Games are not generally produced as solely artistic works. The economic aspect is significant. Attempting to discuss and critique games as solely artistic artifacts means missing one of largest influences on any such artifact. It's like discussing architecture without admitting that materials and physics and humans impose limits.
Modern tools can help make (admittedly small) games even by people who aren't programmers and who don't necessarily want to make money. It's been a while, but I remember the early days of the Adventure Game Studio; there were people trying to make something to sell, but also plenty of people writing pretty decent games solely because they wanted to. Also see the awesome Interactive Fiction community.
For example, when people review classic movies, they take into consideration what studios were willing to fund; executive meddling; whether the movie bombed at the box office; the political situation at the time; the moral codes of the time; budget limitations that forced directors to be extremely creative; problems between the lead actors; etc.
That said, it's probably easier to do that with classic movies about which there is a sizable body of knowledge. You don't have the same production information about a video game released last month.
The experience of the creation might be the same, but how the creation came to be and how it is best understood are very different.
Of course, there are some games that tie the narrative and the gameplay together in such a way that it's hard to separate the two, such as The Colonel's Bequest (1989), The Last Express (1997), and a favorite of Roger Ebert's, Cosmology of Kyoto (1994). There are also "ungames" that eschewed gameplay in order to create more of an art experience, such as Puppet Motel (1995) and The Manhole (1988). But mainstream gaming has largely forgotten these games (as well as many others).
Yet there are a lot of board and roleplaying games pushing their boundaries regarding theme and mechanics:
You have boardgames exploring difficult themes (Train[0]) and others being defined as they are played (Fluxx[1])
On RPGs, You can have rpgs about simple themes as being a housecat (Cat RPG[2]) or serious one like rape and domestic violence[3]. In terms of mechanics, there is Dread[4], a horror game that uses a Jenga tower instead of dice.
There is no push to be considered art, but there are folks doing some really cool stuff with the medium.
What is happenning with videogames is that there are people who thing "videogames should grow up" and "stop playing around". That, in my opinion, is stupid. You don't tell a 15 years kid to "grow up". It will come out naturally. KLEt games mature on their own.
[0] http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/06/24/can-you-make-a-boa...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxx
[2] http://johnwickpresents.com/product/cat-a-little-game-about-...
[3] sorry, the internet failed me :(
The people who seem to be pushing for games to grow up or talking about Citizen Kane moments (and seemingly forgetting about silent films) seem more interested in validation than anything else. There have been interesting games for decades; if they're truly interested in these, all they have to do is play them.
I admit is way less common, but even board games have been created and analyzed as art/philosophy/opinion. Some examples:
- Monopoly (possibly the best known example of a game whose original intent went beyond entertainment).
- Train (a game about Auschwitz: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/63933/train)
As for videogames, the language of the creators themselves sometimes seems to acknowledge the relation to narrative and cinema. Some game designers style themselves "directors", and are sometimes more interested in cutscenes and "telling a story" than in actual interactive gameplay. Note I'm not telling whether I think this is a good or a bad thing :)
Criticism and analysis of games as cultural artifacts is both valuable and needed. Games are like mainstream movies in this regard, where we accept that even mainstream Hollywood movies have a message that can be dissected and analyzed.
For instance, the question is not just what message a movie conveys. The question also includes why. Similarly, there are entire game mechanisms that exist solely for economic reasons (IAPs, gating, etc.) that cannot be understood through artistic lenses.
That's why reviewers can attempt to do both. Just like they do with movies :)
The problem is that videogames are relatively new and people are not yet convinced they can be reviewed as art. It's safer to stick to them being just entertainment whose content is pointless to analyze.
It also doesn't help that a lot of critics can't make a criticism along the lines of "I don't like this because X" without injecting an overt or covert "People who like this are X". The former is criticism, the latter is always a personal attack.
Neither did Mozart.