Game Design Is An Actual Hard Job With Skills

There are very few people within the game industry that would argue that a good game designer isn’t worth their weight in gold. Why is it that so many folks outside the industry think it’s a trivial job they can do with no experience?

I think if you ask folks, they wouldn’t say that they think game design is a trivial job you can do with no experience. But it doesn’t matter what someone *says*, it matters what they *do*. So when you see someone *say* that game design is a job that requires deep understanding and experience, but then what they *do* is they start up a company and then design the game, despite having no experience doing it, what they’re *showing* is that they think eating pizza is the same as making pizza.

I see this *all over the place*. Educational companies trying to gamify their products. Game-centric startups. Healthcare “games”.

Game design can seem trivial when you think of it as just the high concept. “Let’s make a sci-fi game about rocketships and cat astronauts who land on a planet made of yarn!” But the high concept has to *do* something. It has to be the foundation of a whole wealth of interactions and decisions. Why cat astronauts? Why space? Why yarn?

Building games is about *focus*. Good ideas are all around you, and if your only metric is “this idea is good!” you’ll end up heading in 20 different directions. Most games? They’re about ONE core idea. Sure, that idea mutates everything it touches, so the whole game seems new. But every single feature – every single system you introduce into the game blows its complexity exponentially.

So a great game designer’s job is keeping the possibility space as interesting and as *simple* as possible. That complexity has to be *focused*. Every game I’ve designed that has failed has failed not because it was too simple, but because it was too complicated. Every game I’ve designed that has succeeded did so *because* it was simple, and could grow into something more complex.

Simplicity is *extremely difficult*. It’s very easy to grow, and very hard to pare down. My record of it is probably 50-50 at *best*, and that’s with *decades* of experience and insight and iteration. It’s an incredibly challenging, multidisciplinary problem that requires insight into a lot of different fields – art, psychology, technology at minimum – to really understand.

And yet, so many teams, and so many companies think it’s something they can do with zero experience, because they’ve played games.

I get it. And frankly, every experienced designer started that way. But most started on smaller projects, or by working for more experienced folks they could learn from. Starting up a company is a *terrible* place to learn game design, and if you think you’re the exception… you’re probably wrong.

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