I think game design as a field is (almost) fundamentally dishonest & scummy because of its heavy reliance on exploiting psychological weaknesses & technocratic nature. Certain pressures such as hardware limitations & the arcade format kept its more exploitative tendencies at bay. Now there's not much holding it back beyond the will of individual game designers.
A lot of game design stems from the same basic psychological concepts heavily used in gambling & marketing such as operant conditioning, various cognitive biases, simulated accomplishment, audiovisual feedback meant to hook you, ownership, nudging, etc. with some extra crap like flow theory mixed in. What we do is try to find the blind spots of human brains and exploit them for our own gain.
Just as games have an internal logic, so does game dev - our internal logic is that of drug creators and dealers. We try to get people hooked on simulated experiences and coerce them into wasting their precious time doing simple repetitive actions that they might not even want to do, for things that don't benefit them. The final form of a video game is a drug, an experience machine, anything else is an imperfect attempt at creating that.
Everything that's meant to reward real, tangible, beneficial interactions with the real world and other people gets redirected into games. Challenge and accomplishment happen in something that's solved by design. Creative expression is forced into a tiny box and suffocated. The learning process is made frictionless and automated. The player is made to keep playing compulsively. They are meant to have constant new goals and get a sense of forward momentum that leads nowhere. The ultimate goal is long term engagement without much resistance. Which doesn't force the player to acknowledge the outside world or even themselves. Even the concept of "fun" is reduced to optimized, frictionless, almost automatic and mindless learning.
Is it any wonder that microtransactions, heavy progression that adds nothing to the experience besides keeping people hooked, bloated level design drip feeding you useless pieces of small junk & gacha games have risen? Or that games are increasingly becoming flow-optimized to the point where engaging with them feels like being in a stupor? All the pre-requisites were already there, they are built into the very logic of game design.
It's hard to get away from brain hack design even if you try to, as well. There are certain tension points where it creeps back in, usually things like risk vs reward balancing, telegraphing & learning of any kind. No matter whether you view games as formal systems, or if you view them as artistic pieces that are meant to make the player reflect on themselves & the world, or if you view them as vehicles for self expression for the dev, psychology always has a habit of making its way back into your analysis. That said, it's always worth trying even if the attempts aren't fully consistent.
I don't really have a good solution or alternatives for this, I just think it's important for developers to know what they're doing. It's a central belief of mine which informs my ideas on game design. I am hoping that by recognizing this and using it as a basis, I can move into a more positive direction. My love for certain styles of games like arcade games - their rawness and limitations make them more honest in ways that somewhat get away from this style of design, even if not by too much. In this day and age, they are almost hostile to you playing them, and there's something pure about that - you need to stick with them in spite of their hostility, it's a fully voluntary agreement.
