It’s perhaps an overstated question, because books aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and the likes of McSweeney’s have shown that publishing, literature and storytelling can benefit from thoughtful innovation. However, there’s no doubting that digital culture is taking over, and games are at the forefront. In terms of financial turnover, games are bigger than movies; they’re bigger than music; they’re bigger than books or art. Yet, at the same time, they’re often still considered to be nerd territory: a form of culture far away from the mainstream, to be feared and questioned.

Tom Chatfield is an arts writer, most notably for Prospect Magazine. He participated in two events in order to promote his book, Fun, Inc: Why Games are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business.

Chaired by play theorist Pat Kane, the first session asked many of the now-familiar questions about digital culture. Swathes of the conversation could easily have been subtitled: Video games: they’re not as good as going outside, are they? Despite this, Chatfield gave a good overview of gaming culture for the older audience in attendance, although he oddly concentrated his focus on the implications of World of Warcraft on sociological research and population modelling. Sure, participants’ activities in massively multiplayer online games can be measured and statistically modeled, but games have other things to tell us about who we are.

Like most people in my generation, games were my introduction to computers. I can readily remember when the term video games wasn’t a quaint anachronism. I stared in fascination at the Afterburner machine at my local swimming pool; was responsible for a series of horrific crash landings in Timex’s Flight Simulator on my ZX81; spent a year living in North Carolina coveting my neighbour’s NES. For my thirteenth birthday, I asked for a source code compiler, and for most of my teens I traded homemade computer games with my friends. We ran Spire Magazine, one of the first hypertext-based online magazines, which led to coverage in the Financial Times and in other places, which in turn led to my Internet career. Just as some kids learn to play the guitar and end up writing their own songs, I learned how to program. Code and games are arguably the new rock, for at least a subset of my generation; for me, Peter Molyneux and the Bitmap Brothers were every bit as cool as Kurt Cobain.

Games aren’t just about death, although there’s always been a heavy emphasis on bloodsport, which can be cathartic or unsettling depending on your point of view. Take The Secret of Monkey Island: released in 1990, this was part of an adventure series produced by LucasFilm. You can’t die, and there is no scoring; playing these games is about the experience itself, and the only thing you need to do to win is persevere. They crossed a line between movies, interactive fiction and game-playing, becoming ever more sophisticated. Portions of Monkey Island were written by Orson Scott Card, the science fiction author responsible for the classic novel Ender’s Game. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was based on an unproduced movie script, but easily made the transition to a more interactive format. As you progressed, your decisions shaped the kind of gameplay you experienced; if you were more orientated towards action, you could fight your way to the end. If, on the other hand, you were more interested in puzzles or character development, those were also available routes.

The Dig was in some ways the culmination of this genre; it was based on a story idea by Steven Spielberg, and took a psychological, atmospheric approach to weaving a story. Backgrounds were hand-painted, and characters were sparsely animated. Dialogue and plot took a front row seat.

Unfortunately, as the games industry evolved and consumers wanted bigger bangs and fancier graphics, LucasFilm started to focus more and more on flashy, fight-centric Star Wars titles. Their adventure games – undoubtedly classics, both of storytelling and gaming – were discontinued.

All, however, is not lost. The indie games movement only got a brief mention in Tom’s talk, but similarly to the indie film movement’s role in the wider industry, this has become the new home for quieter, more artistically expressive gaming ideas – for example, the breathtakingly beautiful Machinarium.

The second session, Where’s the Fun? took over the Spiegeltent for a discussion about what fun is, how it’s evolved over time, and whether we’re having more or less fun than we used to. Barry Miles discussed the fun he had in sixties London, in underground clubs with the likes of the Rolling Stones, and wondered if the corporate influence on the culture of fun is having a detrimental effect. Digital culture in general, both authors noted, is largely owned by large corporations.

This is actually changing – by technical design as well as through the rise of the indie movement. Just as the corporate managers aren’t the people actually playing or composing music, they’re also not the people genuinely innovating in digital culture. This is still the domain of hackers, who treat it as more of an art or a political endeavour than business. (The open source blogging platform WordPress makes this point succinctly in its motto: “Code is poetry.”) In fact, many people responsible for games, social networks and platforms are unsettled by the corporate influence, and are actively seeking to do something about it. The likes of OStatus are specifically designed to ensure that Facebook and its monolithic ilk will be less relevant in the future than they are today. Similarly, we are likely to see decentralized massively multiplayer games, where different parts of the game universe are crafted by completely separate artists, hackers and designers. The gaming world is evolving, and it is as artistic as it is lucrative.

