These articles are mostly a hollywoodization of the gaming industry. You can see that each of them could just as well have been written about movies and actors as about games. This seems to be extremely common among journalists in California, but I haven't seen it much elsewhere, I wonder if the problem is cross pollination between them and the movie industry there. Most people who play games doesn't care about games in this way, so to them these articles aren't substantive.

Not at all. Most of this is (IMO) dross and has no practical value.