This really has been my experience at several game studios, including the current one I am at. Often enough, the 'game designer' tends to be someone who exists mostly as a political organism in the company. Without fail, none of the designers I've worked with know much about the history of video games and will usually be rather dismissive about the subject.
The current game designer I'm with could not tell you anything regarding various character creation tools and strategies that have been used in various games (APB, City of Heroes, Skyrim, etc. being good relatively recent examples), yet his job is to spec out that very thing for one of our products. The result has not been very good, but this person outranks the rest of the team on these decisions.
Currently this guy is so bereft of anything to do design-wise, he's decided to read some books on Agile and has moved into pushing the artists and programmers around as if he's the project manager as well, which upper management collectively shrugged at and allowed. Management is where every 'designer' I've worked with has wound up and this guy will be no exception.
At the end of the day, I no longer have much faith in the average game studio because I know these people are out calling the shots on creative decisions. If you aren't a coder or an artist, for the love of fuck, please at least be a genuine gamer with a working understanding of game design history. There's been tens of thousands of video games produced now and some are very much worth remembering when considering a new design, both what to do and what to avoid. Your products will be better for it.
At the AAA game studios I have been an engineer at, the core/systems/lead designers have all been very familiar with game history, are avid gamers across genres, and always have, for any idea, examples of how that idea has been done in other games or that it has been promised in upcoming game X, etc.. The junior designers I've worked with have lacked that skill, which is probably why they are mostly just a cog in the content pipeline. Much as there's a difference between a real engineer who can build up systems and an enterprise UI programmer, there's a difference between content "designers" and systems designers.
Hands down, though, the best systems designers I've worked with have had programming backgrounds.
For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers.
What I found in various game companies is that game designers usually graduate from other positions in the company and rarely hired as designers from the start.
> For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers.
I have been wondering for a while how transparently bad game designers must be to produce well... a lot of what we see. This actually explains a lot.
Testers are not designers. :( Testers can be wonderful user advocates, if they make that effort, but... designers they are not. If anything, they're antithetical to design at their best.
Good testers are hard to find, and what's even harder to find are good testers who want to remain testers. The pay is terrible, the benefits are usually non-existent, and they're quite often placed socially at a lower level than the other game developers. Finding someone who is good at testing and doesn't want to be a programmer or a designer is nigh impossible in the games industry. Even if they don't want to be a designer/engineer, they want to advance their career which leaves them with the option of managing other testers, which as we all know, leaves no time to actually exercise their testing skills.
Until testing is treated like a real career, with architect-style career growth options, it will continue this way. Instead, testers spend a lot of their time growing their connections, internally and externally to the studio, hoping that a junior level designer/engineer position will open up. Because there are so many testers, it's quite cutthroat, so spending time at work "showing off" or playing politics is almost a necessity here for career advancement.
QA is basically a lottery for designer jobs. You get a job doing QA (which is a terrible job) in the hopes that you will be one of the 0.1% who get chosen to become a designer. This makes no sense at all, but that is how it works.
The current game designer I'm with could not tell you anything regarding various character creation tools and strategies that have been used in various games (APB, City of Heroes, Skyrim, etc. being good relatively recent examples), yet his job is to spec out that very thing for one of our products. The result has not been very good, but this person outranks the rest of the team on these decisions.
Currently this guy is so bereft of anything to do design-wise, he's decided to read some books on Agile and has moved into pushing the artists and programmers around as if he's the project manager as well, which upper management collectively shrugged at and allowed. Management is where every 'designer' I've worked with has wound up and this guy will be no exception.
At the end of the day, I no longer have much faith in the average game studio because I know these people are out calling the shots on creative decisions. If you aren't a coder or an artist, for the love of fuck, please at least be a genuine gamer with a working understanding of game design history. There's been tens of thousands of video games produced now and some are very much worth remembering when considering a new design, both what to do and what to avoid. Your products will be better for it.