Having read both THE JOYFUL GAME and the No Fun Manifesto, neither proved persuasive.
On the one hand, fun has positives. You get to destress, relax with friends, enjoy life. THE JOYFUL GAME explains this better than I ever could; I won't go on about something you already know.
On the other hand, there's other benefits to games besides fun. And I don't just mean that cold, clinical education side of gaming. I think of Pathologic. If you aren't familiar, it's a janky Russian horror game that might be the most depressing thing in existence. It is the exact opposite of fun, but in doing so, primes the player to explore deep, emotionally-charged themes. When people play it, they can't help but argue. This guy argued killing one to save many. These guys called each other fascists. The lack of fun made people think about important questions they never considered; I wouldn't want to take that from games.
And don't forget; fun can be manipulative. I'm thinking of exploitative free-to-play schemes, drip feeding dopamine in just the right ways while exploiting their playerbase. And then there's series like Far Cry; fun games, but they come with unfortunate implications. If we only judged games for fun, we'd open the door to exploitation and propaganda.
My question: why can't we have both? Why can't we have fun games with greater meanings? I mentioned Far Cry's narrative, but the core gameplay loop (scouting and clearing bases) doesn't make the game fun. It's superfluous; you don't need dumb to have fun. And then there's games like Minecraft, which use fun as a vessel to be educational, to explain complex engineering concepts in a way people enjoy. I can see both side's point, but I don't see a reason to fight over this.
While I'm typing; I strongly disagree with Let Us Embrace Our Long Titles. Looking back a lot of my childhood games, leaving them in a box for a decade has let me revisit them for whole new experiences. If anyone here has played Pokemon XD: Gales Of Darkness, try replaying it today. Turns out, your most powerful ally is a benevolent cable news executive who, among other things, puts you in contact with a whistleblower. I guess Pokemon supports journalism. I don't know if it was uncontroversial at the time, or if 12-year-old me didn't think about it, or if I didn't have needed context my first time around, but the game was definitely different the second time around. If I had traded it in. And it's not the only one: literally every game I've owned has become a new experience over time. Each of them has shown me how much I've changed as a person, in ways I wasn't even aware of. Ten years down the line, I'd love to revisit the games on my hard drive.
The very idea of deleting our games scares me. If anything, we need to be saving our games. We live in a world where online-only games can be lost forever as soon as the servers shut down, where games can be wiped off the PS4 storefront because Konami said so. We have a history to protect; wiping our hard drives will only shoot us in the foot.