Ah. The problem is this: The designers for our game are, essentially, writers. With one notable exception, they’re not programmers, they’re not artists, they’re not musicians. Some of them aren’t even really hard-core gamers, or really take the time to understand or analyze what the specific things are that are fun, or not fun.

The problem is that nominally, a game designer has to know something about everything. I have a hard time imagining what someone would be, if you labelled them as an excellent game designer, and nothing else. Will Wright succeeds because his intellectual curiosity got him interested in architecture and social dynamics, thus, the Sims. Sid Meier much the same way, and like Wright, also a programmer. Pikmin came from Shigeru Miyamoto’s gardening hobby. Miyamoto is probably the one I would come closest to labelling a sort of “purely focused” game designer out there, and he’s a graphic artist, by education – which, given most of his games, shows.

If you’re a “designer” and you don’t understand a lot of the underlying tenets about visual art, or narrative, or music, or simply the sort of academic side of interactivity – if you’re not at least *interested* in those things, what is it that you do? How do you design something that critically involves all of those fields? I think my problem is that by and large, the designers on our team do *not* consist of people with a wide variety of talents – they’re quite focused on one discipline (again, with one notable exception). Sure, written communication is essential to game design, and experience goes a long way… and fundamentally, I’m not so stupid that I don’t know my bitching and complaining is driven almost entirely out of a sense of enraging jealousy.

Yeah.