Designing Games for the Wage Slave 
More on video games for the day. GameDev.net has a decent article up titled Designing Games for the Wage Slave. It's about what's wrong with video games these days now that we're all grown up and don't have hours and hours to sit in front of the TV. It talks about how games need to adapt to the 20-30 something working class stiffs with jobs, families, and responsibilities, and all that jazz. Anyway, it's interesting and it discusses a lot of things that bug me too. For instance,

Don't Waste My Time
Make every moment count. I don't play games to punish myself. I play them to be entertained, rewarded, and challenged. I have better things to do than:

• Attempt the same mis-timed jump again and again: Why oh why have jumping "puzzles" not died the death they richly deserve? There's nothing that quite kills pacing like reloading the same quicksave (or better yet, being returned to your last save point) until you beat a tedious activity through sheer trial and error.
  What, exactly, is my incentive for continuing to waste my precious time in this situation?
• Replay parts of the game I've already finished: Let me save anywhere, any time, or better yet, do it for me. I might only be able to manage minutes of gameplay at a time. Make them count.
• Stumble blindly in the dark: Being lost is *not* fun. Pixel hunting is *not* fun. Wandering around a level looking for an obscurely hidden key is *not* fun. Not even knowing what they key *looks* like is *not* fun. Keep me aware of my objectives, and provide a decent method of pointing me towards them. The glowing aura in "Bloodrayne" and three-dimensional pointers in "Grand Theft Auto III", while contrived, certainly kept the player heading in the right direction.
• Endure obvious filler: My time is precious. I don't want to spend that time enduring mediocre, mundane, or tedious padding that only serve to meet the promise of gameplay hours on the back of the game box.. Make it short if you have to, but make it an adrenaline-pumping, high quality wild ride (nod to "Max Payne") that's worthy of my time.

When placing a sequence in a level, ask yourself: "Am I challenging the player and giving him a compelling experience, or just trying to slow him down?" If the answer is the latter, cut it out like the cancer it is.

So, take this little diddy for a read and see what you think.