A poster on Quora, a question and answer website, posted the question “What separates a good, bad and great designer?”  It so happens that the night before I read this question, I had explained the role of a game designer with my Survey of the Video Game Industry class at the Los Angeles Film School, and so I ventured an answer, which I’m reposting on my blog.

A bad designer is one who can’t be bothered to:

• Be creative
• Strive for originality within the established constraints of the project
• Look beyond their initial ideas
• Be willing to give up ideas that don’t work, don’t fit, or are too costly

Good designers also realize that their initial ideas are very rarely the best ones, so they will keep an open mind and keep nothing sacred as they playtest their designs and evaluate the results.

As one meme I show to my students says about game design:

• If you don’t make mistakes, you’re doing it wrong
• If you don’t correct your mistakes, you’re doing it really wrong
• If you can’t accept that you’re mistaken, you’re not doing it at all.

However, a great designer will be able to realize when their gameplay tweaks have reached a point of diminishing returns and be able to identify when a game is good enough to be released without going beyond the time, budget and scope constraints.

Good game designers realize they aren’t making games for their own enjoyment — they are making them for other players’ enjoyment.  They will start out specifying the experience they want their players to have and playtest the game with potential players to see if they having the experience that the designer wanted them to have.  However, a great designer will not only listen to the problems are, they will figure out why they are saying they are having problems and what the real source of the problems are.

While a good designer might be inspired by the themes and mechanics they’ve played before and combine genres in interesting ways, a great designer is able to draw upon non-electronic sources such as books, art, plays, museums, history, and current events.

The Extra Credits YouTube channel has a great video describing the skills required to be a decent game designer and a really great game designer.

• A high level of technical writing skill (spelling, writing, grammar)
• A solid grounding in logic
• Knowledge of basic psychology
• Understanding the medium your are working in
• A solid grasp of mathematics, at least through advanced algebra

To be a really good game designer, you need to have:

• A thorough knowledge of literature, philosophy and myth.
• An understanding of world religions
• Basic scripting and programming ability
• An understanding of art principles
• An understanding of basic audio design and musical principles
• A practical knowledge of graphic design
• A thorough internal library of games to reference
• A well-balanced life experience

Most importantly, you need to create games.  What really separates bad, good, and great game designers are quality of games they have in their portfolio.

One of my Game Design students was complaining to his classmate about frustrations with a game he was playing. As I approached, he turned to me and said, “How is it that the game designer could not see the flaw in the game he was playing when it was so OBVIOUS?”

Well, I replied, t is very difficult to see the flaws in one’s own work, especially when you’ve worked on it for a long time. You begin to accept all the little details as givens, and you don’t see the trees for the forest. This is why writers need editors and game designers need play testers.

Even then, such things are subjective. What is a flaw to one person is a design choice to another. Many design choices are trade-offs, because adjusting a “flaw” in one design element may reveal an even bigger problem in another. There also may be technical limitations of the game engine or other software component that make the flaw difficult to fix.

Also, there is the limitation of time. A flaw may not appear or become obvious until the entire game comes together, and by then, it may be too late (or too expensive, if many other resources need to be involved to fix the flaw).

A good designer will playtest his or her game with other players early and often, allowing problems to be spotted and resolved before they become too ingrained in the game to be eliminated. However, different types of players have different ways of playing and having fun, so there will always be those players who disagree with a design choice that the game designer makes.