Ah, I don&#x27;t think we disagree: &quot;game designers&quot; as a profession are almost solely employees of games companies. &quot;Game designer&quot; isn&#x27;t even a job role you can hire for; it&#x27;s just what you call someone (usually a programmer or writer or project manager in a games company) when they have enough experience to put on the game design &quot;hat.&quot;<p>But experience <i>in</i> game design—making games&#x2F;toys&#x2F;puzzles engrossing, fun, educational, or whatever-else—teaches game designers a set of skills that are applicable outside of games. It&#x27;s not just &quot;gamification&quot; (which is almost only used in reference to systems of points and rewards used to bait the Achievement-oriented Bartle types[1]); it&#x27;s the architectural level of &quot;systems engineering&quot;, the same thing done when e.g. NASA tries to figure out what goes into a working satellite: designing the satellite itself, designing the support systems for it, designing an <i>ongoing training system</i> for the ground crew, creating training <i>policies</i> so that new lessons are incorporated back into new training, sourcing replacement parts and sourcing <i>budgets</i> for part-replacing <i>missions</i> and sourcing <i>suppliers</i> when other suppliers go defunct and setting up <i>competitive supply-chains</i> so a monopsony isn&#x27;t created that chokes the budget... and so forth.<p>Figuring out how to make a cohesive system, composed of both humans and technology, get something done together, is mostly working out incentives so that the system doesn&#x27;t fall over from one of a thousand ills. There&#x27;s more expertise in the pinky finger of an MMORPG Live Team content designer on this sort of topic than in the entire apprenticeship of a civil engineer.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bartle_Test" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bartle_Test</a>