What is a Game Designer?

Whenever I tell someone I'm a game designer, or that I'm studying game design I always seem to encounter a strange reply. I find that once I say the words “Game Designer” people will respond with a comment about programming as a career, or an amazing idea for an App or game they've come up with.

Of cause, there’s nothing wrong with these types of responses, the person I'm speaking to is interested in what I'm doing, but it does show us something else; that most people don’t really know what a game designer does.

The common opinion seems to oscillate between thinking of game designers as just programmers for games, or as an idea generating machine that comes up with a cool story and then grabs a bunch of programmers and artists to make that idea happen.

Unfortunately neither of these descriptions comes close to what game designers actually do; though if someone wants to employ me to shout ideas at them and then get paid please get in touch ASAP.

What does a game designer actually do then?

The most succinct description I've heard and found to be true in my experience is that a game designer crafts the experience of a game. That at its most basic, the role of the game designer is to create the internal systems, mechanics and spaces of a game so that they will do what they’re meant to do when a player experiences them.

A fairly simple explanation, but creating an experience is not as easy as you might think.

It doesn't mean just saying that you want to make a scary game. It means that if you want something to scare the player you need to know how to scare them and when. You need to create everything in the game towards that end. From the lights, to the enemies, to the player’s tools, to what every room the player enters looks like and sounds like.

To put it another way, lets apply the role of a game designer into the role of a film production:

A game designer is the director, but they also write the screen play, they’re also the casting agent, the set designer, the camera man and the editor.

And if you’re in a small game development team then you can also be the storyboard artists, the set builders, the audio engineers and producer and even the actors.

So really it’s a complicated job with long hours and a lot of difficult work, but at the end of the day it’s a hugely rewarding career.