That depends on the game. You can't rearrange the words or the order in a final fantasy game. All you have control over is speed of delivery. But you have that with books too. It's only a few genres where you can actually manipulate the art, most games are very lineair in their narrative. Even the walking dead is mostly illusion of manipulation. It does get the player more involved with the characters then playing passive witness.

It is a big step for writers, that are used to have complete control, to let the player fill in details for themselves. Sure that make keep many current artists away, but we'll get more and more writers that grew up with this new medium of story telling.
I feel like we're still in the infancy of video game story telling. It didn't take movies long to get good, yet they had the benefit of thousands of years of plays. Interactive story telling didn't really start until the mid 70's with Tale-Spin, Advent(ure) and table top Dungeons and dragons.

Anyway I can see what you mean why artists who grew up with books and movies want to stay away from video games. It requires a whole different approach to story delivery and currently the pay off is far less for the writer opposed to writing a book or movie.

Unless you run into a rare breed of a top storyteller who understands game design also (please come up with a list of this rare breed, with Kojima MAYBE being the cut off at lowest level of competence needed), you will end up having issues of indie game stuff and budgets.  Indie games have small budgets because they only have a handful of people on a team to get a game out.  With this, you aren't going to get the full budgets for movies, or even TV.  And it will have a larger budget than it takes  to create a book.  Then you get into the issues with production quality, and indie stuff usually being rougher around the edges.

Easier world-building, inherent intimacy, lot's of space to work with, and an audience of millions aren't enough?

It is not easier building a world electronically than it is doing it in a book, or with pen and paper RPG system.  There is more power, and greater capability to make something that can be more engaging, but it isn't easier.  Also, there is a theoretical audience of millions with electronic format, but the audience is smaller than with either books or movie or TV.  The thing about other mediums than electronic/videogames is they market is bigger, and it is also easier, to produce something else than a game.  If you talk world building/sandbox, look into what it costs to get an MMO or sandbox game, and you see that it just is not the same.

For one thing, it expands your resume and the money is good too. Karen Travis with Gears of War is one such example.

The video game medium should excel at storytelling, so it can be elevated to mass mediums such as movies and not something society still thinks is purely meant for children/teens to play.

The grouo I had in mind is TOP storytellers.  I am talking individuals who end up producing best selling novels, and known in the movie industry.  In other words, individuals who have really no need to branch out, unless they have self-motivation reasons for doing so.

Well thats kinda eletist.....Id say if the books end up on New Yorks best seller lists (not sure about the Gears novels but the Halo ones are), then authors of that nature deserve some recognition.

Video games are simply another medium to tell stories, and all mediums have their advantages and disadvantages. Comic books and graphic novels are great visual mediums that allow you to play with pacing and give the audience a chance to really examine a world, movies are great for visual tricks and motion, serialized television is wonderful for character development and for creating tension.

Video games have their own strengths: one is immersion and another is connection to character.

Story tellers would want to create stories in video games to try and maximize the medium, and to tell stories in a different way. It's not better or worse, just different.