Fascinating discussion here!
I think it could benefit from a little bit of semantic clarification:
"Criticism," of the type that you are doing towards literature in a university is not the same activity that a film critic is doing when he writes a review of a recent film.
As you have accurately pointed out, "criticism" that we see in reviews is essentially a buyer's guide: it helps you to get information about a product before you invest in it. At best it gives you a broad-strokes impression of the game, and helps you decide if it a worthy investment.
But when Harold Bloom writes about Shakespeare, he isn't trying to convince you to buy "A Midsummer Night's Dream." For that matter, Susan McClary's "critiques" of Beethoven aren't trying to convince you not to listen to his symphonies. Scholarly criticism is more about canon-formation and historical development. It's useful to people studying the creative process of an art.
So the analogy of scholarly criticism in video games would be a someone who studies "the development of the airship as a symbol of freedom and as a crux-point in the game-flow tempo in JRPG's." This would involve comparing the use of airships in the Final Fantasy Series, Chrono Trigger, Tales Series etc. and developing some type of framework for analyzing how different airships impact the experience and pace of the game. Such a study would then be useful to "ludic academics," as professors who study gaming call themselves, and also to game developers. I don't know if anyone does this type of "criticism," as gaming is still pretty young as an art form.
But remember what Jean Sibelius said about critics:
"Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic."
