Building on ranger207's point about transformative impact: I think the challenge is that game transformations are often invisible to outside observers.

When someone reads Lord of the Rings, they can talk about it with others who haven't. The shared cultural vocabulary emerges from discussion. But when a game fundamentally changes how you perceive systems or choices, that shift happens inside your head. You can't really show someone else.

I played Factorio for a LOT of hours many years back. For months afterward, I genuinely couldn't stop seeing bottlenecks and throughput problems everywhere. Traffic, grocery stores, my own work. It sounds silly describing it, but the perceptual shift was real. Nobody around me noticed because there was nothing external to notice.

Maybe games won't produce the next Lord of the Rings because their transformations are too personal and too hard to share?