It’s become obvious that there is a generation gap that affects understanding of digital culture, but it’s not insurmountable. Like most things, you have to experience it to really understand it: Facebook and Twitter, for example, is a terrifying idea to people who don’t actively participate. I’ll fully admit that war games like Call Of Duty scare me, but I know that if I played them, I’d grok their significance and purpose.

Just as rock and roll was a new, envelope pushing culture in the fifties, sixties and seventies, digital culture is remaking who we are in the 21st century. Games are an integral part of that, and are an artistic medium to embrace and explore rather than fear and question.

David Shields has a compelling proposition: that long-form fiction, at least popularly, has not really evolved past the 19th century novel. He argues that our lives are more complex, demanding and overloaded with strands of information than ever before, in a way that the fiction – and art as a whole – that attempts to describe our lives hasn’t so far managed to tackle. The title of his book alludes to his hunger for art that tells truths about the world we’re living in, blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, and throws away established conventions about what a story should be.

He shared the podium on Sunday with Eli Horowitz, managing editor of McSweeney’s, the publisher founded by A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers. They have managed to escape the tumbling fate of the publishing industry as a whole by turning their publications into things of art and beauty in themselves: whether it’s their in-house hardbacks, their literary quarterly, Panorama, their newspaper, or Wholphin, their DVD video periodical packed with unseen and awesome short films, the form feels almost as important as the content.

I’ve been a big fan of theirs for the best part of a decade, and the thoughts that Horowitz shared at the Book Festival were fresh, intelligent and refreshingly bullshit-free. He dismissed, for example, the idea that ebooks were somehow inferior because reading a paper book is in itself a magical experience (something I’ve heard over and over in my role as a technologist). If books are going to compete, he noted, their form has to compete with the convenience of ebook readers, and their content has to continue to innovate, and to strive to be vital.

We’re a new generation, empowered by technology to transform the world around us. What both Shields and Horowitz seemed to be doing was calling out for writers and artists to be true to themselves instead of the established norms – particularly the commercial norms – and do what we feel we have to do. It’s the story, the reality and the issues that count, rather than the framework that we put them in. Ignore genre and write what you need to write.

That message was echoed by both Garry Trudeau and Alan Moore, who took the stage with Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell on two consecutive days. (Sasha’s written a great overview of the Alan Moore event over here.)

I grew up reading Doonesbury, and can’t claim any pretense of objectivity about Trudeau. I love everything he does. The strip is a very different kind of narrative, but it presents an impressive body of work: a continuous story, updated four panels a day, for forty years. Doonesbury manages to be cuttingly satirical, intelligently human and almost zen in its artistry: as Alan Moore pointed out, often the art will be static from panel to panel except for some small detail, which will change for either comedic or emotional effect. It’s a style that Moore’s seminal graphic novel From Hell deliberately mimicked. As accomplished as Moore’s novels are, however, I doubt he could keep the same group of characters growing, changing and never losing their power for four decades.

I approached Garry after the talk, my heart beating and head buzzing, and managed to say about three intelligible words before giving up and collapsing in an awkward heap of admiration and linguistic malcoordination. They say you should never meet your heroes; perhaps that’s because you’ll spend the rest of the month kicking yourself for being such a dork. (However, he – along with everyone else here – was polite, articulate, intelligent and very friendly.)

Both Trudeau and Moore heeded a version of David Shields’s call to action in their respective times. Trudeau took the newspaper cartoon, at the time saturated with the likes of Little Orphan Annie and Blondie, and turned it into affecting real-life commentary. Alan Moore took pulp comic books and turned them into sophisticated literature that discussed what it means to be human. Both became the voices of their respective generations by writing what they felt was vital – what they felt people needed to hear, rather than what they said they wanted.

As both Shields and Horowitz were quick to point out, this generation – digital, disparate and respectful of long-tail individuality – has yet to find its voice. There’s perhaps an argument that, thanks to personal publishing and the Internet, the voice is actually the whole generation. Nonetheless, there’s all to play for, and it’s time for artists to shed their inhibitions.