Execution / Game

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I disagree. In the case of video games, quantity does play a role as well (though quality is of course still more important). Every game is judged on a variety of criteria such as gameplay, graphics, plot, soundtrack, etc.

We're arguing two different things. I'm not contesting that games don't have more criteria, but that this doesn't make them better by default. Nor am I saying any aspect of games is redundant, but simply that it is a fundamentally different experience.

No game is ever praised because it presented the prettiest graphics or the greatest story ever but lacking in all the other criteria. The best games such as Amnesia, are, in my opinion, much harder to put together than an excellent painting or book.

You cannot say games are capable of specializing in absolutely everything. For example, you don't have a first course of Skittles followed by a pepper steak with black coffee and lemon slices for desert. All debatably great things in their own right, but they all represent the extremes of their respective specialization. Typically you pick things that complement each other or contrast each other in just the right way. But without considering how each element relates to the other, you get a poor meal that has no consistency. Same principle applies to games. If you have a certain type of gameplay you need the other elements to either embellish it or provide a counterweight for it, but they need to be fundamentally connected to it. Imagine playing Mortal Kombat with The Rite of Spring as the score, a visual style based on a Dali painting and Moby-Dick as the story. Sound like a mess?

EDIT: No matter how much time you spend agonizing over it, you will never create a perfectly balanced game that takes each of its elements to their full potential, it's not possible. That's not to say each element is incapable of being great, just that you can't say books are inferior because they only engage one "sense". Books have certain limitations that other genres don't, but books also have certain things endemic to themselves which other genres cannot reproduce to as great effect. However, that doesn't mean great video games can not be as great or even better than great books.

Before the creation of the symphonic poem by Liszt, the thought of putting music alongside visual images to enhance the experience was not common.

Opera? Ballet? Theater?