So that Ian Bogost piece on the Atlantic got me digging up my box of old PC Prospect magazines from the 90s (Remember that? You probably don't; it only ran for two years). I distinctly recalled a piece that was very similar, which ran in a 1992 issue.
I managed to get in touch with the author through a mutual friend, and he gave me permission to post it online (for the first time too, I think). I just finished transcribing it and putting it up on Medium.
It's called "Videogames Are Better Without Mechanics." You've probably never heard of the author; he quit games writing (and, it seems, journalism entirely) sometime in 1993. Anyway here's the Medium link: https://medium.com/@NotBrunoAgain/videogames-are-better-without-mechanics-25061fa734d7
@bruno wow, this is ~incredibly~ similar
@bruno had me until "Think of a medium as the aesthetic form of common materials. Poetry aestheticizes language. Painting aestheticizes flatness and pigment. Photography does so for time. Film, for time and space. Architecture, for mass and void. Television, for economic leisure and domestic habit. Sure, yes, those media can and do tell stories. But the stories come later, built atop the medium’s foundations."