What Those Company Credits Actually Mean

Since we don’t really know who writes for games, let’s stick with what we do know. A few days ago Brian Green wrote a lengthy post describing what he actually does as a Game Designer:

The primary job of a designer is communication. This means you need to get used to doing a lot of writing, meeting, and explaining. Your ideas are actually secondary to the main focus of explaining those ideas. A designer with mediocre ideas and great communication skills is better than a designer with super ideas and no communication skills in a project of more than one person. Given this focus on communication, it should come as little surprise that people who design tend to write a lot and have blogs.

Excerpt from Psychochild, What Is a Game Designer?

Sounds good to me. I’m a big fan of explaining how I like things to be done, even with boring things like details and structure. Have you read my posts from earlier this week?

Psychochild’s post spurred a few people working elsewhere in the video games industry to reveal a little more about their jobs. Scott Jennings at Broken Toys added:

…the best designers are evangelists – not only do they come up with Keeno Ideas, but they are the keepers of the flame for their team – inspiring everyone that what is pouring out onto design docs and spreadsheets and visio charts and what have you actually is going to turn out to be something fun, really, and all this work is worth it.

It takes charisma, basically.

Excerpt from ScottJ, Everyone Tells Me How To Do My Job (And They’re Right, Damn It)

Hmm… that sounds a little harder. Not sure about this charisma thingy.

Matt Mihaly weighed in with another job – CEO of Iron Realms:

After I’m done with this post, I’ll be updating the EE website and then working on the list of sound effects we need produced, as our music is getting close to done. After that it’s onto today’s art and approving it or sending it back for corrections. Later this week I’ll be working with Chris and Martin to update our complete development schedule to reflect what’s ahead and what’s behind schedule, and I have a GDC presentation to do this week as well. Stratics is sending over an interview that I’ll devote some time to, and I’ve got to deal with closing up our final round of investment for EE. Of course, it’s tax season now too, which means spending some time coordinating with the accountants and probably the lawyer.

Excerpt from Matt, My Job

Sounds like hectic stuff that requires some serious organisation. Probably not the role for me just yet. I like to play games far too much.

Do you know of any other stories like these? I find personal anecdotes much more revealing than the non-specific blurbs seen on job sites.

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