A lot of game designers I know eventually want to move out of games into something broader. Which is great. I’ve done both product and game design, and I think game designers make extraordinary product designers.

Why?

Because they know how to understand user (player) behavior. They know how to change that behavior. They know how to create interactions that are intuitive and *satisfying* to users – often much more so than traditional product designers.

Most product designers don’t have things explode when you touch them. 😀

No disrespect to traditional product designers. I think a super team would be pairing someone with a deep background in traditional product design with someone who’s got a ton of experience with game design. Each would be enhanced by the other, and the result would be significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

But even without a traditional product designer, a lot of companies that make user-facing products (which is most products) would benefit from hiring game designers.

The biggest obstacle I’ve found when working with game designers who want to reach out to new industries is that they don’t understand how to frame their experience. And the companies don’t understand what a game designer actually does.

Working to reframe game design experience into generalized product design isn’t lying or cheating. They are fundamentally the same pursuit. They just use different languages. In software engineering, if someone doesn’t have experience with a specific programming language, that’s a small obstacle. The deeper experience translates easily across languages, and languages are easy to pick up.

Same problem. A game designer *is* a product designer with an extraordinary set of skills any company could benefit from. But there’s a new language to learn.

If you’re a game designer looking to get into different industries, you have to “translate” your experience into that industry. If you need help with that, I can help with that. But more, the big message is “go for it.” The difference isn’t as big as you think it is.