It says in my sticky'd post that I am biased towards honest game design, and I wanna talk about what this implies. Cuz the concept seems kinda innocent but it has very radical implications if you take it to its logical conclusion. Fully committing to the idea is basically impossible but it's useful as a limiting principle, IMO.
Games are fundamentally artificial means of creating emotions in the players, so they are always dishonest in some sense. They create fake goals, fake obstacles and get you to care about something "meaningless" - their internal rules, their fiction. However, you do actually experience emotions through your interaction with them. That part is very much real.
Dishonest design is a kind of numbing. It's mechanics and styles of design that try to minimize the negative (or positive) feelings that interacting with games causes with the use of psychological tricks. Usually people euphemistically call this minimizing friction or something like that, Doom 2016's director called this stuff a "pressure release valve" which I think is a good way to put this.
Derek Yu's 2021 GDC talk talks about soft vs spiky design, and I think this is a good lense through which you can view dishonest game design. While some games are naturally soft, a lot of games, especially difficult action games, are naturally spiky. They have very frustrating elements that come from trying to learn their mechanics, trying to execute stuff, trying to get consistent, sustaining focus, etc. They also ideally have very rewarding elements - moments where it clicks, moments you make a string of good decisions, a run where you execute everything flawlessly, etc. These extreme highs and lows form the spikes, they're the nature of the game and its interactions - they're honest.
When games were simple due to physical or tech limitations, they had to let this spiky design rock, they had no other choice. Even though this style of design stuck around even as the tech improved, it started getting undermined very quickly. Over time developers learned that honesty is risky. Players can get hooked on the emotional highs, sure, but they can also get put off by the lows. And even the highs themselves can be exhausting, forcing players to take a break, one they won't come back from. So devs started softening the emotional impact of their games.
Arcade games would create smooth difficulty curves to guarantee a certain amount of "free" playtime in order to prevent new players from getting too discouraged. They added on-the-spot continues to soften the blow of failure. They started messing around with subtler stuff too like more lenient controls (input buffers) and small assist features (varieties of soft locking or hitbox tricks). All of this was minor and severely limited by the need to make money through difficulty.
On PC's and consoles, devs started realizing that they can do another kind of numbing - using progression systems to distract from the feeling of loss, and creating softer punishments for a lack of skill. Instead of getting a strict set of lives and a big fat game over if you fail, they started adding ways to farm recovery items, currency, levels, gear. They started having more & more persistent progress and minimized the importance of things liek scoring (which would get erased). They added more & more layers of metaprogression and meta-ownership elements to lessen the frustration gamers felt when they died. They created very smooth gradual learning curves that guarantee that players are never hit with anything extreme. And they started experimenting with dynamic pacing to soften the blow of even the exciting parts of games, not just frustrating ones.
The goals of these practices are simple - to have every game appeal to every audience, and to keep those audiences hooked as much as possible. This can get so extreme that developers will not care if players are even enjoying the games they're playing, they'll just focus on retention.
So that's the jist of the distinction for me - honest games don't run from what they are, dishonest ones do. Things get trickier because some things that ramp up both positive & negative emotions to the point of making players quit games can be psych manipulations too. And "dishonest" design can be inherent to the style of game - some games are simply not too frustrating nor too exciting by nature, they're in that more chill relaxing comfortable spot. You run into problems trying to define what the "inside" and "outside" of a game is, too. Are the RPG layers of character action games external to what the games are, or do they define them? I consider them external, but it's fuzzy and subjective.
But I think that for all the conceptual problems there are, all of this shit is very clear where it matters - when you're designing games. Subjective questions about the inside vs outside of a game fall away because as a designer, you're the ultimate arbiter of that type of shit. Market forces will almost never reward devs for designing honest games, it has to be down to the individual developer.
