http://www.gamestudies.org is an attempt to set up an academic journal about computer games. I had a quick glance over their first issue. Most of it went over my head by a few million miles, but it might be of interest to some people here...
Fascinating stuff - I encourage everyone who is able to stomach an "academic" approach to take a look. There's comments on things like the value (or lack of value) of categorization and the difficulties in bringing narrative to a game - computer games, in this case, but not entirely irrelevant to the general question.
Not sure yet how much real value from a RPG standpoint can be extracted, but I suspect there's more than a little . . .
Gorodn C. Landis