The Wright Stuff – Popular Science
This is an excellent interview with Will Wright, creator of SimCity, The Sims, Spore, and other games.
It touches on a lot of key ideas about game design; the nature of education, play and socializing, the richness of game design, how to engage users of different types, and so forth. I kept wanting to quote parts of it here, but then it turned into quoting half the article. So just go read it.