Seems to me there needs to be more of a distinction in games between writers, and designers. At my job, the designers write all the text. Mind you, they’re often very good writers, and write really good text. But I’m beginning to think that because they’re selected for a hybrid of skills (or in some cases, purely for their writing) the design suffers somewhat.

I think part of the problem is that game design, at this point, is still a very new medium, and there aren’t that many people who are even really trying to understand how to use it, and are just focused on incremental steps toward “newness” while creating essentially commercial commodities, nearly devoid of art, in a traditional sense, but also art, in the implementation sense. It’s really a, “what’s the easiest, least risky way of doing something,” and not, “what’s the BEST way of doing something?” Because it is a business, it’s hard to argue with that philosophy, and because the project’s on a relatively tight deadline, again, simplicity, and lack of change makes for a more easily scheduled project.

But the problem, to me, is that a lot of the design that is going on is essentially, how do we take last year’s game, and change some of the subsystems to make it more appealing? Instead, we have a new frachise – one that sort of failed to properly define itself last year. Shouldn’t we be making more strides towards saying, “THIS is what the fundamental game is really about – we missed the focus last year, but we’ve got a couple really central focused mechanics that we’re going to polish to a mirror shine.” What we have instead is, we can Band-aid this, then put some scotch tape on that, and maybe people will like it better.

I don’t know – obviously, there are people with more experience, and maybe in the end, their deicisions will be correct. But watching them work, it’s like watching truck drivers trying to fish. Maybe some of them will catch some fish sometimes, but they really don’t seem to know how to fish, but once the fish are caught, they do a good job of transporting them to the store. Fucked up analogy, sure, but the point being, we don’t seem to have any game *designers* on the project. Writers? Yeah. Producers? Yeah. Something, though, feels quite dangerously missing, though.