The role of the game designer

I left class today very curious to see how the game designers themselves felt about game theory. How they feel they fit into the theory and reality of their medium. I decided to skim around and stumbled on The Art of Computer Game Design. "

A book originally written by game designer Chris Crawford in 1982, it went out of print but was rejuvenated in electronic (free) form on the net after an intrepid professor heard of its existence and wanted it as a resource for her students.

I haven't gotten very far through it, but it seems to look at the issues we talked about today (What is a game? How do you design a game? The future of the game? Taxonomy, etc) from the perspective of the designer.