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Isn't it time for video games to grow up?

They involve cartoon characters jumping on the heads of other cartoon creatures and collecting flashing stars and magic mushrooms; endless battles between warring factions hiding and ambushing each other like a group of kids playing hide and seek in the ravine; space adventures with bizarre alien sidekicks and simulated sex with differently-coloured species. It's a teenaged boy's fantasy world of escapism, right? So when will video games grow up?

Victor Lucas says asking such a question betrays a misunderstanding of what the gaming industry has become. Lucas is the executive producer and host of Electric Playground, Canada's first and arguably one of English media's most important television programs about video games.

“We don't care if you don't get it any more,” he says from the set of his show, now a daily magazine that airs on Citytv and G4TechTV. “It's not a niche market, it's a universal, global market and there's a lot of fun that people are missing out on if they're not playing games.”

If games need to grow up, what should they grow up into, wonders Newsweek writer N'Gai Croal. The author of the Level Up blog, who also writes the “Playing in the Dark” column for the video-game magazine Edge, suggests that one reason so many people consider video games to be just an adolescent pastime may be the “f” word: Fun. In other words, they are seen by some as time-wasters.

Croal says that we're still trying to understand how games do what they do, how “the procedural rhetoric of play works and how you can use that to elicit emotions from people who play games.” To say nothing of provoking thought.

Some games - BioShock and Braid are recent examples - require careful thinking to play and do result in emotional responses from players. Croal considers games to be an “expressive medium” and invokes two more titles - Ico and Shadow of the Colossus - as examples. Lucas insists that even Defender and Pac Man were able to do this.

“I remember how angry we got when we lost our digital life and how excited we got when we completed levels,” he says. Recognizing that emotional connection was one reason he decided to create Electric Playground. “Those are the roots of our games, our first steps into interactive fiction,” he says. “What's happened since then has been staggering.”

But Croal thinks that the industry would be well served by breaking out of the typical genres and tapping into something deeper.

“I think the BioShocks and the Half-Lives and the Braids and the Shadow of Colossusses should start to be the baseline for games,” he says.

For Lucas, the release of Spore - the latest creation from the brain of Sims inventor Will Wright - is an indication that games have reached a point of maturity. Lucas thinks that university classes will be formed to study the game, which has players evolving life from a single cell all the way to flying spaceships around the galaxy. “It's an enormous achievement,” he says.

Despite the fact that the video game industry has overtaken the music industry in terms of revenues and is quickly overtaking the movie business, video games are still perceived as something kids do, laments Matt Levitan, marketing and public relations manager for Sony Computer Entertainment Canada. He hopes for the day when more people will appreciate the storylines and the acting and the effort that goes into creating games which makes them more than “just pixels on a screen.”

The video game industry is maturing faster than the consumer perception and mainstream media's coverage of it, the Sony staffer says. If this is the case, he maintains, there needs to be more gamers in prominent positions to influence the change in perception.

“If I was the editor-in-chief of a national newspaper,” he says, “I'm sure I'd have a lot more gaming coverage in there.”

Lucas has been on the air with television shows about video games for more than ten years, and says that the challenge with mainstream media is that they are working with traditional programming ideas.

“It's a completely different universe,” he says, citing as reasons fractured audiences and the paradigm shift that allows the audience to openly participate in the discussion that was once limited to the media elite.

Croal says that while the medium of video games may be somewhat adolescent based on the subject matter and game play of some games, the dialogue is starting to grow up.

“The conversations that are happening around video games right now,” says Croal, “are more intelligent, more informed, and more capture the actual experience of playing games.” He calls the discourse around games “compelling,” and welcomes the opportunity that the Internet has provided for new voices to be heard.

But because everyone can participate in that discussion, some contributions can be less - palatable. At times the outcry to a negative review in an online forum can be strewn with expletives and racist, homophobic comments. “Everybody takes gaming personally,” says Levitan. “Everyone is so passionate about it.”

Although the audience's contribution to the video game conversation can be base, crude, and “sometimes nasty,” Lucas insists that, “sometimes it is breathtaking, intelligent, and revelatory.”

“Games grew up a long time ago,” Lucas says. “People that don't recognize that have missed the boat. I feel bad for them.”