Art, game design, programming, and technology

Still with me? No, I don't mean that every game designer has to be a C++ wizard who dreams in curly braces, but game designers must be able to think and solve problems algorithmically and have a very clear understanding of what's easy and what's hard to do on a computer. Sure, game designers can tell programmers what to implement, but, as all programmers know, there's a world of difference between "what to implement" and "how to implement."