And the "How cum game storees dunna get rispect lyke buks and movees?" crowd seem to be ignorant of economics and motivation. It is said that "the cream rises to the top," but I say the cream goes for the top from the start. Talent goes where the prestige and/or money is first, and when it comes to writing the prestige and/or money are not in video games, but in novels and screen-writing. And without the talent and the money to lure that talent, video games won't get the prestige. It's very simple really. Maybe stop throwing your limited resources at Hollywood voice actors and try to attract talent to the areas that have been suffering for so long. I've never heard anyone say "Yeah, that Simon Templeman is o.k. I guess, but games need some big names reading the shitty dialogue if they are to evolve!"
The problem isn't the medium itself, it's the kinds of people we have producing and curating the medium right now. I don't know if it's age difference or the usual cultural shifts, but the way people talk and write now....where are the professional adults? Where are the men and women? Most of the males seem effeminate and adolescent, and the females just adolescent. So much of their writing and speech is laced with irony, snark, passive-aggressiveness, slang, memes, facetiousness. Non-stop. And lest you make comparisons to how we roll on the Codex, these people do it on the job where there should be different standards. Do any of these people sound like they could be a Hemingway, Twain, Kafka, Shelley, Blake in the making? Or if more modern examples are more appropriate, William Gibson, Ellison, Murakami? On the critical side, are any of these hipsters with in light years of Pauline Kael or John Ruskin? Do we have the journalistic equivalence of 60 minutes (sorry, I don't know of many journalists) or even Larry King? And the good, sincere game criticism I have seen is unanimously focused on play. And then there is life experience: think any Herman Melvilles will be coming out of the generations who spent all of their free time on pop-culture? Even old game designers successes were built upon life experience or at least study. Legend of Zelda is a result of Miyamoto's ventures into the countryside combined with fairy tales. Think you can make a Sim City without looking into urban planning? (Will Wright went to technical university with focus on architecture and engineering, btw.). I wouldn't be surprised if the people who made Gauntlet spent time in actual dungeons, so atmospheric and tonally "correct" it was for a game back then, or at least played a lot of DnD, which beats watching Pewdiepie and playing Bioshock in terms of edutainment.
Needless to say, the current ambassadors of video games are not going to be producing meritorious works in video game writing any time soon. And we've already seen how video games can not only have A.) good writing, but B.) tell stories in a manner complimentary to the function of the form. See: Planescape and it's Q&A dialogue tree approach of expressing ideas and the death-resurrection mechanic; Silent Hill 2 using in-game antagonists as symbols of theme; even goddamned Super Metroid, with its almost operatic/silent picture use of music, rising crescendo of a beginning, into-the-rabbit-hole progression of the middle meat of the game, late game twist (assumed foe becomes friend), climax (Mother Brain fight and exodus from the planet). So there is no excuse for not getting 'er done. Except talent. Full circle, baby.