The Designer's Notebook: Ten Years Of Great Games

Ernest Adams writes, "Ten years ago this month I started writing The Designer's Notebook for Gamasutra. To celebrate this anniversary, I want to look over the last ten years of game history, highlighting games that I feel were especially important from a design standpoint. This is necessarily a personal view, and I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I'm especially interested in games that I feel showed great imagination, contained important innovations, or left a lasting legacy."

"They won't necessarily be the biggest sellers or the ones with the highest critical acclaim, however. Sports and driving games, for example, are two of our biggest genres, but won't get much mention. Their designs tend to advance by evolution and refinement, not wholesale change. Likewise, I've deliberately avoided discussing sequels, for the most part -- sequels are frequently better games than their predecessor, but mostly because their gameplay has been refined than because their designs have changed dramatically."