Someone named Sean Maelstrom (possibly not a real name) wrote a pretty neat essay on gaming called Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy here. I'm always up for serious discussions on gaming and I highly suggest it.

It's interesting, well-written, and mostly serious. The essay makes some good points but mostly misses the mark.

Ideas I agree with

1. old-school video games are today's "Casual Games".
For all the haters ... if you played video games before 1990 you were once a casual gamer.

2. Casual games eventually produce more hardcore gamers
Star Wars, scifi-lite if it's science fiction at all, produces more sci-fi fans. My college comp sci professors hated video games but most of my fellow students came to computers for games (etc.)

3. Blizzard and Nintendo (as developers) are something special in the gaming industry.
Nobody makes consistent blockbusters like these two developers.

4. development methods matter
Most gamers discuss only creativity in big ideas -- having a good game means executing small ideas as well.

Ideas I didn't agree with

1. 95% of the Game Industry are worthless copycats that never compare to the original
This misses two important points. First, a good genre can contain more than one game -- nearly every modern game genre is less than twenty years old and most of them began with one distinguished entry.

Second, one of his water-walking examples, Blizzard, generally does not innovate on a large scale. They take existing ideas, then execute the sh** out of them until all that's left is win.

In fact, I was a little put-out that he didn't compare Nintendo and Blizzard more, and talk about why two developers with vastly different approaches were both so successful.

2. Casual Games should really be called "Downmarket Games"
If you write a serious article about games you must provide a new name for something with a serviceable old name that everybody already knows. It's a law or something.

3. Great Companies Make Great Games And Then There's Everybody Else
Nintendo and Blizzard are juggernauts and make great games -- but there are plenty of smaller, "derivative" developers who make also great games.

You could probably name your own favorites, but Insomniac and Relic come to mind immediately for me. They don't make billions of dollars but they make fantastic games.

Besides, in the volatile world of development studios, I'd say that any game that gets you to the next one is a success.

4. Weird Hate of Specific Development Methods

Mr. Maelstrom really goes off on the Waterfall Model, on which he blames a panoply of woes. The Waterfall Method imagines project development as a sequential process, where requirements writing leads to design, which leads to code (etc.)

He says this leads to "samey" games, but misses how adherence to high-level requirements (or whatever the equivalent may be called) is so important in massive games. World of Warcraft is a fantastic game where a handful of (relatively inflexible) high level ideas govern not only the big mechanics in the world but permeate the small ones as well.

Anyway, I could go on and on about software development. If you haven't, I suggest reading that essay.