If you're an avid video gamer and while sitting at home playing your favorite game, you think to yourself, "I could do this better", video game design might be the perfect job for you someday. But there are some key skills you'll need to have before you can enter the field and truly make an impact on the video game market. Here's a description of the most important ones.

A video game designer career requires a person to be well educated in the field of game design. This means that not only will you need a high-school degree, but you'll also need a college (or technical school) degree as well. This may not be a problem for some, but for others (such as hardcore gamers), its a rather large barrier.

Video game design and development is both a science and an art. On the one hand you have the graphic design elements of the game, creating visual characters, levels, and everything else. You also have sound engineers creating the audio aspects of the game, from characters voices to the sounds of gunfire. On the scientific side you have programmers writing line of code after line of code that makes the game actually work. And organizing the whole video game are managers who make sure the focus and idea of the game stays on track and you have a high quality end product for users. As you can see there are tons of specific areas of video game design you can get into.

What about design or art principles? Do I need to have skills in these areas? One of the most important qualities to a video game designer or artist is to stay true to the experience that you are creating for the players. So keeping true to a vision of the experience is something employers will look for. From creating a game from the idea all the way to production and to the shelves, keeping the vision true to the experience is something that all good game designers are able to do.

Many successful video game designers and producers started out in the industry as video games testers. Game tester jobs do not require a college degree. You can get started part time, working from home as long as you have a computer or console to play the games on. Game tester jobs are also popular. Positions are not usually advertised on job sites or company web sites because potential testers contact the company all the time.

While you are testing games, you can get some experience designing games by working with the game design tools that are released with many games, like the Neverwinter Nights tool set. In fact Bioware ask applicants to submit levels created with this tool when they apply for designer jobs.

If you go deep into how these video games are designed then the first thing you can do is to find out the summer camps that offer such types of computer-based courses. As video game design is made possible because of computer technology, computer camps can rightly be the preferred option of your search.