Well, for a moment let's take "why do you care if anyone other than gamers takes games seriously" off the "rhetorical question" table, because it doesn't automatically belong there.
Yes, it's true that gamers should have more faith in themselves and their right to enjoy their medium without regard to what others think. It's also undoubtedly true that in another twenty years or so we'll have elected officials who actually play video games and the "middle ground" will look significantly different than it does today, unless we reach some kind of new pinnacle of life extension technology and still have essentially the same elected officials in two decades, in which case I'm going to advocate for stakes and mallets. (Just kidding, NSA; please don't sent men to my house.) Hopefully they'll have played something a little deeper than "Cut the Rope".
But non-gamers still have far more power in our arena than they should. Many of us get anxious when Fox News or some other source of uninformed punditry gets on their high horse about video games because while we recognize it as a load of nonsense, others see them as a legitimate source of information. A few days later, we get panels asking if the video game industry's self-regulation is working. We get major retailers pulling games from their shelves. We get support for ISPs expressing their right to throttle back game-related bandwidth. We get hysterical parents claiming that they won't buy any of a company's games because this game was directly responsible for that shooting.
If you have a fondness for, say, the films of Wes Craven, or the television series The Walking Dead, or the books of Ann Rice, you probably don't need to worry about expressing that on a social media page. If you love Manhunt or Grand Theft Auto, you might be well advised not to disclose that if you're looking for employment.
Likewise, if you spend three hours a day watching television or reading books or seeing a movie, most people aren't going to think much differently of you for revealing this information. If you spend three hours a day playing video games, a fair number of people suddenly know everything about you, or so they think.
Personally, I don't so much want video games to be taken seriously outside of their consumers as I want the technophobes and hysterics to develop a blind spot to their existence until they complete their process of going the way of the dinosaur. Until that comes about, I will continue to feel a circle the wagons feeling when someone with a loud voice and a big soapbox declares that video games are somehow outside the circle of acceptability.
And, Jim? You're English. "...you take games far seriously..." is not. I understand writing of a weekly show occurs in haste, but somewhere in the process of becoming spoken words, a "more" should have found its way in there. Not trying to be smug, just sayin'.