They said the same things of cartoons, but Walt Disney tore that obstacle down with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. They say cartoons shouldn't take themselves too seriously (i.e., the format is too childish to convey strong emotion) and yet Japan keeps turning out acclaimed mature anime every year. They said electronic games would never work on anything but PCs and arcade stations, and yet the nineties and late eighties proved that wrong too with the advent of the Atari, the NES, and others.
Every time someone says that a medium can't be anything more than it already is, someone comes along and shuts the nay-sayers up. I believe the word "game" is too narrow a term. That word allows politicians and activists to complain when a video game tackles mature issues. It's what drove Fox to criticize BioWare for including pseudo-sex scenes in Mass Effect: their reasoning probably goes along the lines of "you can't include anything naughty like sex or drugs in games, because they are GAMES."
The narrow minds of the world ascribe characteristics to video games that limit their potential. Video games have to power to challenge your beliefs or immerse you on a personal level that movies and books could never reach. With a video game, you have to power to influence the outcome of events (or at least, you are given the idea that you are). More conservative thinkers could not embrace this simply because their opinions are beyond influence. Their opinions have been cemented in the concrete of time; to them, a video game carries no more emotional weight, utilizes no more cognitive thinking, requires no more personal investment in the experience than a child's game of skip rope.
Imagine if you saw a bunch of kids swearing or discussing objectivism while playing hopscotch. In much the same way, many people can't see Mass Effect evoking the same feelings as Titanic, or Bioshock supported by the same philosophies as Anthem. Not all video games are "games" in the childhood sense; some are more about what you take away from them in the end.
Edit: Of course, I can understand if you dislike the genre or quicktime events. I'm just opposed to the view that games should be "games." That's like saying tomatoes should just stay tomatoes instead of being in ketchup or sauce or ammunition for bad rock concerts.
