A few other games to look into, for the curious: HeroQuest, Mage: the Ascension, Nobilis, and Sorcerer.
Source: I'm a personal friend; we play roleplaying games together fairly often; I go to one of the several cons that he goes to regularly; I have been discussing roleplaying games with him online on-and-off going back to rec.games.frp.advocacy in the mid-late 90's.
The completely lack of concrete ties to specific systems makes it hard to tell, but the generalizations he makes seem to be, at best, only valid of games designed to operate in a simulation-oriented manner like D&D, rather ones designed to operate in a more narrative-oriented manner (FATE, among others.)
> He certainly does not have a worldview comprised entirely or mostly of one or two RPGs
If not, he certainly seems to have a narrowness of understanding on the particular subject similar to what you might have of issues in programming languages when you had an experience of more than one or two languages -- but they were all statically-typed OO languages with Algol-style syntax.
Now that that essay is dated 2006, so Fate and Apocalypse World had not risen to their current prominence. But the branch of roleplaying games precipitated by the Forge existed.
Maybe you'd like to make your point without explaining what the author must have experienced?
And others. Every game I listed, for example.
Given the author's apparent broader experience, I can't account for such a limited essay.
I didn't make any inferences about his experiences, I made a statement about the scope in which the generalizations he made were defensible.
> Now that that essay is dated 2006, so Fate and Apocalypse World had not risen to their current prominence.
Sure, I used FATE as an example that was likely to be familiar to current readers of what I was referring to, not as a specific system which the author should have addressed.
Now, its possible that the author's intent was to make an argument specific to simulationist-style rules.
Here is a paragraph from a short story ("Turjan of Miir"), with the protagonist choosing some amusingly named general purpose spells:
"Turjan closed the book, forcing the spell back into oblivion. He robed himself with a short cape, tucked a blade into his belt, fitted the amulet holding Laccodel's Rune to his wrist. Then he sat down and from a journal chose the spells he would take with him. What dangers he might meet he could not know, so he selected three spells of general application: the Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal's Mantle of Stealth, and the Spell of the Slow Hour."