's corpse and a scene that turns upon a 13-year-old girl's apparently consensual sexual relationship with a man in his 50s. L.A. Noire's most pertinent and nuanced theme emerges slowly: A cowardly man is not a bad man, and a brave man is not necessarily good. "Courage and cowardice exist in every man," someone tells Phelps. "Get over it." It is far more satisfying moment than it sounds. Meanwhile, the investigations, if anything, get even better, weirder, and more involved. In a sequence ripped more or less directly out of Chinatown, you use longitudinal coordinates to identify a parcel of land, figure out who owns the land via its Land Registry number, and finally tabulate the land's insurance value on a primitive calculator. A lot of this gumshoeing, it should be said, L.A. Noire essentially does for you. But how wonderful, all the same, to know that B.S. activity as conceptually dull as the piecing together of an insurance scam can be a video game's best part.

Interactivity sabotages storytelling. There is no longer any use arguing to the contrary. Thus, the story of L.A. Noire can never be good — at least, not in the way it is trying to be. As a story, then, L.A. Noire is not successful. As a game, too, L.A. Noire fails. In a lot of ways, it is a terrible game: frustratingly arbitrary, puzzlingly noncommunicative, and not very fun. But I love L.A. Noire. I think it's fantastic. What this suggests is that we need a new name for whatever it is that L.A. Noire does.

Or do we? We actually have several names for it: "interactive film" or "interactive drama." Both are blood-curdlingly redolent of everything that was wrong about the 1990s, when "games" like Night Trap were briefly thought to be where things were heading. The first games made by video-game developers who were given cameras and actors to work with made such a mess of things that almost no one since has gone back to what is, theoretically, a promising template. Rockstar and Team Bondi deserve immense credit for resurrecting an abandoned tradition and utilizing tools that the orthodoxies of game design have come to tell us are corrupt and wrong-headed and inappropriate. And maybe they are — if what we are talking about is video games.

L.A. Noire comes closer than any previous digital experience to showing us where the hands are on the clock: half past movie, a quarter past video game, and a quarter to … what, exactly? I have no idea, which is a large part of what makes the game wonderful. L.A. Noire's failures are not that important when weighed against its successes, and the first video game, or whatever we wind up calling it, to do perfectly what L.A. Noire does surprisingly well right now will be hailed as the real breakthrough. It is, finally, a game that made me certain, after months of morose uncertainty, that any writer who is not interested in what we are now calling "video games" is a bystander to one of the most important conceptual shifts between story and storyteller in a hundred years.

Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea, God Lives in St. Petersburg, The Father of All Things, and Extra Lives, which will be published in paperback tomorrow, June 10.