i used to believe i couldn't be a designer because the other aspiring designers i knew were men who got raised on blizzard games & star wars while i was raised on barbie games, neopets, & purple moon.

wish i could tell my younger self how flat out wrong that belief was.

in design it's common to fall back to patterns you're familiar with/are nostalgic for. it's a bias, but it can be useful, too.

my fallbacks are different from most other designers'. that means i dissect problems in very different ways and often reach different conclusions.

as a student i used to see guys who wanted to be designers dissecting games and thought "there's a whole body of knowledge/experience here i'm clearly missing, and therefore i cannot do this job."

what i minimized by doing that was the body of knowledge *i* had to contribute.

i also overlooked the benefit of being able to come to a lot of these games later as an adult. with clear eyes and no particular nostalgia for them, i could be curious about how they worked. sometimes they held up to the nostalgia, and other times they didn't.

i believe great designers are curious. they want to learn. why did another game do it this way? what is that mechanic trying to evoke? is it successful? what would i change about it?

if you can be curious, then no matter what game you work on, you'll be successful.