Bad Twinkies

If Hollywood is to be believed, a Twinkie never goes bad. Kinda like a McDonald's hamburger. Must be all the preservatives.
In this blog entry I hope to talk about bad/clichéd game design and narrative decisions.
There are two sides to the Twinkie coin:

The first is easy-way-out writing and design.
Computer games are often designed from the ground up, in a predictable fashion: start with genre.
-Are we producing a first-person shooter? (ie. do we, as developers, want to play a game where characters, creatures and sets get shot to bits by the player?)
-A strategy game? (Does our target gamer want to command armies? Make "strategic", "thoughtful" decisions?)
-An adventure game? (Static sets, low budget, indie production for the "elite" gamer?)
Yes, I make a lot of assumptions about how both production companies and "generic/cliched" players operate. But this is how many game designers think. They are gamers, first and foremost, and they want to produce something that is fun for them to play...And they want to play games like what they grew up playing. The problem is this sort of conceptual inbreeding.
Cliches are a problem for all writers and designers. They are there, always in your field of view, begging you to take the easy way out -- "Just grab onto me and you'll never need to be original again! I'm proven! I'm entertaining!" Clichés prey on those of us with writers block.

The other sort of clichés that game developers employ are those of juvenile content, often for marketing purposes (however misguided). This affects both well-thinking developers who want to target a particular audience, and bottom-line-comes-first-thinking executives and shareholders (Electronic Arts!).
These sort of considerations include: Dumbing down for the sake of it (as an example: removing the possibility of the protagonist to die, or otherwise be in any properly precarious situation), and of course, big tits (though this final one is, thankfully, dying out).

Most other Twinkie problems come down to lack of funding, lack of quality control, lack of proper adherence to proven UI/design conventions (Let's think outside the box! For no reason!), and lack of after-production support (patches).