I'm in the camp that wants everything to just run nicely at 1080p and 60fps instead of aiming to be glitzier with every generation, while at the same time being an absolute purist about 24fps in cinema.
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The thing about games is that they don't have a celluloid texture to begin with, and you're not stripping away that materiality of the canvas for the sake of the hyperreal.
I say this as somebody who is extremely strict about disabling frame interpolation for films, since I mostly watch classic cinema and have seen a ton of it projected in 35mm, and I know what it's supposed to look like. I'm very sensitive to the "soap opera effect" and the uncanny-valley effect it produces by stripping out the natural motion and variance of film grain and squashing everything into cheap digital video. The post-processing looks awful. You'd think this wouldn't apply so much to current cinema, where digital photography and/or VFX don't always have that palpable texture to begin with, but anyone who caught recent films like the Peter Jackson Hobbit in 48fps—shot that way, without artificial frames generated in post-processing—can attest to how it exposes the artificiality of film sets and has a way of making a set look like a set.
So 24fps actually is cinematic, in a way that I notice vividly. (For films after it was standardized, I mean: if you go back to the silent era, exhibiting films shot for other standards like 20fps with modern technology is a subject of some debate.) But it's entirely for reasons that have no pertinence to games.
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I'm only talking about CG, mind you. To be honest, something like a Pixar film would probably look fine at a high frame rate for the same reason they already look fine in stereoscopic 3D, since they're digitally rendered to begin with and generate so much motion between keyframes with simulation, and the reason this doesn't and won't happen is because each and every frame is so expensive already. It's not the same kettle of fish as hand-drawn artwork or live-action footage.
The most truly cinematic game I've played in recent memory is Cuphead. It's very responsive and runs at 60fps, but I wasn't surprised at all to learn that the animations were drawn at 24fps. That game is going for a specific look—the one that animated shorts had pre-television, when they were made to be projected on film—and it gets there with more than just the grain filter. It's the rare game that you actually want to have look like a film instead of a video game, because that's the aesthetic commitment to authenticity the designers are making, but it doesn't come at the cost of game-like responsiveness.
This is the ideal compromise, really. If you go back to Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, the game itself runs at 60fps (and you can tell from your motion through the environments) but the object animations only shift once every few frames to capture the look and feel of stop-motion. It looks quite authentically like stop-motion—but again, not at the cost of the responsiveness of the game. The low "frame rate" of the animations actually comes off as a darn sight smoother than a fully 30fps Kirby game like Star Allies.
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The irony is that I pick up on the pestilential calamity of the soap opera effect as consciously as I do because I've seen 60fps in games, so the uncanniness comes from seeing a film look like a game when I expect it to look like a film. But it doesn't follow that running a game at 30fps or 24fps suffices to make it look like film. First of all, I typically don't want that anyway, as I want my games to look like games—but I've disliked the game industry's perpetual cinema envy since the 1990s, and that hasn't changed; in a video game context, the buzzword "cinematic" almost always reveals an extremely narrow perspective on cinema. (And even at 60fps, a lot of the performance-captured animation in AAA productions is far too chunky and laggy for my liking; not game-like enough.) You can't simply pretend to be made at 24fps if you weren't shot that way, or animated frame-by-frame that way. What makes a film look like a film is not so much that number itself, but the dance of light and shadow and grain and how they "run" at 24fps.
The art of cinematography developed with those nuances in mind, and high-quality digital restorations are very sensitive to preserving that look. If you shoot something in digital and print it on 35mm, it doesn't suddenly look like it was shot on 35mm. (I remember this being something of a hot subject back when Attack of the Clones was first released.) Now, there's been a fair bit of convergence here, now that everything goes through a digital intermediate anyway, but people with a better eye for photography than I do can still pick up on how something shot in digital at 24fps is film-like in a way that is unlike how something shot on celluloid at 24fps in film-like. (Anyway, I know I'm cutting corners and I won't belabour the point; celluloid/digital is not the distinction we care about here. If you want to see a demonstration, refer to Sean Baker's film The Florida Project, which switches from film to digital at a critical moment—partly for artistic effect, and partly because it was the only way that scene would get done. Trust me, you'll notice the difference.)
My point—TL;DR—is that a game that runs at 30fps doesn't look like a film. It looks like a game running at 30fps.
