The relationship between society and game design

 This is a post i posted on reddit, which i thought was interesting enough to also include in my blog. The short version of the story is that i asked for some advice about landing a freelance gig and people in the replies began saying that i was not a game designer, because i obviously was an amateur and hadn't made any games yet. This is the follow-up post to that one.

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Hello again people!

My name is Lars and you might remember me from my post about freelance game design work. If not, that's cool as well. The response to my post has been thunderous and a mixed bag, full of helpful peeps who sacrificed time off their day to give advice to some rando and not-so-helpful peeps who were very eager to patronize me. I write this post because, as a game designer, i have an incredible love for game design, and in extension, game designers. There are some attitudes that are not very constructive floating around here though.

For context, i have been a professional game designer for three years now and a game designer in general for about five. I began by reading Jesse Schell's Art of Game Design: a Book of Lenses and falling in love with designing for a medium i loved already. Since then i began designing slowly but steadily, starting off with designing for a minecraft server, then making an adventure for D&D 5e, then briefly working on another server, a tabletop system with a friend for drivethrurpg's gamejam, then as a freelancer for a solo developer and very briefly as a project manager for an indie team, with countless small endeavours in design peppered throughout, with me adding to a new design blog as of late (and looking for more freelance gigs). Excuse the info dump but it is needed for my point.

As a game designer, i made it clear what i am on my post about finding freelance work. The issue is numerous individuals replying to my post or any of my replies always with the preface of "you are not a game designer". I will concede the fact that i did not include all of my previous experience in my post (on which i didn't see the point because i wasn't looking for work, i was asking for tips) but that does not matter. A game designer calling out a fellow designer and saying that they are not a designer due to X arbitrary reasons is extremely disrespectful and exclusionary from the community. I cannot believe i need to have this conversation on a subreddit supposedly filled by fellow designers but here we are. A person is a game designer as long as they design games. Whether they are an accomplished designer or a good one or a bad one is up for grabs, but they are a game designer first and foremost. This reflects extremely poorly on the subreddit as a whole. Is this how you guys treat actual beginner game designers? It also reflects extremely poorly on yourselves. I have no idea what the relationship between each and every single one of you and game design is. Now i do not know whether the consensus on game design being an art is on this subreddit (hopefully on the art side), but i don't see a lot of artistic mindsets being cultivated here. An artist's relationship with their art is an extremely personal one and one that you can't take away. Denying them their position as an artist serves only to alienate them. It baffles me the need for people to include the "you are not a game designer" part into their supposed advice in the first place. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you that proud of your accomplishments, that you feel the need to compare yourselves to the guy humbling himself enough to ask for advice? You need to cultivate respect for your fellow creatives and the medium as a whole.

I see some of you got into game design through another discipline and some of you even told me that the only way to pursue game design is through another discipline first. While that is largely true in a corporate sense, it is incredibly belittling for the discipline of game design. If you are a game designer through a corporate position rather than a love for the discipline then i can understand how you feel on the matter and i am not gonna take the title of designer away from you. You are fully-fledged designers (and it seems arguably more than me) but you need to learn respect for the medium and your fellow designers.

Which segways into the second part of this ramble, corporatization. I see a lot of corporate mindsets on here, which is understandable because i literally asked how to get work, but it bleeds into your philosophy and your relationship with game design. Game designer isn't just some kind of arbitrary position like Technical Director, it is a perfect mix between a science and an art (if you want more on that, check out my blogpost about it), with many people not knowing/realizing that a game designer is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to a project and your actions perpetuate this devaluing of the discipline. You are shooting Game Design in the foot here. Game Design is not something whose value is tied to any corporation, product or corporate mindset/culture. Game Design has been practiced from the babylonian times with the Royal Game of Ur all the way to today and a discipline with many thousand years of rich history demands more respect, love and care. Society runs on games. Making football (or soccer), or basketball, or volley, or any dice game, or poker, or blackjack, or the simple games children play, spread around by cultures around the world are all Game Design.

Show some damn respect! Show some discipline! Show some love to your fellow designer! Just because someone hasn't made a videogame or some stupid, arbitrary shit doesn't give you free reign to talk to them as if they are a little kid, trying to make it to the space. Much more than my pride being hurt, my sense of community first and foremost was hurt. I couldn't believe the game designers who share a passion with me would treat me in such a fashion. That is all!