Let's take the definition of "video-game art" as the art of defining interactive experiences that open themselves up upon mastery.
This is the original definition of what video-games were at the start (Pac-Man, Space Invaders).
The mastery takes effort to learn; the game, to incentivize this effort, rewards the player when they do well, and punish them when they don't.
The almost immediate nature of the feedback loop makes learning faster than almost any other human activity.
Given the nature of the medium, you can tackle a theme (space invaders), and even a story on top of it.
This is good for critics; they know stories, they know that books are the highest form of art for intellectuals.
The currency of critics in the system (media/advertisement/entertainment industry loop) is credentialism -- except for purely independent critics you have their own platform and exist through a complex bidirectional relationship with their audience.
However, the story is almost always at odds with gameplay.
A story limits the freedom the gameplay system can respond to the player by railroading certain outcomes.
Often, adapting a story implies different scenes that cannot fit into a game genre, so it's more appropriate to a collection of mini-games rather than what people generally consider to be a game.
Video-game stories tend towards tropes that don't cause such problems for itself, such as the 'big tournament' arc.
Of course, certain genres have much more freedom (RPGs), but still a definite story means certain characters can't or have to die, etc, which remove the meaning of player choices.
The mastery approach hasn't gone away. But critics hate it; the general philosophy of the industry is inclusivity, which is at direct odds with a competitive direct ranking of players according to skills. It requires effort, and rewards innate ability -- reflex, memory, ability to make mental computations, ... are all advantages that generally directly translate into in-game advantages. So the critics industry had been relentless at disparaging the games that directly emphasized mastery (arcade designs, the infamous 'God Hand' review) and elevate what are generally called 'movie-games' that have worked at eliminating these aspects ('Last of Us', later 'God of war') to let all players experience the story fully without interacting with the gameplay in any meaningful manner.
They had to compromise because of the success of Dark Souls that brought mastery back to the forefront, but this is where the total incompetence of mainstream critics is truly glaring (see the infamous 'Cuphead' journalist moment). As a result, their critiques are rarely anything more than press releases with a final score based on production value and not based on any insight into the depth of game mechanics and systems.
I'm surprised not to see Chris Crawford mentioned, as The Art of Computer Game Design (1984) makes the central point of this article at the very beginning, and is a primary source of video-game critique.