What is a game designer, out of curiosity? I mean, I get the basics, but game designers don't do most of the programming, do they? They just need a general overview of how the game is working?

I could explain it, but it's easier to just show you an example. A game designer writes things like this: http://www.squidi.net/three/

Coming up with new game ideas is the holy grail of game design, but a game designer's day to day work is creating and refining game content, often working with programmers to tweak the implementation.

For instance, take Super Mario Bros.: the developer would write the graphics rendering code, physics, make a level editor, etc, but it's the game designers who decided beforehand what the concepts would be, and work afterward to create and playtest the levels themselves until the game is fun.

For a more modern example, in World of Warcraft, developers push all the polygons and worry about collision detection and timing of spell effects, while game designers say "the fireball spell should do n damage at x range, and the Whatzisname questline should have such-and-such a set of rewards; here's the dialogue script."

If you prefer, you can think of developers as providing the toolkit, and designers as building the game with it, but in a much more iterative process.

I decided that I do want to take a crack at explaining:

    game design : fun :: computer science : information

Just like computer science is the study of how to best analyze and manipulate information in large quantities, game design is the study of how to find, create, increase, manipulate, measure, or otherwise "use" the fun in a work. If there were a latin word for fun, game design would be served well by being renamed [that word]-ology. (As it stands, I've found "ludology"--the study of play--used, but it doesn't quite capture the same meaning.)

It's important to make the distinction: fun doesn't only apply to games. A ludologist would be perfectly at home in UI design, for example, or education (and also obviously things like toy and amusement-park design.) You could hire a "game designer" for those positions right now, but people would look at you funny because the branding's wrong.

However, just as there's a difference between computer scientists and programmers, there's a difference between ludologists and the risen-through-the-ranks game designer that we see today, so it wouldn't be a perfect fit. The game designer may know some facts about how to make things fun, and have some theories as to why certain game design patterns produce fun, but they've been "hard-won" on the street; they've never formally studied it, mostly extracting it from their practice in other game-related disciplines (art, coding, level design, etc.) That kind of game designer is half-developer (or artist, or playtester, or what-have-you) working in a sort of cowboy fashion to advance the field.

Of course, ludology is in its absolute infancy (it's about 20 years younger than formal Computer Science) so it's still not even recognized as a separate discipline; thus, the only ones working on it are making their advances in the field, similar to the original computer programmers who had to be Computer Scientists, because no one had thought the thoughts they needed to think to base their work on.

As I said, I'm taking CS and English courses. Tack on a bit of psychology and sociology, some media history courses, and whatever it is that teaches game theory (economics? basically, "fairness" as it relates to fun), and you'd have a good starting program for the actual teaching of formal Ludology. I was always thinking about being a CS professor one day; I might have to change that plan a bit, and perhaps write up my own curriculum ;)

Okay! That makes a lot of sense. Thanks a lot for explaining.

Are you in that job right now, to my parent post? What sorts of things have you learned from it? What trends do you see developing within the industry?

I don't work in the game industry. I'm just a lifelong player who has talked from time to time with game developers. So don't take this as gospel, but here's my take on long-term prospects.

"AAA" games, the real earthshakers like Halo and World of Warcraft, can only be made by large teams with multi-million-dollar budgets. Inescapable truth. Success in conventional game development has come to depend more and more on a corporate lifestyle: no loose cannons, no lone geniuses. Game developers have to master their C and C++ and perfect their 3D optimizations; game designers have to be very lucky, very hardworking, and very low-paid. (The design side is much harder to break into.)

Games from established studios have to be guaranteed moneymakers, mostly appealing to 15-to-35-year-old males, which is why we see lots and lots of online gunplay and me-too rhythm and karaoke games. The sudden upswing in rhythm and karaoke games points out the increasing mainstreaming of video games, though, which brings me to point 2:

Independent development. The internet has made it extremely easy to write a simple game in Flash or something and get it plastered all over the internet. You go viral with a decent business model, you can cash in, and quite a few games have already been optioned for downloadable console ports after an online success. Especially for casual games -- pick-up-and-go entertainment, usually in the puzzle category -- this can be a great road to recognition, and it's the only one available to the reclusive-genius solo programmer.

Solo development with internet distribution is also the only way to release game types that just aren't that popular these days. I've been playing a game named The Spirit Engine 2 [ http://thespiritengine.com/ ] lately; if you look at the screenshots, you can see that it's not the kind of game that would fly on the mass market.

In fact, my advice to anyone who wants to "make games" is just to make games. Don't go work for a game company. You'll do more work for less pay than you would in any other programming job, and you probably won't even scratch your game-creation itch -- you think you'll be slaving away on Doom 7, but it's far more likely that you'll be fixing graphics buffer glitches in Horsez [ http://www.amazon.com/Horsez-Nintendo-DS/dp/B000GJ0J1K ].