The conscious and subconscious of a designer

 How you doin'.

I have worked with teams making games before. Whether they have been created by me or i simply joined them doesn't matter, i always end up seeing crimes against designing being committed by non-designers. So, like a galliant knight galloping towards the gaping maw of the dragon, i have arrived to share my personal beliefs on what a designer should be and should be doing.

What is the job of a designer? To put it simply, a game designer comes up with a game and creates the blueprints necessary to develop it. Of course, no designer is god and the initial draft will always have kinks and mistakes, thus adding to the designer's list of responsibilities the job of supervising the development process and dealing with any issues that may arise. 

This job description can be broken down into two very distinct parts. A designer's job is to:

• Come up with ideas, concepts and mechanics and finding a way to make them resonate with each other.
• Critique their own design: find mistakes, adapt to circumstances and make sure that development goes well.

To bring the title of this post back into play, these two roles that a designer plays coincidentally describe the dichotomy of the conscious and the unconscious in a human brain. Now, of course, i am no psychologist. My knowledge on the matter is very casual, so please forgive me if i misrepresent how science views the brain. I am just making an analogy.

Let us begin with the conscious part of a designer's brain, since this is the easier of the two to quantify. A designer must have the skillset to be able to perceive the flaws in their design. To put it more generally, a designer must be able to understand their design and the knowledge to bring it more towards in-line of their goals, whether those goals are to create a product or a piece of art. Performing analysis is a deeply conscious process and is a skill that a designer absolutely needs. This analytical side of designing is what gives it its scientific hue. An aspiring designer should practice their skills of analysis and a lot of material out there exists to aid in that, from game critics and their work of breaking-down videogames to books written by other game designers, detailing their process of creation. The book that started it all for me personally is Game Design: a Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell. And, most of all, a designer should analyse other games! Playing games and getting a feel for how they do things is the most basic of basics, the absolutely number one thing a game designer should be doing. Play games and then dissect them.

Well, i hope it's not too earth-shattering of me to tell you to go play games, since playing games is first ans foremost fun. I hope you have been playing a lot of games regardless of if you want to work on the medium! But gaining experience from playing games doesn't just aid in your ability to recognise patterns and dissect them; it also trains your imagination.

This is where the unconscious part of your brain comes in. A designer is called to come up with ideas in the first place (unless they are called in to work on an already existing design in which case less so). How one is supposed to manifest these ideas on demand beats me. The unconscious is a fickle thing. This part of designing is less science and more vibes. It's mojo, it's sorcery, it's revelry, it's tied directly to the parts of you which you can't see or control, but their lurking existence influences you. But just like any other skill, you can train it. Imagination is based on experience and new ideas expand your repetoire of inspiration to draw from. Apart from feeding your unconscious with new material however, i've personally found that it's good to just leave it to its work. Personally, my unconscious does not like to work under stress, does not like to work on projects i don't have faith in and does not like to work while being forced. Give yourself time to do your own thing. Again, coming up with ideas is sorcery. It's a ritual. It's a feeling. Let yourself get lost in it and see what comes out of it.

Conscious and unconscious are two antithetical terms actually, which makes it weird that any kind of discipline would exist in both of these opposite worlds. But that is the nature of a designer. To recap, a designer is a job which asks of a person to analyse and synthesize with available information like a scientist and also to just come up with whatever like an artist. This is what i believe makes our discipline unique (and so bloody hard to define) and honestly beautiful. Personally, it comes naturally to me to both view games as a science and as an art. It actually keeps things pretty interesting, seeing stuff from both angles. I hope this way of seeing games rings true for the reader as well.