You've basically hit my main thoughts on the debate. On the one side is a few people who are basically playing a semantic game to exclude games from the culturally elitist concept of what is and isn't art.

And on the other hand you have gamers who play exclusively AAA games and who don't want to admit that the games really deserving respect for their craft tend to be doing a little more than "pretty game with thoughtless, mediocre gameplay and a bunch of cinematic that wouldn't even be a passable summer blockbuster".

And in the middle are the majority of people who either don't care, or care more about what games are doing, not what we call them.