Responding to a comment in the post before this one:

I think the reason that the game designers on the Sims in particular happen to largely come from a writing background is that basically, we’re making a port of a pre-existing game, with some tweaks to make it more console-friendly. One of the things that the designers on these games do is write a lot of text. Tutorial stuff, descriptions, etc. Because the fundamental “game design” had already been taken care of by the design staff of the original Sims, whose composition short of Will Wright, I don’t have a clue about, “game designers” weren’t really what was needed, for the most part.

Now, the problem with the Urbz is that it’s quite different from the Sims, and some things that were removed (the job concept from the Urbz is radically, fundamentally different than the one in the Sims) had unexpected and unintended consequences. Consequences that fundamentally altered the way the Sims worked. Strangely, the Sims isn’t just about going to the bathroom. That’s a large part of it, but what it’s *really* about is juggling the motives, the skills, and the relationships – those things got *measured* by the original job system, providing motivation to keep all the balls in the air. In the Urbz, the job system was revamped, but it didn’t have that measurement of progress in the same way the Sims did, and as a result, it radically unbalanced a lot of things.

So, the problem is that what happened was that we went from taking a pre-existing design, and mucking around with the details to make it viable on consoles, to fucking up the system, and needing a redesign from a *gameplay* perspective, rather than a detail cleanup perspective. The fundamental game core had been altered, and what we needed was a design staff that could understand what the underlying mechanics were. We didn’t have that last year. I’m somewhat concerned that we don’t even necessarily have that this year. Better, definitely, but I’m not sure anyone on the team is quite savvy enough to rebalance the game after having changed it so dramatically.

Anyway – the point was that basically, that’s why we have a design staff that’s mostly comprised of writers, instead of “game designers.” But it’s sort of weird, right? Because when I say “game designer” what I’m thinking of is the guy who works out the mechanics. The guy who makes Monopoly, not the guy who writes Star Wars. But then, there’s probably people out there (Final Fantasy fans, no doubt), who say, you need plot, atmosphere, character as well. And to that, I say, “yup.” So, the “game designer” then ends up being Gary Gygax crossed with George Lucas, working out both the systems that underlie the world you’re creating on top of it.

And for that, there just aren’t a lot of people who can make their brains encompass all those goals. Dealing with mechanics, as well as the creative aspects is a strange melding of left and right brain functionality. To some respect, you need to be both a mathematician and a painter.

Or something like that.