If this is a paper, then you will need a thesis statement. If your thesis is: "Classic games are better than modern games," then you will need to qualify this by first defining what you mean by "better."
Some books you may want to consider:
-A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
-Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever by John Beck, Mitchell Wade
-What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy - James Paul Gee
-The Ambiguity of Play by Brian Sutton-Smith
-Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Berlin Johnson
-Read some of Chris Crawford's stuff; he has a book about game design but a lot of stuff online too, like: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JC...on_Speech.html
Not saying you should necessarily read the entirety of all of those books, but there may be parts of each that you can glean from and use. Most of those have been mentioned in interviews by people like Will Wright, Warren Spector, and other renowned game designers.
If your point is that games of yore are merely more entertaining than modern games, you may not succeed in proving your point well. Better presentation is generally more entertaining, and today's games do have better presentation than classic games.
If you believe that yesterday's games are "better" because they are more innovative, original, well-balanced, etc., then you are really still saying they are more entertaining in some ways; you should probably have more.
Most good game designers will say that games have a teaching capacity to them, and that the "best" games are ones that do a good job of teaching the player new ways of thinking and / or new skills and knowledge that they can apply elsewhere. It stimulates areas of the mind; we find enjoyment in mastering games because it is making us "better people," or at least more apt to survive in the world we live in. Some might argue that "sandbox" games, where the player is given lots of tools and has to figure out solutions to problems, are some of the best games in this regard, but all games teach some sort of problem-solving skills by giving a set of verbs (jump, shoot, dodge, build, gather, run, etc.) to the player to allow them to explore the manifold ways those verbs can be applied to different situations.
I think this that there is a lot of truth in that idea and that this is one of the major reasons we enjoy playing games in the first place. Classic games, because of their simplicity, put the ludemes in very raw and accessible terms, and therefore were in some ways "purer" teaching tools than many of today's games.
There is a lot of potential for a great paper if you take this route, but you will need to do some research. The books above should be able to point you in the right direction. As a final note: you should of course realize by now that school is a game, and your grades are a score. To get a high score, you must simply determine what set of rules the teacher sets before you and play their game to their satisfaction. Gushing about how games are good for learning has, IMO, a good chance of endearing yourself to an educator and netting you a high score on your paper.
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