Changing the topic is the only reply this video deserves. But if we're supposed to just shit on the linked video: why are fairness and lack of frustration such holy cows for "video game designers"? And why is their notion of fairness so specific? Poker isn't fair, if you have a shit hand it's much harder to win. But the odds even out in the long-term, so it is fair over repeated plays. Old school video games have a similar notion of fairness: a single run in isolation may have unfair moments like a sudden enemy spawn knocking you back into a pit. But as a human being you are capable of pattern recognition and memorization (one would hope), so this won't happen to you the next time. As you master the game, it becomes incredibly fair because old-school games tend to be very deterministic affairs with simple patterns. And because the game didn't have mini-tutorial sections, you don't have to deal with the baby stuff on every playthrough, making for a much better experience at expert-level play.
That one makes the least sense because games have gotten longer, not shorter. Carefully repeating a 3 minute level segment is apparently an unreasonable time sink, but mindlessly running through the wilderness for 5 minutes on the way from one dungeon to the next is a-okay. It's such a weird double standard. Modern games are many things, but they're definitely not respectful of the player's time.
You described what's unfair: an enemy popping randomly and knocking the player into a pit. It's just dumb and unnecessary. The reason old games were filled with these things is a mix of inexperienced developers and weak hardware.
I usually try not to give in to the codex temptation of ad hominems, but seriously, that's one damn pointless reply that doesn't engage with the argument at all. The game isn't being unfair, it's teaching you something, and in the next run it will test whether you learned your (memorization) lesson. Just like it makes not sense to evaluate a card game based on a single round of play, these games should be evaluated based on the experience over multiple runs, because that's what their design is built around. And they're very fair from that perspective. It's no different from a rogue like, which teaches you important lessons by killing you.
