Oh, really?

Lum:
The problem is that game design is what everyone wants to do (or more accurately everyone thinks they can do) so most companies hire internally for that sort of thing. Your best bet is to get an entry level job (CS, QA, whatever) and work your way up, but be aware that all your coworkers are trying to do the same thing.

Lietgardis:
What he said. Support jobs are an easy way to prove your sentience — in CS and QA, you have plenty of opportunities to suggest solutions to the problems you report, and if they’re good, somebody will notice.

Lum:
Like I said, everyone wants to be a designer (and think they are qualified to be), whereas good coders are much rarer and their skillset is a much easier thing to quantify. And the game industry being what it is, it’s not very easy to find teams small enough where you can be both.

Raph didn’t get a job from being a board poster. He was one of the primary designers behind a popular MUD. So he had previous work to point to. Which in this industry means a great deal. And Dave started at the ground floor, first at CS for EQ, then as a worldbuilder for a small company whose future was by no means assured. In general walking into an interview and saying you want to take over the direction of the company’s flagship product is not a good way to impress your coworkers.

Ubiq:
Raph got his job because a friend of his worked at Origin already. I got my job because Raph gave me a golden recommendation. Connections are probably the most valuable way to break into the industry.

Barring that, trust me, the cream rises to the crop in this industry really well, especially in larger studios. If you are the best CS or QA person in your division, you will get noticed eventually. On UO2, we promoted at least 3 people from below to worldbuilding and data positions from CS and QA. John Hanna and Carly Staehlin both got lead design positions that started from being top-notch community people.

Dave:
Depends on how flexibly you define “game design”. Mythic hires most of their content team, world builders and the like, from their CS team. For that matter, I think two of the three people who filled my slots at Mythic after I left started in CS. And I personally went from board poster to EQ customer service, not design. That was a couple of steps later. Scott was hired to build the CS tools for Camelot, his part in server development and design came later. Raph was hired out of school, where he was working on a degree in literature, not off the boards.

The thing is, this is show business for geeks. It’s not enough just to pay your dues in CS or QA, because a lot of people are doing that. It’s not enough to be really smart, because a lot of those people are really smart. It’s not enough to be an effective communicator, because that’s the bare minimum to even have a shot. You need to be obsessed, driven, monomaniacally focused to an unhealthy degree. And then you have to get a little lucky, get the right jobs on the right projects at the right time, get opportunities to learn your craft and take the maximum advantage of them.

Cool ideas about games are easy. Any bunch of gamer geeks can sit down for a few beers and come up with pages of them by closing time. The hard part is learning things like project planning, management techniques, how to put together a budget, all the boring, tedious, apparently unrelated skills that go along with a team of these sizes. Right now, I’m not spending much time thinking about game design, I’m drawing tables of organization, writing job descriptions, development process flow-charts, and a whole bunch of things that once were the bane of my existence, I’m used to stomping all over procedures as getting in the way of doing the job, not defining what I know is only a pipe dream of how it is theoretically supposed to be done.

But I’ve seen the results of just letting these things slide, of ignoring process until the oversights bite you in the ass. Of failing to have a plan to deal with success. The usual result is a big flameout of a failure long before you get to launch, the “upside” is to succeed, and not be able to deal with it. To be reactive and reflexive, following the path of least resistance on a slow slide to irrelevance, eventually to be ditched by your own company. I’ve seen it in the regular IT industry as well as in games, and I don’t want to go down that road.

So I draw flow charts, and write job descriptions, and create nice neat orderly diagrams of how game development would work in some hypothetical perfect universe. Not because I believe it is actually going to go according to plan, but because without a plan, there’s no way we’ve even got a shot.

Cool ideas are what it’s all about, what we do this for. Getting your cool ideas turned into a game is the brass ring we’re all reaching for, what keeps us going after layoffs and cancellations and firings and all the drama that goes with the egos and politics. But they’re only the first step on the way to really *being* a game designer.

J.:
“Ideas are cheap. Ability is expensive.”
-John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy.

EDIT: And if it isn’t enough go to read also “Mr. Squishy” from Oblivion. The book I wrote about here. I wish I could paste excerpts but it wouldn’t work that well in italian.