We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Yes, by that “nuts and bolts” statement I really do mean designers are trying to write novels when all we have invented is the alphabet. We can slap together a bunch of game mechanics and try to make them all cohesive and whatnot, but for all the increase in hardware power, we are not seeing a whole lot of advancements or innovation in things like gameplay elements and game engines; just a few here and there, and a lot of incremental improvements or variations on something well understood.

That's actually a really good way to talk about what I was trying to hit earlier. A lot of what people in the industry talk about and what you can infer from what is produced indicates a very superficial understanding of design, where some surface elements are merged together until you get something that feels right, with no understanding of what those elements entail or why things should fit together. I've never been in a design class so I'm not sure how different the academics are, though.

A sort of illustration of what I mean is take an example of an online shooting game, and for a lot of people when it comes to saying what they want designed or trying to critique, they'll just leave it as "I hate sniper rifles, we should take those out" or "we should add experience points so people can earn new outfits, that can be fun". But I feel it should be more examined in the sense of "this aspect of play promotes and encourages this behavior, which isn't fun, so it should be changed to [x]."

It might not just be board game experience, though, for that guy, because he's also pretty good at analysis of literature/shows and getting at why certain parts work and gets exasperated when most people leave their review as "I liked this part and that part" and no deeper. Since literary analysis is such an old field compared to game design, that might be more equipped to train people to think this way, maybe?