The Work of Game Designers

It was a strange twist of fate that brought me to the Game Design Club yesterday, but I'm infinitely glad I went. Up until then, I'd been having a crisis of confidence. See, in the first semester at DigiPen as a Game Design student, you don't actually get a ton of game design. You get game history, but the bulk of your work is in the basic computer science and programming classes.

Now, I've enjoyed the basic programming side a lot. Turns out there's programming in my blood, on both sides of my family. But game design is still what I want to do, and I hadn't been able to do a lot of that kind of work. From what I could tell, game design was coming up with ideas and having rock-solid support to back those ideas up. But still, anyone can come up with ideas. Everyone wants to be a game designer, right? So what made us special? What separated us from the programmers, whom we BSGD students shared half our classes with?

Well, I was able to hear it from my peers.

A person may have ideas for a game, but those ideas need to be tested and refined. They need to be prototyped, iterated upon, and refined. The game designer needs to figure out IF the game is fun, WHY the game is fun, and what needs to be done to make it better. They have to test everything from movement to tutorial text, figuring out specifically what is going wrong with their game when playtesters complain. They have to take the ideas to that creative slaughterhouse and turn them into a fun game.

Generally, programmers aren't interested in that busywork. The RTIS guys, the coding wizards, are more interested in creating new technology to put into a game. They're more about creating clever code and impressive tech. If they can relinquish their ideas to the designers and focus on the tech, everybody can be happy. Designers take ideas from all around them - even their fellow team members - and take those ideas through iteration... so that the others don't have to.

Someone has to iterate the gameplay. But someone also has to work on the technology, and someone else still has to create the art and animations. So you have designer, programmer, and artist... and a game team is born.

All this time, I had no idea how designers fit into the team dynamic. But now that it's been made clear to me, I've found new confidence. This is the valuable service we provide for the team, and it's this work that we must find our joy in.

I'm fine with that. As much as I like programming - as important as it is for me to understand fundamental coding - I don't want the job of creating new technology for a game. I'd rather pound the ideas and gameplay into submission. That's because I'm a designer, not a programmer.

This is the kind of clarity of purpose that changes lives. And it's changed mine.