A good designer can craft an experience and describe it to a team and make sure that the team understands how that experience, uh, is, is the -- is the thing that grounds everything that you do in terms of the technology that you're building. How is that technology helping you get to that experience? And the mechanics that you're building, uh, and the art that you're making, the sound, the music, um, or even your business model in -- uh, for example. The designer -- uh, the design director, lead designer, whatever you call it, I think, is really trying to make sure that you're describing the experience that people want to have. I've seen a lot of people fall into the trap of saying, "Well, uh, we are making a, uh, a shooter. And it's kind of like this game. And it's going to be like this game, but we're going to have these new features. Um, you know, it's, it's this game plus this new mechanic." Well, I've often heard the pitch, and I'm sure you guys have heard this quite a lot. "It's this game plus this game. That's my vision." But that really doesn't tell you anything, right? It's -- um, I don't know what it's like when I put those two games together. I can have a picture in my head, but when you tell me "this game plus this game," I'm thinking, I know what this experience is, and I know what this experience is. But it might not always be clear when I put them together, that a better pitch is to just say, "What is the experience you think it will be?" or, "What is the experience you're trying to create?" That's so important because (1) we're in an age where most things are sequeled. And there has to be consistency if you're trying to build a brand. That's what's going to make sequels at least stick, right? You come to a brand or a franchise or a sequel for the kind of experience it delivers, right? So, Farmville delivers a kind of experience. Um, Dead Space delivers a kind of experience. And it would be really easy to sort of dismiss what the experience is that people came to you for and say, "Well, you know, we're going to make, um -- we're going to make a -- another shooter. And, um, well, it's kind of like the last one, but, you know, again, we're going to add a bunch of new mechanics because those mechanics just sound really neat," and forgetting that sometimes adding things - uh, using a food analogy - that adding things will oftentimes sort of spoil the experience, right? I love chocolate. I love fish. But when you put chocolate and fish together, I'm not sure I really like that. And it's amazing that a lot of designers don't think that way. It's, it's just sort of a - you know, this sort of grab bag mentality. So, I think that the, the design director is the glue that says this is the experience we're trying to create. And that also gives the team a, a sort of litmus test, that once everything comes together, you know, you can check features off of a list and say, you know, my work is done. But if you say that you're trying to create an experience and somebody sits down when the day is done and they say, "Well, I checked in my code. I did the art." And if you play the game and you don't have that experience, then that's a great way for the team to actually know when the job is done instead of just saying, "Well, there's one guy who -- he'll just tell us when we're done. And, you know, I don't know what's in his head, but, yeah, you know, he's this kind of black box."
