A speech that says that people don't know what they want should first be shown to all gamers that believe they benefit by influencing, and even demanding, design decisions.
The idea that people don't know -or at least are unable to describe- what they want is one that I am a firm believer of, I see it in my job every day. That's why it's so important to keep an open mind: you simply can't know where your next favorite thing is going to come from.
The video is one man speaking to an audience he has to seduce because that is the way he makes money (on the moment)
All he stated is that some features are non compatible with others. A chunky tomato sauce is not thin and light. It cant be both.
In his narrative, whether or not people tasted chunky sauces before is unclear. If they had not, hard for them to refer to a past experience to state what they want.
His story about the cultural italian sauce is wrong too. Through the US cultural export, one italian sauce became THE italian sauce but italian tomato sauces come in many genres going for 10 pc tomatoes, 90 pc meat to 90 pc tomatoes, 10pc meat.
The US picked one and turned it into the world standard. Different.
I think that people can state what they want but only the developpers have all the data to take the best decisions.
Quick example:
The environment and travel to one location from another.
The environment might be rich, highly detailed, looking alive and all. Implementing such environment might soak something like 40 pc of the total resources a developper allocates to a game.
It follows they have better draw the most from the environment.
An environment can support:
-discovery (exploration)
-path learning (the environment is intricate enough to be worth learning with shorter and longer routes)
-challenging (hot spot of monsters, safer, more dangerous routes)
-surprising (unexpected encounters, laying ambush, being ambushed)
and more
If a developper goes the route of a detailled environment, they have better to try to exploit the environment through all these options. That is travel.
No matter how exciting they manage to make travelling from one location to another, travel remains travel and in the end, travel is a routine.
Comes the negation of travel routine; which is called fast travel.
Fast travel negates all the features brought by the environment. When one fast travels from one location to another, one does not need a between, there is no between.
Here comes the incompatibility: the developpers spent 40 pc on the game budget on developping a feature whose advantages are destroyed by another feature.
So much that developpers usually force one use of the environment on the players (exploration) as one has to discover a place before fast travelling to it.
From the player's point of view, no incompatibility, the environment can be engaging and a fast travel option can be implemented. You use it as you wish.
But from the developpers'point of view, the allocation of resources dictates otherwise.
Only the developpers have the data in hand.
Fast travel wants for no environment between locations while a developped environment calls for no fast travel.