What to look for when hiring a game designer.

I ran across an article written for prospective game designer employers on how to spot bad designers. Naturally, I read it. It can be found here:

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/10/opinion_how_to_hire_a_good_gam.php

While this seems like a mostly correct article, there are a couple points I take issue with.

1) Suggesting that good designers should have modding experience is narrow minded. I need no rant to go with this point - it's that cut and dry. Modding experience has nothing to do with the talent of the designer that's sitting in front of you at an interview. Modding is one of many ways to obtain design experience, and probably one of the less efficient ones at that.

2) "Beware of Ideas Man." What a terrible thing to advise an employer. Game design is all about ideas, many, many ideas. How can a supposed professional not know this? More bluntly: how could it not be true? If he means simply to beware bad attitudes, then he should have simply said it. I've read more than once that game designers who are afraid to have an opinion are far from desirable. Game designers are by necessity leaders, and therefore must have opinions, and not only opinions but on occasion downright mandates, else they are useless to the team.

3) Stating that game designers should be spending every waking moment of free time playing games is not only incestuous, its downright neurotic. Game designers need to aquire inspiration from everywhere, not only games. In fact, other games are probably one of the least important places to look, after all, who wants to just innovate or merge stale ideas? Don't we want brand new ones if at all possible? Isn't that what Mr. Schell, the author of "The Art of Game Design," meant when he described the greatest juggler in the room as being the one who wasn't the most technically skilled at juggling, but the one who got all of his inspiration from outside of the juggling circles? In fact, the juggler specifically said that the reason he was better than the others wasn't because he was a more technically skilled juggler, it was specifically because he didn't spend much time watching his peers.

It is interesting that he says game designers have a credibility problem, the reason he gives being that ideas are a dime a dozen and anyone on the team either could, or "feels" they could, create their own. Of course, in reality, the game designer is not just a ferreter of ideas, he is a leader.

It could be said that any leadership position has a credibility problem at first. After all, anyone who takes such a position has by necessity not held it before, at least at some point, and therefore all of their subordinates or peers will view them with narrowed eyes - until they earn the respect of the team. Consider the young officers of our military who, straight out of college, are given units of upwards of 30 men and women to lead, many of which are older and have more experience (sometimes by decades) than said officer. Such officers are in fact entrusted with these men and women's lives. Don't you think there is a credibility problem there, too? Don't you think his or her subordinates often feel that they could do a better job? This kind of problem is so old and so prevalent, that the fact that the author seems to think it is somehow novel to the game design industry leaves him the only one in the room with less credibility than they walked in with. Such an absurd viewpoint is, ironically, borne of the highly limited breadth of the author's knowledge and experience.

Such is the inevitable result when one spends "every waking moment immersed in gaming."