At a debate on technology and the future a few months ago, the panel chair confronted me with the line: “It turns out computer games merely teach you how to play other computer games.” What did I make of this, as a novelist? Wasn’t it damning? If true, didn’t it – the question implied – prove that games are practically worthless?

Well, no. I’ve been puzzled for a long time by the modern tendency to try to justify life experiences by pointing to research about how they “make us better” in some way. You know the kind of thing. Walking in the countryside improves cardiovascular function by 14%. Believing in God increases lifespan by 2.6 years. Falling in love takes two swings off your golf stroke. (Note: some of these may be made up.) As if there are no other – important, immeasurable – reasons to go for an autumnal stroll or find a life partner. As if you should try to make yourself do things you really don’t want to do, like taking up religion, to reap the supposed “benefits”.

I don’t see why games should be trying to “teach” us anything. But then, I don’t see why novels (or sculptures, or any other art) should try to teach us things either. I don’t think it’d be any kind of indictment of gardening that doing it only taught you how to garden. What I do think is that, like any other rich field of human endeavour and excellence, games have experiences to offer that you can’t find anywhere else – that they’re worth playing for the things they do that no other medium can.

To take just three key examples: first, games are the only medium that can produce what writer Andrea Phillips has brilliantly described as “the emotions of agency”. A novel can let you into a character’s triumph in battle, but only a game can make you feel proud of your victory. A TV show can make you feel disgusted by a character’s avarice, but only a game can make you feel ashamed of your own actions. The little browser game A Dark Room – apparently set in prehistoric Earth, although that gets more complicated as the story unfolds – made me feel an unnerving mixture of pride, self-disgust, determination and guilt, none of them emotions that other media find it easy to evoke.

The second kind of almost-unique experience you can get from games is related but distinct: deep, visceral identification with the player-character. Of course we’ve all identified with our favourite characters in stories, but this involves a delicate balancing act. If they stray too far from the kind of person we imagine ourselves to be, the identification is broken. In games, the identification is instinctive and immediate. Move the controller joystick. The character on the screen moves. “Oh, that’s me,” you say. This can be joyful – who wouldn’t want to feel as though they are Ezio Auditore, the absurdly fit, tower-climbing, parkour-running roof-jumper of Assassin’s Creed? It can also be unsettling – the game Heavy Rain goes to a lot of trouble to get you to do childcare tasks with “your” children to increase identification before something bad happens to one of them. That kind of experience isn’t for everyone, but you won’t get more powerful identification than in video games.

Games have that same electric tension you might find in the theatre, but instead of watching the actors, you are both the actor and the audience.

I once stood in a forest through a long moonlit night in Red Dead Redemption (that inevitable “I”) as dozens of grizzly bears came at me from all sides, their fur ghost-silvered by the light; my horse was dead, there was no other way out than to keep on fighting for what felt like hours. More bizarrely, in the same game I swear I once left my horse untied in town and came back to find it had taken itself to the blacksmith for shoeing. As games become more complex and their algorithms interact in unpredictable ways, there’ll be things you experience that no one else has or ever will – and situations you’ll never be able to find your way back to.

Games can be eerie, surreal, joyful, quirky, terrifying and hilarious. If you never engage with them, you’re missing out on part of the richness of contemporary culture. Of course, I can’t promise you that they’ll increase your resilience, raise your IQ or improve your hand-eye co-ordination.

But when was that ever the point of doing anything?