February 28, 2025: Why Are There Game Designers?

I think it's a valuable question to ask! I'm re-reading The Well-Played Game by Bernard DeKoven this week and reflecting on his answer to that question. To understand why we need game designers, let's first understand the process by which games emerge.

Let's say you and I are hanging out together, and we want to play a game and experience something particular through that play. If it's something simple, like "I want to toss the ball back and forth with you," that's easy – we simply do it. As we do so, we may implement new rules to refine and clarify that experience (don't let the ball touch the ground, don't "double-tap" the ball, don't toss the ball overhand, etc.).

What do we do if we want something really specific, though? What if we want to play, "the feeling you get when you're on a boat looking out at the shore, and the world seems soft and flat and sublime, and the water is warmer than you expected and you wonder how long you could be here until it got cold"? What do we do now? It would take us years of mediation to somehow transform our ball-toss game into this new experience, and it would involve a tremendous amount of trial and error to produce the mechanisms that provide us with our desires, and it would probably involve a lot of time spent engaging in "un-fun" play as we experiment with what works.

But what if we could find someone who already did all that work for us? What if there was someone we trusted to have done all that trial-and-error work, tested and modeled all the negotiation we would otherwise have to do? We may still need to do a bit of negotiation to figure out exactly how to make it work for us, but it would be way easier than having to come up with all of it from scratch.

That's the function of the game designer, from my perspective. The person you trust to give you the model of the experience you seek, that you can build atop and uncover new experiences from. To be a game designer is to seek the trust of those you play with and provide for, and it's a sacred and compassionate relationship. That's why playtesting is so important – because if you're trusting me to give you something, I want to make sure I'm damn certain that what I give you is what I mean to give you.