A game designer is...
“One of the challanges of being a game designer is that there isn’t really an established discipline of game design. So it is difficult to acquire the fundamental skills of the field, or even to know what they are. In general, I would say that the skills a game designer needs are similar to those of an interacive designer or industrial designer. At the core is the ability to structure a participatory experience by understanding how dynamic systems function. THe trick is understanding how these formal systems relate to the experiences of payers in terms of desire, aesthetics, communicaiton, emotion, representation, meaning, and other vectors of the multivalent play experience.”
-From an interview with Eric Zimmerman, CEO of gameLab in “Education of a design entrepreneur” edited by Steven Heller.