Well maybe it's best to give a little background as to where these ideas come from. During gamings infancy organisations were desperate to market their new technology capable of simulating experiences and creating forms of entertainment that you simply plugged into your TV and enjoyed. So how do you market a brand new product alien to the consumer? Market towards children.
Fast forward a few years and now those very same kids have grown up, some are teenagers or young adults now and were seeking something else new. They'd grown tired of so many "child friendly" games being on the market and wanted something more exciting, more mature. When game developers realised that many gamers were getting older new games with more adult content began to spring up and more complex games began to appear. More and more games were featuring in depth storylines with character development and world building, protagonists now had more desire in life than to just collect the most shiny objects to cram into their trousers. Games like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid with its clever writing, three dimensional characters (both in a literal and metaphorical sense) and complex themes about love, war and government corruption were a huge hit amongst teens and adults who wanted something deeper. Gamers were growing up, and so were the games being made for them.
The problem here is that many other mature games that sprang up were becoming popular amongst children and younger teens also. Not so much a bad thing for Final Fantasy and Metal Gear, but more so for the new more graphic video games on the market. Mortal Kombat with its insane death match style combat often resulting in characters exploding (into about 7 sets of rib cages, the developers weren't too good with anatomy at the time) and the new "First Person Shooter" genre of games shocked parents. Now the consoles they once thought of as just another toy for little Timmy now has blood, drugs and sexual references within certain games and it freaked parents out. The previous marketing towards children that built the video games industry's foundations was now contrasting with the medium spanning into more mature themes and content.
Parents who weren't as clued up on what games their children were playing would then become outraged when they found what would be considered mature content in say a movie for example appearing on what they saw as a toy for their child. They couldn't differentiate that there were in fact all kinds of different games being developed with different target audiences in mind and different themes and content within.
Nowadays our video games are all given age ratings by organisations like PEGI in Europe or the ESRB in the US to better allow parents to decide for themselves if a game is appropriate for their child much like with movies. Those that grew up in recent years are aware that each video game has it's own genre, style and can differ in being suitable for young children or being targeted more grown up audiences. This distinction however is still often confused amongst non-gamers who likely still have the mentality established from marketing by early video game console manufacturers that this is all still for kids.
To be honest, there really isn't a set age for video games. Much like films and books there is something for everyone of any age with all kinds of interests. Video games are a medium, a form of entertainment, they aren't something exclusive to only one age group and this can be seen clearly by the sheer vast number of differing video game types available. Some are just silly family friendly games, some are akin to your classic Disney cartoons and others are geared for all kinds of fans of drama, horror, political themes, mature comedy or romance. Games aren't all for kids, and they aren't all for adults, it's just a case of different ones being designed for different types of people.
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