There are several reasons for this imbalance, but perhaps the most glaring is the fact that the creative and commercial power in the games industry rests largely in the hands of men. And unfortunately a disproportionately high number of them seem stuck in a creative backwater full of big guns, big muscles and bikini-clad babes - or at least entertain such ideas because of commercial considerations. Could the games industry's enduring censorship problem be a result of this very imbalance? The 'outraged' Daily Mail only sees blood and guts in games like Doom, Postal, Carmageddon and countless others, because quite often that's all there really is.

The stunted development of true adult themes can be attributed partly to the sheer amount of clout that Japanese corporate behemoths, Nintendo, Sony and Sega wield within the industry. These companies have built their empires on the foundations of the toy market, so retaining an inherent, archaic responsibility not to offend the kids - despite the fact that the bulk of videogames are now bought by adults.

It shouldn't be forgotten, however, that the defining moment for the advancement of visual realism in videogames was provided by Rare's masterly 3D shooter, GoldenEye - ironically published by the world's most paranoid and prudish games company, Nintendo. While GoldenEye's sniper sequences are animated superbly (no other game conveys the impact of a bullet so realistically), its core gameplay does emphasise the merits of a stealthy and intelligent approach.

So where are we heading? Will games keep getting gorier than ever, with little regard for character interaction and moral or emotive content? Certainly there's no stopping the diehard first-person community as its continues its pursuit for the ultimate gib fix. However, there are vague signs of maturity creeping into certain titles, such as Final Fantasy VII's emotionally charged storyline that has become infamous for reducing players to tears. Or Valve's skilfully directed epic, Half-Life, that bestows some intelligence upon a genre in danger of descending into a moral void.

In the next few years videogames will undergo technical and creative transformations of such vast proportions, that the development of truly adult content is inevitable. How fast areas like AI, realtime dynamics, and complex simulation of behaviour change the face of videogaming, though, rests on how readily developers will let go of all those primal videogaming impulses ('what do I shoot?') that can be traced back to the schoolyard.