I was going to respond because I find this is an interesting topic, but Viking did this already so eloquently!
I think you should distinguish between design and implementation. This comes of course from software development with which I am far more familiar. Before design even, you think about requirements. At that point you are not concerned about implementation (what OS, what programming language, etc.)
An equivalent for requirements for a game would be the story (I'm with sw00000p that without a story there wouldn't be much of a game) and details about that: characters, environment, etc. Hand in hand with that you have to consider the game genre.
There's much more of course, but I don't see how you could develop any game without some prep work before getting into the technicalities. Those come later.
Now I have to go to my IT job that pays the bills...