Big difference between 'toy' and 'entertainment'
I firmly believe that the primary goal of any creative medium, such as books, films, tv shows, art, sculpture, videogames, comic books, should be to entertain. Any related objectives, such as informing or teaching, should be secondary to entertaining people, because if you are being creative and not entertaining someone then I think you're doing it wrong.
So how do games fit in? Well in the past games only entertained. You loaded a coin in to the arcade machine, picked up the plastic gun and experienced nary a thought from beginning to end. Now games are beginning to have stories, and some games are even challenging us to actually think about serious things. Mass Effect and Fallout may get a lot of stick for their morality systems but really fallout 3 in paritcular has some choices which don't seem to have good outcomes, and all you can do is find the one you personally are okay with. This is a massive leap forwards and potentially opens games up to being even better than films and books because instead of having to accept the writer's idea of what the only acceptable solution ways you can choose your own, a lot like how y'know, actual morality works.
To say a game is 'just' a game is immature and annoying. A game can and should be so much more. I hate to quote Yahtzee again but he puts it quite nicely in the Batman review, 'Was Watchmen just comic book writing, was Schindler's List just a bunch of flickery lights on a wall?' If there weren't people who for every medium in existence said 'Can this be something more, and not 'just' a silly way to entertain people,' then we wouldn't have the entirety of human culture.
I truly believe that gaming is the next big step in human culture. Interactive Entertainment that builds upon what has come before in the same way that storytelling has built itself throughout history. And anyone who says we shouldn't be thinking about this because it's 'just a toy' is holding us back just as badly as the uninformed idiots and pissants at places like FOX News. Let gaming become something more.
EDIT: Meant to add, 'entertainment' doesn't necessarily mean 'make you feel good or happy.' At least not for me when I use it in this context. There isn't really a word yet to describe what I mean exactly. Schindler's List is entertainment, but that doesn't preclude it from being deep and thought provoking. Watchmen is entertainment, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the greatest comic books and I believe one of the greatest stories ever written.
'Sad is just happy for deep people' - Doctor Who: Blink