The games industry tends to have two words for the kind of people on a development team. Specialist — someone with deep expertise in a specific discipline, hired to do that thing and largely only that thing. And generalist — a word that, if we’re being honest, most hiring managers read as “mostly useless.” You will almost never see a job posting for a generalist outside of an education context. The implication is someone who knows a little about everything and not enough about anything — the jack of all trades, master of none. The word carries enough baggage that most developers avoid claiming it even when it partially applies.
But there’s a third kind of developer that the existing vocabulary doesn’t cover. Deep in at least one discipline. Capable — genuinely capable, not just passing familiarity or interest — in one or two others. Informed and conversant in two or three more. Not a specialist and not a generalist. The shape is something like a hub with spokes at varying lengths: one or two that go deep, a few that go a meaningful distance, and an awareness of the terrain beyond even where the spokes don’t quite reach.
I’ve been calling them centerists. And I think the industry would benefit from doing the same.
How We Got Here
As games have grown larger, hyper-specialization has become the norm. The logic is understandable. Bigger projects need more people. More people need clearer definitions of what each person does. Hiring for specialization feels safer — you know exactly what you’re getting, the expectations are legible, the contribution is easy to measure.
There’s also the “do more with less” pressure that has been a constant presence in the industry for as long as most people can remember. The instinct is to find the most efficient possible version of each role and fill it with the most focused possible person.
But rigid specialization has a hidden cost. A specialist can only flex so far. When a project needs something adjacent to their expertise — when a problem crosses discipline lines, as problems in game development almost always do — the specialist either can’t help or has to hand it off. And every handoff is a potential bottleneck, a communication gap, a place where something gets lost between the person who understands the problem and the person now responsible for solving it.
The Anti-Silo
Here’s what a centerist does that a specialist often can’t: they work across more of the team. They cycle communication rather than containing it. They sit at intersections where information flows naturally because they have enough context in multiple disciplines to understand what’s being said and translate it for someone who doesn’t.
There’s a specific problem centerists solve that rarely gets named. When a specialist advocates for their discipline — argues for more time, more resources, more consideration — the argument is often heard through a filter. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s being made from inside the house. The animator making the case for animation, the audio designer making the case for audio — even when they’re completely right, the room can discount it before it lands because it sounds like it’s coming from one place, in one language, for one reason.
A centerist can carry that argument across a line. They translate it — not by changing what it says but by saying it in a vocabulary the rest of the room can receive without the filter. The case for animation time becomes a case for how the game feels to play. The case for audio budget becomes a case for how immersion holds or breaks. Same argument. Different language. Different reception.
That translation also creates room — room for conversations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, room for disciplines to be heard that might otherwise stay quiet, room for the kind of cross-pollination that tends to produce the most interesting solutions. A centerist doesn’t just carry arguments across lines. They make it easier for everyone around them to do the same.
Centerists are the anti-silo — not because they break silos by force, but because their natural way of working makes the silo walls less relevant.
The Creative Director Observation
This is my opinion and not a rule, but it’s an observation I keep returning to.
Some of the most effective Creative Directors I’ve encountered or worked with came from disciplines other than design — animation, engineering, audio. And I think there’s a reason for that which connects directly to the centerist idea. Game design tends to be what a lot of experienced developers end up developing as a secondary skill set regardless of their primary discipline. The longer you work in games, the more you think about how things feel to play, how systems interact, how player experience is shaped by decisions at every level. Design thinking becomes ambient. It develops in the margins.
Someone who comes to Creative Direction from animation brings that ambient design thinking plus a deep understanding of how movement and timing communicate meaning — how a character’s weight and momentum tell a story before a single word is spoken. Someone from engineering brings an understanding of what’s actually possible, what costs what, where the real constraints live. Someone from audio brings an understanding of how emotion is carried and how immersion is sustained or broken.
I’ve also worked at studios where there was no path to Creative Direction unless you came from a design background first — where the walls were explicit and the pipeline was fixed. And I’ve worked at studios where that wasn’t true. Both kinds of studios produced successful games. But I can say with some confidence which teams tended to have a clearer and more widely shared grasp of the creative vision. The ones where the person at the top had enough spokes on the wheel to speak everyone’s language.
You Probably Already Have Them
Here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough: a lot of developers are already centerists. They came up through one discipline, spent years watching adjacent ones, developed real competence in areas outside their job description — sometimes officially, often just out of curiosity and proximity and the natural porousness of creative work.
But the modern development structure rarely creates room for them to contribute that way. They get hired as a specialist. They’re slotted into a lane. Their adjacent capabilities go unasked-for and therefore unused. The animator who thinks deeply about game feel and could contribute meaningfully to design conversations stays in the animation lane because that’s what the org chart says they do. The audio designer who understands narrative structure well enough to flag problems early doesn’t get invited to those conversations because that’s not their role.
The centerist is in the building. They’re just not being used like one — and it could simply be because no one asked, “Who knows about this kind of stuff?”
The Honest Answer To Do More With Less
The industry talks constantly about doing more with less. It’s usually a euphemism for cutting people while expecting the same output, and it usually produces exactly what you’d expect. But there’s an honest version of the question underneath the euphemism — how do you build a team that’s more than the sum of its parts?
Centerists are one answer to that question. Not by asking one person to do three jobs, but by cultivating people whose value radiates outward across a team in ways that make everyone around them more effective.
Hire for it when you can. Create room for it when it already exists. And if you’re a developer reading this wondering whether this sounds like you — it probably does. You’ve just been operating in a lane that was narrower than your actual range.