Here it comes, the most interesting part of my monologue. The question of who are the game designers to me and why most of us, students, aren’t game designers when we are working in a group. As I have already pointed out, game designers as a title were avoided like the plague in the descriptions of the courses. Furthermore, all branches are called Game Design. Yet the role of a game designer is a specific role in the group.
So, are some of us more game designers than others? I think the best answer is this: all who create a game are occasionally game designers, for a brief moment or an extended period of time. Certainly not all the time. But we, who are titled “game designers” are inside of this domain all the time. And just like you can visit our domain, we can visit your domains of code/art for some time. But do we claim to be artists or programmers because of our brief moments of insight? Certainly not. So why would you claim to be game designers? Doesn’t sound fair to me. (I avoid producers in this because their line of work has to do with the workflow rather than the direct process of creating things. But even they can be visitors in our fields of expertise, as can we be in theirs.)
-Oh, ok, fine, I guess. So, what is your job then, mister game designer?
Well, let’s see the cursed description on the official university page (picture in Part 3.1). Prototyping, documenting, communicating, narrative, game system and game analysis… Doesn’t sound very clear to me, personally, though it is an accurate description of our individual tasks. The issue here is that these are the descriptions of the individual skills taught in the courses. Like saying that an artist’s job is to hold a brush. It is not an actual description of who a game designer is.
Now ask yourself if you know who is an architect? That’s an easy question, isn’t it? It’s that person who DESIGNS the building. He doesn’t build it himself, he only provides the blueprint with the instruction of everything that is the part of the building because he must consider all these factors while DESIGNING.
Do you know who a musical conductor is? That person waving a wand at the concert you say? Well, that too, but here is a quote from Wiki: “The primary duties of the conductor are to INTERPRET the score created by a composer in a manner which is reflective of those specific indications within that score, SET the tempo, ENSURE correct entries by various members of the ensemble, and to “SHAPE” the phrasing where appropriate.” When you get to a concert hall, you don’t really see the actual role of a conductor, because by the time of the concert his job is finished. The conductor has finished shaping the musical creation with the instrument that is his orchestra.
Do you know (I promise this is the last one) who a choreographer is? Here is another Wiki quote: “Choreography is the art or practice of DESIGNING SEQUENCES of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion, form, or both are specified. The dancers are simply the tool for realising the vision of the choreographer.
What is common between a choreographer, a conductor, an architect and a game designer? These people are on the outside, in a manner of speaking. They see the bigger picture through the ability to zoom out so far where they can take in all the details and patterns. And this is what designing is to me – a process of creating a pattern. And while an artist, a programmer and a producer are all designers in a way they create patterns through the visuals, code and human behaviour, there are those who take into consideration ALL of these patterns. At least, they have to, or they can’t truly be good game designers. A real game designer is someone who must scope out far and wide in the search of good patterns and then weave these patterns into a more complex pattern of their own. There you have it, who are game designers are to me and why I love the word “pattern”.
So, no. We are not all game designers in a way that we are not all the weavers of the patterns on the biggest scale in this line of work. But we can all claim to have the knowledge of game design, as we know in a way what this is. Just as a game designer may have knowledge of art without claiming to be an artist. And I guess we are all studying Game Design after all, if you look at it from that perspective, but some more than others.
This also brings me back to my original complaint about the titles of this education. While I can see now that there is a legit reason to call everything Game Design, I now wish even more to call this education Game Development. The reason being that we don’t deal on a big enough scale with the philosophical side of the question “What is Game Design?” to reach the understanding of how complex this topic is. Instead, we make games. And making games teaches us the development and production process. While it is undeniably a part of Game Design, we don’t truly delve into the depth of this topic. Just as while studying Russian I get some understanding of how linguistics function, there are those who study just linguistics. And linguists deal with the systems rather than going into a detailed use of a specific language. This is also why a non-gamer will have an easy time drowning in this education, because the philosophical question of the systems, the need for the exposure to the systems, in general, is skipped here. We are already expected to know games. Same way as a linguist might have an easy time understanding how any language functions because they have studied systems as big scaled patterns rather than a study of an individual pattern of the systems.
And that’s the end of my rant about game designers! Hope this makes some sense, otherwise, I am sorry! =D This is a complex topic, so no surprise if this might look confusing. In my next part, I will take up some individual examples of me dealing with design. And after that, I will make a part of all the issues I had while dealing with artists/coders/producers interfering with my designs. And the grand finale would my reason for all this nonsense, that should also be fun!
lostingame.design 