Cognisant Game Design - why? and the mission statement

I founded Cognisant Game Design because I feel that with all the technology and tools we have at our disposal, our biggest deficit in games currently is design. This site was inspiried someone over at Greg Costikyan's blog who posted in a comment that he wished/was looking for a place to discuss serious game design issues, and *only* game design.
I was getting increasingly bitter, even resentful of the current game industry I realised that there are a paltry number of game companies and games that inspire me enough to want to work for/on them compared to when I was a kid and growing up. It wasnt just a symptom of getting older and more jaded (well not as much as I'd thought).I realised we are missing something nowadays and design is close as an approximation . In order to better study and understand the subject I created this site.

The main problem I see with today's world is that we try to make a game that fits into a specific genre, or in a specific way whereas in the old days people came up with the idea/the concept first and then tried to figure out how to build it. By not having 3D engines or to have to worry about pixel shaders, physics etc they worried about what was best about the game. Now often, concepts are fit into engines or 3D, or worse, what you think the publisher would like you to pitch.

The best example was a friend of mine who asked me to start and MMO company with him and I asked, "well do you even know what kind of game you want to make? and what about it would it make a good MMO?". He hadn't thought it through, he just wanted to make *some* kind of MMO since that is "Where it's at" these days. Or the funding/development hurdles of doing one

Lastly I designed this site so that it would cover all aspects of design, not just a vague statement, and also to move away from the current state of ludology and acknowledge existing genres, study them, learn from them or to evolve them as well as studying abstract new representations of narrative, virtual societies etc. We are forgetting gameplay and what games can offer, past, present and future.