>For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write creatively (e.g stories).

Remember that the purpose of games is to communicate with the player, just as the purpose of a novel is to communicate with the reader. Novels do this through language, games do this through direction, design and assets, not the code. I think the analogy to typesetting is correct - writing the code that runs the game is a far lower level activity than writing the game itself.

>If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move on to game design?

If they do, it's only because a company doesn't want to hire outside of house. But one doesn't need to know how to write a game loop to know how to design a game, any more than one needs to know how to design a game in order to write a game loop. They're completely separate disciplines.

>It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.

Not necessarily to programming. It can be useful, and sometimes with small studios or a single developer, it's unavoidable (but good design in those cases is usually the exception rather than the rule.)

You can tell stories without writing.

That was how human history and "oral tradition" was passed down for thousands of years, even after the development of writing.

If anything, writing made telling stories harder because you had to start considering things other than just your words, like punctuation and spelling.

If you look at a movie, some of your bad screenplay writing can be fixed via casting. Imagine not having any hands on experience with the process, but alas, you move on to movie director because you took movie directing 101. It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.

Most directors can't write screenplays, or even work the cameras they use to film their movies. And yet Hollywood has been doing just fine...

And for the record: there are plenty of game designers in the video game industry that can't program. They've collectively designed games that have sold tens of billions of dollars.