For a long time, I believed that becoming a better game designer meant becoming more rational.

Being able to: Understand players. Understand systems. Understand emotions. Understand loops, motivations, rewards, depth, cognitive biases, and all the invisible forces that shape play.

All of this matters. It truly does.

But over the years, through projects, playtests, discussions with teams and players, I began to feel that something was missing.

Game design is often described as a discipline where every decision can be explained. As if a good designer could always justify their choices through logic, method, or theory.

I’m not so sure.

Because the moments players remember years later are not always the most rational ones.

They are the ones that made them feel something personal: a doubt, a loss, guilt, joy, a memory, or a new way of looking at their own certainties.

This is where rationality reaches its limit.

It gives structure. It builds coherence. It helps us understand the “how” and the “why.”

But it cannot replace sensitivity.

We never create from a neutral place. We create as the person we are at that precise moment, shaped by our lives, our readings, our fears, our encounters, our fatigue, our hopes.

This is why two designers can know the same tools and theories, yet never create the same game.

Tools can be learned. A unique perspective cannot be borrowed.

And I believe this is what makes game design more than a science.

Our responsibility is not only to create what works. It is also to recognize that each design carries something of us: our values, our contradictions, our obsessions, and sometimes things we do not yet understand.

Every game designer is an author.

Not because every game is a statement.

But because every game carries a way of seeing the world.

It carries our flaws, our blind spots, and the fragile contrast between what we deeply believe and what we still fail to resolve.