Believability, most other mediums have shining examples of how a piece of work can influence a whole movements. Those are sort of games that we should be focusing on, the unsung hero who first used "X" feature but nobody ever played or cared to find. I don't want a popular games made by fanboys on the Smithsonian, I want games with actual value to the genre despite popularity.
What makes you think other art hasn't been chosen for similar reasons? There were fanboys 16th century as well.