I have spent some time going back and replaying older games that I found amazing when I originally played them. Outside of simple reflex games like Tetris or Mario, game play has not aged well. Play a strategy or RPG video game from the mid 90s and see how fast it takes you to find some exploitable feature that makes the game trivial to beat.
Compare:
1. "Shogun: Total War" to "Warhammer: Total War" or
2. Civ2's city spamming to Civ5 really well designed gameplay.
3. 1993's Stronghold [0] is so easy for modern gamers to win it feels more like an interactive screensaver than a game and it was a great game when it was released.
The only real exception to this rule is RTS games like Starcraft or C&C, but only in multi-player.
tl;dr Gamers and game play are in a Red Queen's race with each other.
Games which were cpu limited in 1993 have improved for obvious reasons, but I'd argue that the best games between 2000 and 2008 were qualitatively better than the best games between 2008 and 2016, certainly of equal quality at least.
Not just visually. Increased computing power and richer game frameworks will make for more compelling AIs. There are advances in procedural content generation that are getting past the saminess of endless variations on "kill ten rats." Open modding platforms (e.g. Minecraft) create whole communities around them, and endless supplies of content. I think we're still in the infancy of that trend. The immersivity of VR will make gaming experiences qualitatively more compelling than the screens of the past. There's a lot more going on than just increased polygon counts.
I think a better way to phrase that might have been "games will become more effective Skinner boxes", as developers discover new and more powerful ways to keep people in the reward loop. Because that's the real concern here.
Games like Candy Crush and Time Clickers are amazingly good Skinner boxes. There certainly seems more that might be done in FPS games, say, to match that sort of dopamine hit.
It's interesting seeing the better gamers "fidget" (in my current game, CS:GO, players switch weapons, or reload, or swish their knife which gives an accompanying short sound effect) which is a self comfort move I think but in the context provides a low level visual-aural stimulus that I suspect is doing duty as a "reward" stimulus akin to that in a Skinner box.
I don't think there's any evidence for this, and the call to panic is based on it.