With the clamour and controversy that used to be associated with the spiciest of Hollywood blockbusters, last Tuesday I saw the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest in a video game franchise that has, through its slick portrayal of casual violence, enraptured and enraged the public in roughly equal measure. The latest edition shows little appetite for compromise, and no wonder. The newcomer in Rockstar Games’ 11-year-old series needs to live up to the brand’s reputation for being the meanest, fastest, noisiest show in town.

Then there are those sales figures to consider: GTA IV is projected to pull in $400m in its first week alone, the kind of return that would speak loud and proud in the movie world.

The warnings displayed to describe the game’s unsavoury nature – part of a brilliant marketing campaign, of course – are a litany of the subjects most likely to provoke moral crusades against contemporary culture: “blood, intense violence, partial nudity, strong language, strong sexual content, use of drugs and alcohol”. The last in that list has caused a particular storm of outrage. It refers to a new technical innovation: if, during the game, you choose to have one too many in a bar, and climb into your car, the screen turns fuzzy. Off you roar, regardless, so that you never quite focus on the innocent pedestrian whose life you bring to a brutal end as you get away from that troublesome police unit on your tail. Heightened realism, say the game’s makers; monstrously distasteful, reply the critics.

But the moral arguments surrounding GTA IV are in truth a little tired. There is nothing here we have not seen before, and no new definitive scientific evidence, though much in the way of tendentious anecdote, that playing such games seriously harms the minds of the teenage boys at whom they are aimed. As for the glamorisation of criminality, that too has a lengthier tradition than we suppose. Few of us, in our games of cops and robbers or cowboys and indians, sought the certitude of the moral high ground: show me the boy that preferred to be, or had even heard of, Bob Ford to the man that he shot dead, Jesse James.

That is not to say that GTA IV does not break new ground, however. Far from it. The most encouraging signs from early user reviews are that they focus not on increased death counts or the verismo of blood splattering with the correct trajectory from split skulls, but on more traditional artistic concerns: script, characterisation, nuance, wit. The very premise of the new game is diverting: its lead character – the game player – is Niko Bellic, a former combatant in the Bosnian war who has travelled to Liberty City (read New York) to pursue his dreams of easy affluence, only to become entangled in a noir-ish world of vice and violence. While it is not entirely true to describe Bellic as a victim – he is not averse to killing – he is also no monster. There is texture and context to his life. There are instances of goodness in his bleak universe but they are drowned by greed and need – another recurring noir theme. Through the game’s sophisticated interactive features, Bellic faces numerous casual choices – whether to befriend a stranger or treat him as an enemy – which turn out to have consequences later in the game. He also has the choice of just hanging out – admiring the streets of a remarkably rendered cityscape, dropping into a bar for a drink, surfing online for a date. We have glimpses here of a fully-rounded character, distantly related to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle or Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov, anti-heroes driven by their own moral fury into a demented demise. Bellic has his own demons and they correspond sharply with some of the most contentious issues of our time – immigration, inner city blight, drug use and prostitution. Let us not claim too much. A game is a game, and the point of GTA IV remains the shooting of others, preferably generously adorned with car wrecks and civic chaos. There are no points to be won for reflecting on the morally ambiguous scenarios; indeed chances are you will be dispatched back to nil points if you over-indulge carelessly on the philosophical issues. But there is enough here to mark a step change in the genre: enough satirical bite in the exchanges between characters; enough attention to detail in the subtly changing visual backdrops; enough grit in the twilit street-scenes, for us to appreciate the work’s artfulness. The later editions of the GTA series have been compared with those HBO masterpieces The Sopranos or The Wire, for embracing the concept of narrative complexity and frankly depicting the social cavities that are caused by urban decay. That also may be too grand a claim. But GTA IV is certainly in the tradition of a popular culture that is fast learning to deal with difficult themes, and doing so with a demotic energy that is rarely found in apparently weightier forms of expression.

Think back to another breakthrough for popular culture, the first Star Wars movie in the mid-1970s, with its vapid protagonists and infantile view of good-and-evil, and see how far we have come. It may not have been a wholesome journey but we are where we are. Apart from anything else, GTA IV is a remarkable technological achievement. It will not teach your children how to tell right from wrong; but then neither does Pop Idol or Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Video games are growing up, if not to manhood, than at least to late adolescence, when we first begin to process the infernal complexity of the world around us.