[kd5bjo]

I tend to think of all creative disciplines (including game design) as both universally learnable and unteachable. They’re the class of things that fundamentally hinge on personal style, which develops only through experience.

There are certainly associated technical skills that can be taught effectively, where there’s a definite right and wrong technique. There’s also analysis, where you take an existing work and figure out how it produces the effect it does. That’s also teachable and can provide a font of inspiration of things to try, but there’s a world of difference between knowing why something works and being able to pull off the same trick yourself.

Beyond that, most classes in creative disciplines seem to be primarily a bunch of prompts to get the students to make lots of different things, and exercise their creativity.

[AwesomeFaic]

Fair points! I will concede the fact that my example + experience has taught me how to learn, but didn't necessarily teach me directly. Solid rebuttal. I think there are intricacies within game design that are quantitative enough (either due to their relation with technical or otherwise non-creative elements) that the systems can be inherently taught. But I do agree that plain-and-simple "good design" is something learned from experience and application.