What should every game have?
I think the game must be attractive in terms of visual graphic interests and the unexpected challenges for each play but not too much; the most effective approach to enhance player engagement in gameplay is to set each stage in a single game round so that players can feel gradually about the enhancing difficulties during the gaming.
Games I owned (currently playing)? I play video games in a variety of genres (when my mom is not around since she hates video games):
Action: Temple Run, Temple Run 2, Subway Surf
Strategy & Narration: My Tom, Deemo II
Rhythmic Beats: Beatstar, Spin Rhythm
Three-act Structure of My Favorite Game and Pacing:
Action and Rhythm Genres: it is functioned by stage of difficulty as I play the game further.
Beatstar (my favorite list so far) lets me play all the difficulty levels (normal, hard, extreme) of all songs, each song contains 5 stages (easy to the challenging part — speeds and beat blocks will increase and contains more challenging postures), and unlock more songs by playing songs based on higher scores and frequency of playing.
Coming up with Ideas with Metaphor or the Mechanic?
I think mechanic matters more than metaphor because the game is the story platform that requires players to be engaged or somewhat that let players be involved in the narrative settings, or even players create a story. The player is a key cast in a game in terms of completing the process of gaming. Although the metaphor is a rule set that can determine the quality of the game, it is not the first step because sometimes not all similar rules are applied to the same or different games.
Ideal Potential Player(s)?
I have no preference about who I would like to collaborate with because I would like to learn their different aspects of approaching the game design solutions.