I agree with your points about incentive management, but I think it's not me who thinks about a very specific meaning of "game design". I think about the usual one, which is making games - stuff people do for fun, as opposed to work. I read your comment as extending the meaning of "game" to encompass all the stuff that can be gamified. So for instance, technical debt as carbon credits is an example of gamification, not of creating a game - game as in fun, something you participate in as a choice, not an obligation to an external party (not meeting which you can be punished for).
Ah, I don't think we disagree: "game designers" as a profession are almost solely employees of games companies. "Game designer" isn't even a job role you can hire for; it's just what you call someone (usually a programmer or writer or project manager in a games company) when they have enough experience to put on the game design "hat."
But experience in game design—making games/toys/puzzles engrossing, fun, educational, or whatever-else—teaches game designers a set of skills that are applicable outside of games. It's not just "gamification" (which is almost only used in reference to systems of points and rewards used to bait the Achievement-oriented Bartle types[1]); it's the architectural level of "systems engineering", the same thing done when e.g. NASA tries to figure out what goes into a working satellite: designing the satellite itself, designing the support systems for it, designing an ongoing training system for the ground crew, creating training policies so that new lessons are incorporated back into new training, sourcing replacement parts and sourcing budgets for part-replacing missions and sourcing suppliers when other suppliers go defunct and setting up competitive supply-chains so a monopsony isn't created that chokes the budget... and so forth.
Figuring out how to make a cohesive system, composed of both humans and technology, get something done together, is mostly working out incentives so that the system doesn't fall over from one of a thousand ills. There's more expertise in the pinky finger of an MMORPG Live Team content designer on this sort of topic than in the entire apprenticeship of a civil engineer.
