The Three Big Questions and Computer Games

I've been hanging out at The Forge, and one of the members has lately started some discussion of the "Three Big Questions" that get asked when people post their designs. The questions are:

What is your game about?

What do the characters do?

What do the players do?

One of the problems with a lot of new designs is that the answers to those questions are fuzzy. Often, descriptions of game setting are given for "what is your game about". A lot of newcomers also confuse the boundaries between characters and players.

All of this reminds me of the game Indigo Prophecy, which I've been watching a friend of mine play. If you haven't heard of it, it's an "interactive movie" with a lot of depth and branching. What's it about? Investigating the mystery of a supernaturally-influenced murder and trying to survive. What do the characters do? Talk to people and try to figure out what exactly is going on. What do the players do? Ummm... mash buttons to determine how well the characters do. Watching my friend play the game, I think that's really all I want to do.
My point is that there are a zillion games with this kind of mis-match. I don't mean that what characters and players do have to be perfectly matched. But it seems like the game designers of Indigo Prophecy put far more thought into questions 1 and 2 and pulled something out of a hat for question 3. I've seen this is in a lot of proposed CRPGs as well. They answer the first and second questions with a long description of backstory and plot, and wave off the third question. This kind of thinking is why a lot of CRPGs have bad, uninspired gameplay.

Also, note that the second two questions ask about what players and characters do. They're about the verbs of the game as Chris Crawford defines them. A lot of answers to these questions have really vaguely defined verbs, or aren't verbs at all.