Quick response to the response to the response to the response:

There are plenty of reasons to criticize the corporate control of everyday life. Bland, repetitive entertainment is near the bottom of that list when you include being poisoned by McDonald's food and corporate lobbying to make it illegal to label a food item as being GMO-free. (I swear to god this is true)

No need to have any call-outs as to who's hardcore and who's not. And art is good, it encourages innovation that can sometimes seep into more mainstream productions whether the big studios like it or not. See the recent popularity of unique films like Amelie, Run Lola Run and others as an example that brilliant directors from the art / indie world are capable of entertaining more than just a specialized audience if given the chance. The frou-frou art museums comment was rather spurious in that context.

Pacman (certianly not a 'drop in the bucket') was simply the most striking example. I heaped much praise on Grim Fandango as a relatively recent example of innovative gameplay. It simply wsn't the mass-culture phenomenon that 80's arcade games were. That was back before one needed to define oneself as a 'gamer'. This fandom around the medium itself would give Marshall McLuhan plenty to write about.

Speaking of popularity of games, Yahoo!'s online board and card games get orders of magnitude more traffic than any multiplayer big-budget studio game's servers. These people may not describe themselves as 'gamers', but they're still an important, obviously sizeable chunk of the market that isn't being courted by the big game companies enough. One would think the non-stop frenzy caused by the Sims would have clued in at least one or two companies working on the next FPS that maybe there's more money elsewhere, but so far it's not working out (EA shooting the golden goose with the awful sims online is showing how hard it is to actually support innovation when every creation is simply a financial transaction). Another interesting statistic about these non-gamer gamers is that a large number, more than half even, are female. Women who would never imagine sitting on their couch shooting bad guys as entertainment seem to love games like Acrophobia, and not enough resources are going into exploiting this market any further. This is short-sighted on the part of the games industry, who, IMO are too enamoured with producing the same sure-thing over and over.

One need not simply 'stop playing' when one has the option of examining how the product could be improved.