On the very first day at Playgroundsquad our supervisor asked us one simple, yet very important question: What is a game designer? Of course, some of the more savvy students were quick to answer and while their thoughts were not wrong per say they also didn't hit the nail right on the head.
Game design is partially writing game design documents and sticking to a vision; but this particular workflow is a dying art in many studios. Another faucet of game design is implementation and iteration..but the line between a gameplay programmer and designer quickly become apparent once you've worked in a small team environment. The question proved itself quite a lot more tricky than any of us would've anticipated and I've been pondering the answer to the question for quite some time..until now. I realized that there is one thing that sets design apart from the graphical and technical development of a game: ~vibes~ .
Vibes are not really quantifiable, they are after all, very subjective. And that's where the designer enters the room and goes "but well..there are actually quite a few tricks we can use in the VFX, in the music, in the control scheme, the UI, the hit reactions the..(etc. etc. ad infinitum) of ensuring a particular vibe with a large audience of people", that's where the term I want to coin as "Technical Empathy" becomes the answer to this question which has bothered me like a thorn in my side.
Design is about researching, ideating, implementing and iteration upon a form of empathy. How do we in our game convey this specific feeling, in the most surgical and accurate manner? What do we want our players to feel, when, and how do we achieve that? As a designer you really need to get into the heads of who your target audience is. Where do they look? What input are they more prone to using, do they prefer complexity? A fast pace? The presence of cute animals?
That's where designers are so important, because the road to the right vibes is not always intuitive. Just think about all the times you've wanted to add a feature which you thought was inline and it threw off the vibe completely only to change the timing of your jumping sound by a quarter second and suddenly everything is immaculate.
A game that is purely technical tends to lack the soul that make grown men cry, and a game that is purely graphical is no game at all, it's a digital art piece. But with the touch of surgical and technical empathy you can create games that are more than just games. They are experiences. Something magical. To be a designer is to get your head into not only the game, but also the gamer.
I think a lot of my impostor syndrome would've been lessened during my studies if I knew what role I had as a designer, something our supervisor stubbornly denied us her own answer to. But now that I have gotten warm in these boots and see what I really bring to the projects I have worked on I feel a lot better about complaining when the vibes are off, and fiddling with the smallest of values until it feels *just right*.
That being said, how would you define the role of a game designer? Where do you draw the line between a programmer with ideas, or an artist doing level design and a "fully fledged" designer?