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there are no universal frameworks or lenses for understanding game design. they all fail somewhere. all advice is domain-specific and goal-specific and something that is good advice for a classic platformer is probably terrible advice for a grand strategy game.
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(related) stop watching game design youtube
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in reply to @junkmail's post:
I learned infinitely more about good game design from playing la mulana, a game notorious for being deliberately cryptic and player hostile, than i did from any dogshit critique about oot's LiNeAr shadow temple
ye, a lot can be said about how the best lessons, in pretty much all artforms, come from really actively engaging with work. I could probably get hundreds of lessons out of many levels I've played if I really had to, which is maybe, idk, hundreds of YT videos' worth!
GMTK is the one game design channel i still watch, and that largely comes down to Mark Brown acknowledging the flaws in his approach to discussion and critique in the past. these days instead of "here's the Right or Wrong way to do game concept X" it's more "here's examples of differing approaches several games have taken to achieve a certain kind of effect". that, and the fact that he's put his money where his mouth is and is presently making a game of his own, documenting the whole process
and i'd still take the channel as less of a Game Design Bible and more a lens for getting another perspective to potentially draw inspiration from. the videos where he interviews game devs directly are ones i find most interesting because you get to hear about their ideas and goals and the iterations they went through
I lost my taste for this guy and then came right back for his super humble and endearing magnet game dev log. Been a lot of fun seeing him get swamped away from any game design theory and talk about supporting intermediate screen resolutions. Otherworldly catharsis.
Is the lack of mention of testing/feedback due to oversight or reflective of your considered opinion?
Playtesting and feedback are invaluable, but they are methodologically fraught, and it can be hard to get design feedback that wouldn't sand down every interesting point of friction in your game.
(I suspect the real answer here is that he was being funny by way of terseness to make a specific point.)