AbdulAlhazred
Legend
OK, sure, but lets look at the poster child, Apocalypse World. Having read many things Baker et al have written about the genesis of that game, I think we can see that it was not even slightly spun out in his brain and just dropped on paper. It was a produce of LONG experience, a distillation of that experience into a form which could be communicated to others, along with some genuine innovation in the moment. Still, I bet every element arose somewhere in actual play before it ever got incorporated into AW, and the actual writing of the game itself was at heart more of a compilation of practice and process of identifying the key elements and eliminating the extraneous. So, I am relatively sure it was a pretty social process and the stage of putting the ideas on paper in final form was not where "the rubber met the road" so to speak.I honestly think you've missed the thrust of the argument here, which was more around creative vision and impulses, and less about say beta testing. Most of the indie game sector at most has a small amount of testing done to ensure mechanics aren't horribly broken, but the creative thrust is not being pulse checked off some sort of market or user. We've gotten genre defining games from that sort of single developer / vision first process, that have upended the industry and won awards.
Now, I could never prove that every other substantive RPG has something analogous, if not a full blown public process, at its root, but I think even fairly idiosyncratic developers like Siembieda still didn't just sit down and scratch out his first game "The Mechanoid Invasion" from nowhere. Again, I don't know as a fact, but I bet you dollars to donuts that it arose out of a process of hacking and playing and collaborating with other people from which the thing emerged. And honestly, I'd say Palladium is almost the poster child for weird, half-broken, obviously not-really-tested stuff!