Missing the 'Whole' Point in Game Development

An Anonymous Reader wrote to tell us about Walter Kim of the Ludonauts. He has an interesting argument about game design: "many videogame developers, particularly the Western ones, approach their craft with far too much of a hard-headed pragmatism, a nuts and bolts mentality about development that has, consciously or unconsciously, extended itself to design. What you end up with are a bunch of games that, while they may exhibit a great deal of cleverness on the level of individual level design, are stitched together with about as much finesse as duct tape."