Games in which the player character can't be seen/heard or games in which the player chooses the character's race/gender don't count.

Why? Because you never get a true sense of who the character could really be as an individual. No matter what race/gender you choose, you're destined to walk the same path and speak the same dialogue (minus experimenting to reach branching paths, but those are still the same actions and same dialogue no matter your race/gender). A designer having the sense to decide a character's race/gender before the game finishes development means more consideration went into that character's characterization/what makes he/she an individual set apart from the rest of the NPC-schlubs in the game or even apart from the characters of other games. Without that consideration, the character is just a mindless clone with no real role to play save to serve as a host to a player who may or may not really care about the events taking place in the game. So, then, what was the point of writing a backstory, a continuing story, a plot? What was the point of creating a world?