Interestingly, I feel like recently I’ve mostly only seen the “games aren’t art” trope deployed in a way that inverts the implicit valuation - like, the GamerGate-y “that game has artistic value [which is bad], therefore it’s not a game” “argument.” Fortunately, in this as in so many other cases, the “misogynistic assholes are wrong about everything” heuristic does all the work that’s needed.
Your point about the lack of non-review criticism in the contemporary IF scene resonates with me too - I feel like I’m often trying to split the difference when I do mine, which often leads to awkward results. Just in this comp, the author of Cost of Living got justifiably annoyed with me for spoiling some later pieces of his game in my review - but I don’t think it’d be possible to really engage with the work by taking around the issue with a bit of blurred text. And what I wrote on The Muse is really as much personal essay as anything else - it only looks at the parts of the game relevant to what I wanted to talk about, rather than offering a comprehensive view of what the author produced to a prospective player.
I think this has a lot to do with how IF is produced and consumed these days - disproportionately in time-limited competitions where there’s some urgency in cranking out responses and hopefully guiding players to stuff that’s worthwhile before voting is up. And because there are so many events, with so many entries - a good problem to have! - plus the fact that many reviewers are also authors so are using the “down time” to work on their own stuff, there’s often not much space to do anything else.
I’m not trying to throw stones since I’m definitely at fault here given my own habits - I like to try to react to new stuff from new authors since I think that’s a good community norm and ideally helps folks stick and become repeat, then veteran, authors, plus I have completionist tendencies. But it does seem crazy to me that something as rich as, say, Turandot has generated very little writing or thinking since it came out two and a half years ago.
I will say there are some exceptions outside of the rich vein of Infocom analysis that you’re part of - I made that Turandot reference because I’m thinking of @kaemi’s perceptive look at Victor Gijsber’s archive, and @mathbrush’s “author highlights” series (scroll down on his IF Wiki page)is a good model too. So definitely worth considering what other approaches are possible!