To celebrate Gamasutra's long-running 'The Designer's Notebook' column turning ten this month, veteran game lecturer/designer Ernest Adams has been highlighting the games of the last decade that "showed great imagination, contained important innovations, or left a lasting legacy" - from Starcraft to Rock Band.

Needless to say, this is quite fun and educative - Ernest is always readable - so here's a random bit I enjoyed, a mini-analysis of The Sims:

"The Sims wasn't supposed to work. A game about people living in suburbia, doing perfectly ordinary jobs? A game about buying furniture? A game inspired by A Pattern Language, a book for architecture geeks? It just goes to show you that not all players like to be entertained the same way, and there's more to video games than adrenaline. The Sims established the age of user-created content by letting people take screenshots, caption them, and assemble the result into stories that they could upload for other people to read. Modding had long preceded The Sims, of course, but this was different -- it was easy and required no tools. The Sims' legacy is huge."

Anyhow, there's plenty more in the article itself, in a kind of retrospective-y fashion, as you would expect. I can't spot anything too controversial in there, in terms of missing titles - but feel free to disagree in comment form.