[theabrax]

Well, to be fair, the article doesn't say anything about that the chosen set of mechanics (novelty) have to provide fun. Actually, this seems to be the usefulness part of creativity, or as they describe it, how "playable and entertaining" "appropriate observers" perceive the game.

As you already refer to LeBlanc's "8 kinds of fun": he also is one of the authors of the MDA framework - a framework to analyze games - which states, that the mechanics of a game are the only thing game designers can influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework (the article itself is linked in there)

While the authors don't state it directly as this framework, they refer to the framwork as an explanation of why they use mechanics.