Today's #gamedev thread - if you say a designer has "tech skills", what does that mean to you?

To me, this is such a weird term when it gets applied to people outside of the actual job desc of Tech Designer, whose role is to be the cyborg that speaks to both man and machine.

I think it often gets used in place of 'self-sufficient' - oh, so and so did X without an engineer's assistance! They're so technical!

But that's a strange trait to laid, imo. And I say that as someone who has that trait in spades.

Or maybe sometimes people use it to mean, they remember a lot? 'lets ask X about this feature, they might know, they've got tech skills'

*laud damnit. Autocorrect stop turning my vocab into typos challenge

Anyway, design is fundamentally about crafting the rules and experiences that players will inteeact with in a way that produces in those players a desired or targeted response. Yes, knowing what your tools are capable of or capable of becoming can help with that. But.

I feel like as an industry we search for and promote designers with 'tech skills' but we should also be elevating designers with 'emotional skills' more. Tech skills are more quantifiable and clearly benefit production in measurable ways, but emotions are the real job, after all.

I'm employable because I'm good at math, but I'm a good designer because I did theater and music for two decades.

King's Quest doesn't exist without Roberta Williams, who had no programming experience when she co-founded Sierra.

The Elder Scrolls doesn't exist as-it-is without Michael Kirkbride, who is a writer, a painter, and a font of inspiration and ideas - but not a programmer.

I'm sure there are countless more examples - point is, remember to appreciate the humanities aspect of game design, as well as the technical aspect :)

(point is *not* technical aspect doesn't matter, it's not zero-sum!)