Games Design

What do I enjoy in a game? I enjoy something that clearly has a goal and then sets out to achieve it in its gameplay. Gameplay is really the core of a game, the idea that's left if you strip a game down to its bare bones, without shiny graphics or controls. It's the experience. I've enjoyed being an incredibly agile thief in the Sly Cooper games, being able to use practically anything around me to get to different part of the level. Training a team of monsters in Pokemon and being able to choose from whatever monsters I can find. Being a scientist trapped in a situation much larger than myself and trying to make sense of it with my trusty crowbar in Half Life. The genre of game is almost secondary to what the game is actually about.

One of the important issues that emerged from the articles I read this week was that of repetition and lack of originality. The quote database in particular seemed to be full of people complaining of games copying each other, reworking themselves only to change the graphics or using the same tired ideas.
A thing I am particularly sick of is the repetition of races in MMORPGs or even standard RPGS. Human, elf, dwarf, orc. Sometimes cat people. For goodness sake, it is really not hard to come up with something different. Even tauren in World of Warcraft are a refreshing change and they're just more animal people. Just sitting here thinking about it now I've come up with about 3 different ideas. Actual animals. Why not have a MMORPG where you can just be an animal? You eat stuff smaller than you, you run away from stuff bigger than you. I think it could work.
You could have an inanimate object RPG. You could be a lamp or a book and whenever a human shows up you have to freeze or some kind of trouble occurs.

Enough of that. I doubt those will happen because they're not tried and tested. Games design seems to fall to an individual who implements the design document after the idea has been discussed and finalised with senior design and business personnel. The sites disagree on whether or not the original designer should stay involved in the project. Some say that the idea should be strong enough for production to continue without the original designer, whereas some say that the designer should keep a check on their idea to make sure it is being realised as they imagined.