What is game design to you?

[KaiserMk7]

As far as I would be inclined to suggest, game design falls within the functional, rather than aesthetic, branch of the broader field of design. It is the design of the systems that shape player interaction. Barring contrast of important elements, visual feedback, subtle suggestion, and other such indicators, it's divorced from the art direction. Likewise, it's mostly divorced from audio and writing; sounds and texts are relevant not for their contents, but for how and under what conditions they're used and how they nudge players in a given direction, and non-interactive cutscene choreography is not game design at all. Aesthetic design is certainly present within gamedev in coexistence within game design, but they're fundamentally separate.
I invite differing opinions and further insight and discussion. I'm interested to see what others think on the matter.

 

[Strategist's icon Strategist Strategist]

There are multiple levels to game design. It is a multidisciplinary skill and it demands creativity and life experience. There's difficulty progression/enemy spawn/economy balance, which requires understanding of math, probability and economics. There's also level design, which is more of an art and requires some understanding of storytelling to create memorable worlds/levels. And there's also metagame strategy, like balancing different types of skill trees/weapon types/character progress, which requires playtesting and an understanding of human psychology. To be honest, understanding human psychology and what motivates people to stick with games is important in general to game design.

There's more to it that is genre specific but in general, it is a multidisciplinary subject and the more you bring to the table in terms of experiences with entertainment media, history, math skills and experience with games of various genres, the better you will be at it.

 

[ciro64 ciro64]

Game design to me is understanding the appeal of your game and building on it.

I call Star Fox Zero's stealth mission a game design horror because it does everything it wasn't supposed to do lol.

 

[Cris_Agev]

game design seems too complicated to explain taking as example modern gaming, it feels like doing dissection with how heavily artistic it became.
Maybe taking as example classic, simplistic(and not so much) games like tetris, snake, cards, chess,etc and ask again what's game design it becomes for me more simple, it's coming up with a series of rules that putting them together and making me interact with them can give my brain a sense of challenge, purpose and accomplishment, the more clever they are the more it can make me feel I'm having fun.
Of course today that weight is shared with artistic design and direction: music, drawing, painting, cinematography, storytelling, writing, etc. But the core is there in every game: well designed(or not) set of rules.