I agree that games are by and large getting better. Us nerdy types can rail against the generic cover based shooter with the generic soldier plot, but you can't mess with success. Also between airport scenes and slowly dying in a nuclear explosion, they can still offer us something is they put their mind to it.
In the past games were about fun, or a certain type of slightly masochistic trial and error. They were about beating the game and having fun getting there.
Nowerdays, as far as a lot (not all, but enough to screw it for the rest of us) of people are concerned, the only measure of a game is how awesome the deathmatch mode is, and that pisses me the hell off. I really had hoped we'd have grown out of that by now. I mean, online shooting is fun, and it'll never go away, but its gotten to the point where even good developers barely bother trying (see Brink).
I think that this trend is going to die off, at least in terms of a games primary function. The market is already so crowded its borderline stupid, and so I think we'll see more interesting approaches to multiplayer, ideally better and more compelling co-op which I think has been overlooked a lot outside of Portal 2. We're also due a resurgence of good single player games. Again, I think we'll see this come back to the fore soon, probably on the next console generation.
As far as games as art. Well... Not everything can really be that kind of game. Almost no-one can do it intentionally, and those who try tend to make shoddy knockoffs of games that did it accidently. Something becomes art by having a deep, compelling, original story, characters that you want to explore and are sad to part with and genuinely innovative design. It needs a combination of incredibly good fundamentals and the X-factor of human condition subtext.
If every game was like that, no-one would buy them. Almost no genuinely great games get bought by large numbers of people. Take Rez. Rez is an AMAZING games, and is genuinely art. It was an experience of something so different to anything else, putting you into a synesthic universe of weird unknown sci-fi. And practically no-one bought it compared to utterlly non-art mainstream games.
So yeah, we'll get the odd gem, but we'll mostly get good, playable, enjoyable blockbusters, because those are the ones that really make the money. TBH I think its kinda pretentious to harp on at the need for more art in gaming. Some games can be art, but mostly that was irrelevant while you were playing it, and indeed your motivation was entertainment not illumination. You look back afterwards and go 'Wow', but throughout you were just enjoying the game for what it was.
