Jacob, I would say that the game is undergoing the process right now of maturing. That is to say that a lot of designers have, in the past couple of decades, not taken their own medium seriously as an art form, and the tools for creating high-quality experiences with minimal effort have not been available. I would say that this began to change in a major way within the past half of a decade.

So, it's not the availability of high-quality graphics that has been preventing games from achieving their potential - it has been the will to fill the entire breadth of the game's scope with material in precisely the sort of way that earns money most efficiently, rather than filling that scope with expressive material.

My personal findings have been that a few major studios (Firaxis, BioWare, etc.) have had greater success by producing games with complex references to real life and expressions about humankind, and this success has encouraged some developers to move in this direction. Additionally, the availability of new, cheaper game engines and the availability of programming and scripting education has contributed to a rise in small developers who are willing to put expressive material in their games at the risk of losing investment.

The games of the 80's were so simple that expression was required to even make the game make sense, so that's all there was at the time. The following decades had a crash in the gaming market followed by a rise of high-budget games, which eclipsed this still-existing low-budget market, decreasing its visibility. This is becoming less true.

In short, I feel that, yes, the high-budget games have in numerous cases failed to take themselves seriously as an art form and have, therefore, had decreased expressive value. However, high-budget expressive games do exist and have had success, and lower-budget expressive games have begun to appear in the public eye again for the first time in nearly two decades.