"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I have a feeling that most people that try to be creative these days have never heard the phrase or had the concept cross their mind.
Problem is in modern world perfection is measured by volume rather than by quality.
ReplyDeleteBut to think of it, it's not very current thing. Dumas is widely considered to invent Atos into his works not because of the story in the first place, but rather due to being paid on a line by line basis, and this not very speachful guy solved the task perfectly.
But yeah, problem is the rest of the books was brilliant, while nowadays it's mostly not.
Well, Atos gave a fairly interesting side-plot so I don't mind (heh, I'm not sure how many times I've read that book between ages 8 and 11, should re-acquire it) that, even though what you say has a good point.
ReplyDeleteSame goes for Dickens (in fact, he was also the earliest version of DRM) - take his Bleak House, for example, or Pickwick Club Notes, and you'll see a lot of things there being "extra" just because they were originally published as newspaper novels. Does it necessarily make them bad? Nope. Could they be better if they were shorter? You bet.
Hell, the worst offender of them all is Stephen King. Bugger's 800-page novels could be condensed to 25-page short stories and only GAIN in quality in just about every aspect.
But, to make my original post more based on something, my comment this time falls to Rage, id's latest production. It is the perfect example of how adding more and more and more on to something just detracts from the thing you're adding things to.
Well, there we might be experiencing another classics, which I experience quite often at work as well.
ReplyDeleteTo sell something you must promote it. To promote you must introduce some shiny features. So you put something along "innovative vehicles management", "multiroles action" and so on. And in the end of the day you'll have a 5 minutes car driving episode which is easily beaten by Envirobear 2000, and "multiroles" which end up in first 10 minutes of the game being played as a kid.
But hey, you never said it will be brilliant. You just said it will be, and there it is.
Oh, yes. I've been seeing that a lot.
ReplyDeleteBut nah, the problem with Rage is different. I was going to write on it once I finish it, but to briefly show the problem, let's presume this discussion took place:
"So! We're making a new tech for games, how can we make it sell? We need to make a big impression with the engine, you know?"
"Well, who do we want to sell it to?"
"Everyone!"
"Well, then let's add every genre into the game, except maybe strategy/tactics cause those are hard."
"Yay!"
"Yay!"