Let me rephrase, the game industry is getting bigger and bigger, and more and more people are being educated to become game designers. Now, whether this is necessarily a good thing I'll leave in the middle, but I do believe that it is good to try to determine the psychology behind what makes gaming so interesting. What makes a good game good and a bad game bad. By all means, I am not downplaying the importance of pleasure, and neither is Zimmerman. In fact, pleasure and the homo ludens are key concepts in modern literature on game design.
What I essentially mean to say is that game design is a rather complex form of interaction design and currently most people are just trying to randomly do stuff and see whether it is engaging. There is benefits to gain from better understanding this engagement and we shouldn't downplay that. Music has theories, film and writing have theories, and on the other side computer science and interaction design have theories. So why not gaming?
Granted, I am a student in Human Media Interaction, so I'm sort of preaching my own profession here, but I do believe that understanding the world and human behaviour is important and we should never downplay science in that fashion.
It's actually very difficult to teach game design.
Mostly because it's a very, *very* "artistic" process in that there is no set of rules you must follow to be one.
The only thing you can learn, then, are the tools you will use, which is ridiculous because there are no set of tools everyone uses.
It's sort of like this: I can take classes to learn how to paint. It'll teach me all about color theory, brush techniques, perspective, etc. But none of that matters if I'm a shitty painter: I'll have all the "tools" mastered but with none of the talent.
Game design is in the same sort of boat, except there are no real tools. There are no "techniques" to game design because there doesn't need to be. It's a very fluid discipline that is strictly governed by gut feeling, exploration and inspiration (at it's core - the actual work also makes you work within budgets and such, but that's another thing that cannot be taught because it varies WILDLY between studios).
Level designers have it a bit easier because their work is more technical, in a sense: if they work with 3D levels, they can learn architecture, layouts, etc. to make their levels better in a technical standpoint, but depending on their goals much of their task revolves around reproducing realities.
Game designers can only study game mechanics, and those change and evolve all the time. The best tools a game designer has are good memory, analytical skills and a large cultural knowledge, which are all 3 not elements that can be properly taught, they are skills that are gained through studying other disciplines.
Trying to "compartmentalize" game design is a futile endeavor, seriously. I respect the indie guys because they typically have much more freedom to do what they want to do, but generally they produce a *lot* of shit because of their "artsy" mindset. Kind of like a lot of amateur filmmakers or photographers; there's a lot of crap out there, but they typically at least have the decency to call themselves amateurs.
Most academic-style game design writing is just not good. That doesn't mean academic writing about games has to be bad, but adopting academic affectations doesn't make something "adult", sophisticated or worthwhile either. Some academic fields (I won't name names) are awash in academic-styled garbage.
"Rules of Play" is not something I've read but paging through it on Amazon it looks ridiculous, even before you realize that the author is the guy behind "Top Chef: The Game". On page 75 the book is still concerned with defining what a "game" is and presents EIGHT different definitions and a chart comparing them. Get real.
I'll have to look at that book, but if it is indeed like that, I personally know an idiot designer who works like that. He's very, VERY bad, but hides behind all of that stuff to cover just how sucky he is. All his work is fluff, "emotional flowcharts", defining the "core" of the game through some emotional chart or some shit, and when it comes down to actually creating compelling mechanics or making a game "fun", it just doesn't work.