[quote=“Jorpho, post:15, topic:72724, full:true”]The way I see it, it may be feasible to get a graduate “into the industry”, but getting a graduate into a position where they can actually make some of the lofty design decisions outlined in the article – as opposed to another code-monkey position of the sort popularized by ea_spouse – is practically like winning the lottery.
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I don’t really agree. You’re absolutely right that miracles are not going to happen overnight, but pretty much all senior designers and design leads start out as junior designers. Even the idea that there is someone who makes the lofty design decisions is often a marketing myth anyway at AAA-scale production. And the truly lofty design decisions (what kind of game product it is to be) isn’t even up to designers (that’ll be business interests), but designers are still an important part of the big picture.
Even junior designers - a lot of unintentional crappy stuff happens simply because many teams can’t get enough feedback and perspectives on things super early enough and rapidly enough to head off something before a bunch of dependencies form, locking it in. Everyone on the team wants to make a game that people will get sucked into and love and remember forever, they don’t intend to alienate people who could be having a blast and becoming fans instead, but on large productions so much stuff is happening simultaneously that while all the attention is distracted by this and that thing (the fire du jour), other things just get done the way they’re always been done, and often all it takes is for someone in the room to point out a problem for the team to jump onboard and make it better. We’ve each all only lived one life, so every person has significant blindspots no-matter who you are, but ideally the team will have much smaller blindspots.
Then you succeed in making something that a lot of people will love, only to see it get marketed in ways that alienate many of the people who would love the game… head->wall 
