1.1 - "The Door Problem" Reading

    For this week’s reading, “The Door Problem” by Liz England, it answered the question of what exactly a game designer does using the situation of implementing doors into a game.

    The first thing I realized after thinking about the assigned questions was how small and lacking in creative agency so many of these roles seemed to be. For example, the environment artist’s role of simply converting something that has already been designed in 2D to 3D, presumably without much creative leeway in between sounds extremely disappointing. I feel like with how bite-size many of these roles are split, the creative agency and claim to them feel lacking in many cases. Though I do feel that if I had the chance to work in the production process of more than one of these roles, though for fewer objects it would be more fulfilling. For example, I feel like based on the reading, environment artist and lighter roles alone feel extremely uninteresting, but getting to be able to do both would be exciting, which is what I had always imagined the role of an environment artist to be.

    I feel that in part because I don’t fully understand the technical aspects of each role I have a hard time thinking about which ones feel fulfilling to me. One point of observation is how small and broken down some of these roles on the technical end are, which honestly feels a little disappointing because the most interesting part of game design to me was following the process from beginning to end, so it seems disappointing to see that something like that is not likely.

    With that thought in mind, I think the best roles to me would be ones like level designer that get to place down and engage with the assets as more of a whole. While I do like the problem solving aspect of doing programming, it has always felt like a tool to meet the ends, so I’m not sure how fulfilling it would be to have to program smaller parts of the whole product.

   I feel like part of this comes from not wanting to be far away from the core creative design components, but also being curious about the technical implementation of it. In that sense I feel roles like level designer and maybe thinking about the role of environmental artists as a whole would be the ones that are the most exciting for me.