A unique blog about game design and development, by a 40yo professional game sculptor.

When I went to Project Horseshoe last weekend, I expected to rub shoulders with lots of people just like me, but instead found a varied group.  All professionals in the game industry, and they all called themselves "designers", but I still had a hard time communicating with them.  In a way, the experience made me feel even more lonely than I already do, professionally speaking.

At one point I mentioned to the assembled that I'm both a programmer AND a game designer, and that's always been hard for the industry to accept.  Collectively, they all went, "Huh, how 'bout that."  Lonely, lonely, lonely.

There are several sub-types of game designer which are recognized by the industry.  They are:
    1) Level Designer  - an artist who uses in-house tools to build and populate worldspaces
    2) Lead Designer - a manager who wrangles the level designers and helps the Producer control the Client
    3) Freelance Designer - an experienced designer with an existing corpus of work, who "parachutes in" to help direct the look and feel of the game

I KNOW I exist, even if the industry as a whole has no conceptual slot for me, so I started thinking that I might be a beast of a different color.  If I gave up calling myself a "designer", what WOULD I call myself?  I thought hard about it, examining the different roles of artists in other mediums.  Doing so, it finally dawned on me:

I'm a game sculptor.

If you have a game idea, and immediately try it out by programming it yourself, you're a game sculptor too.

Now, I know friends who would say that the industry already has a name for someone who designs and codes games by themselves: amateur.  I counter with famous examples of game sculptors, like Peter Molyneux and Sid Meier (I know Sid created SimGolf this way; he told me himself at the first DICE conference).  And game sculptors, just like art sculptors, can work with a team, though we need more creative control than other types of designer.

And just like an art sculptor, game sculptors always have something to show, and are always more happy to SHOW what we're doing than just sit around and talk about it.  Plus, just as art sculptors are more keenly aware of the physics and structural organization of their works, game sculptors execute their creative vision with a deeper understanding of the code and algorythms that ultimately comprise the game.  I don't think it's an accident that all the new physics-based games are made by code sculptors; code sculptors stand head-and-shoulders above other designers when it comes to understanding how  complex algorythms can be used in game design.

I also think "game sculptor" is a temporal tag.  If you design something on paper, and hand it off to others to execute, you're not a game sculptor.  But I know many designers who USED to be game sculptors and are no longer.  I have a friend who once bragged, "I used to use a compiler to make games.  Now I use a development team."

So why call myself a game sculptor?  Well, I've already concluded that the generic terms "designer" and "programmer" don't describe me.  But mostly I want to use the term to help find my true peers; other game sculptors.  It's tough being lonely all the time; hopefully this new frame of reference can lead me to meaningful conversations with new peers.