This is understandable, but wrong. Yes, many video games are violent and frivolous, and the most devoted players still tend to be young and male. But the best games reveal a mass cultural medium that has come fully into its own, artistically flourishing in ways that resemble the movie industry during its 20th-century peak and television over the past 20 years. From “The Searchers” to “The Godfather,” from “The Sopranos” to “The Americans,” what connects these eras, and their most outstanding works, is a shared ambition, a desire to be both grand and granular, telling individual stories against the backdrop of national and cultural identity, deconstructing their genres while advancing the form.

If ever a video game has risen to the level of those classics, it’s Red Dead Redemption 2. With an enormous production budget, seven years of development and a script running about 2,000 pages just for the main story, it might well be the most ambitious game ever made.

Like the classic westerns and gangster stories it draws from, it can be crude and violent. But it is also richly cinematic and even literary, serving up breathtaking digital vistas reminiscent of John Ford films along with a mix of deftly scripted stories about outlaws, immigrants, hustlers, con artists, lawmen and entrepreneurs, all trying to eke out an existence on the edges of civilization. It’s a game about power, violence, frontier justice and murky moral choices — a new American epic for the digital age.

As a technical achievement, it has no peers. Red Dead Redemption 2 teems with life. Towns have daily rhythms, tied to time and weather, that seem to go on without you. Wildlife roams the countryside, growing skittish if you move too close. Many video games allow players to interact with other characters only by attacking them; here, every character, even the least important digital extra, can be spoken to, and often conversed with at length.

Violence is anything but mindless. You play as the outlaw Arthur Morgan, a member of the Van der Linde gang, whose goal is to help restore the gang to glory after a significant defeat. There are plenty of shootouts, chases and heists. But you can usually choose to avoid them — and when you don’t, they almost always come with a cost: Sheriffs and bounty hunters chase you down, important game options disappear, whole towns become hostile territory, horses you’ve bonded with (making them faster or more responsive) die. Instead of indulging no-regrets fantasy violence, it is a literary experience that emphasizes — and simulates — tragedy and personal consequences.