OK, first of all I have to confess that I didn't read all the other comments, so excuse me for repeating, if that would be the case.
What, in my opinion, seems to be the problem is the interactivity and non-linearity of computer games. The characters, the environment (not only in a "physical" way) and the story itself need to be able to "fork" into different ones depending on the players actions, this is in my opinion what separates the media from other, like literature and film. In a more complex story, with more complex characters, it will get almost impossible to create and combine all these different paths. The only way I can think of to solve this is to create very dynamic games, a "simple" example could be The elder scrolls 4: Oblivion, and almost simulate the world.
The games currently seen as "Highbrow" are either artistic in a very visual way or on the standard of a B-movie.
To take an example of the latter. The metal gear solid series are often seen as rather complex games, story-wise, if you'd make a direct transfer of any of the games to another media, E.G. film, it might be able to compare with simplish Action films. And all of the games in the series are rather linear.
What I think is needed to create more highbrow video games is to create tools, including game engines, that take care not only of the low-level graphics e.t.c. but also a lot more high level things, totally removing the "implementation level" or what ever you might like to call it. Some inspiration could be taken from projects such as squeak. As I see this probably doesn't have a huge commercial interest, although it should, this might be a project for the open source community.
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OK, first of all I have to confess that I didn't read all the other comments, so excuse me for repeating, if that would be the case. What, in my opinion, seems to be the problem is the interactivity and non-linearity of computer games. The characters, the environment (not only in a "physical" way) and the story itself need to be able to "fork" into different ones depending on the players actions, this is in my opinion what separates the media from other, like literature and film. In a more complex story, with more complex characters, it will get almost impossible to create and combine all these different paths. The only way I can think of to solve this is to create very dynamic games, a "simple" example could be The elder scrolls 4: Oblivion, and almost simulate the world. The games currently seen as "Highbrow" are either artistic in a very visual way or on the standard of a B-movie. To take an example of the latter. The metal gear solid series are often seen as rather complex games, story-wise, if you'd make a direct transfer of any of the games to another media, E.G. film, it might be able to compare with simplish Action films. And all of the games in the series are rather linear. What I think is needed to create more highbrow video games is to create tools, including game engines, that take care not only of the low-level graphics e.t.c. but also a lot more high level things, totally removing the "implementation level" or what ever you might like to call it. Some inspiration could be taken from projects such as squeak. As I see this probably doesn't have a huge commercial interest, although it should, this might be a project for the open source community.