[Prospero]

I think that part of the problem with the current state of gaming is the studio model that games are produced under. During the 1980s, superstars of the gaming industry were individual names, not studios (Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, Michael Cranford, Brian Fargo, John Carmack, Roberta Williams, Steve Meretzky, Al Lowe, and Geoff Crammond, to name a few). Only Miyamoto and Wright (IMO) have been able to successfully make the transition into the new, studio based model, partly because their games sold so amazingly well.

Under the studio model, you get fewer games and games that are more similar to each other, because the studio model doesn't allow for the idiosyncracy that comes from a single designer or a very small team working alone; moreover, games are expensive, and the people footing the bills know they have a better chance of getting a better return on Doom III than on something quirky and new. (Go to a Commodore 64 abandonware site sometime and look at the amazing variety of stuff there to see how things have changed.) In addition, critics and, by extension, the gaming public have been trained to believe that the things that make a good movie also make a good videogame (most of the money goes into FMVs, sound design, graphics, and things that generally improve "cinematography"), and that isn't necessarily the case.

In this new economic model, there are very few individuals, most of whom are left over from the '80s, that have the power to see a highly personal, original idea through to completion (Miyamoto's Pikmin and Wright's The Sims are good examples). That should be what designers are complaining about, not whether Miyamoto games are kiddie games.