Diamonds or Dandelions?

Quantity vs quality? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and how it pertains to creative output. Thus, I came up with my Diamonds or Dandelions comparison:

Dreaming of Diamonds by Swamibu - CC BY 2.0

Diamond Method: Blizzard Entertainment puts out bestselling games. Every. Damn. Time (since Warcraft I, anyway). I used to work in the game industry, this is not a “magic bullet” industry. Games can suffer from feature creep (it’s three weeks till Golden Master and you think “wouldn’t it be cool if we could do THIS in the game?” and suddenly your deadline is pushed back again and your lead engineer has an aneurysm from apoplectic rage), or too many cooks (often  from management or marketing who say, “Unchartered 2 is hot. Make it like Unchartered 2.” … “But it’s a flower shop sim!”), or just bad management. How Blizzard Entertainment has put out near-perfect game after game is a mystery, and something that the whole industry studies and tries to emulate.

I don’t know how they do it, but I do know they’re not afraid to kill a title when it’s floundering. They have killed two titles from the Warcraft and Starcraft lines that they felt weren’t going to perform. They also don’t set release dates, so they don’t suffer from releasing a buggy product that will later be patched. These two things are difficult to do; they both cost a lot of money and depend on a publisher’s agreement. Blizzard is its own publisher, so no worries there.

Copying the Blizzard method, what I call releasing diamonds, is hard to do. First you have to create something great. That’s already a hurdle that’s nigh impossible to jump. You also have to be willing to look at your work and wonder if it’s going to be a hit or not, and if not, be willing to toss it aside. You have to have perfect self-awareness; don’t be so hard on yourself that you throw away good work, and don’t feel you’re so perfect that you’ll release a dog. Never mind that if an editor is waiting on it, you have to have a good relationship with them. But if you can manage these things, you will give yourself the energy and focus to release only your best stuff.

Løvetann på vei inn i stua by nerdegutt - CC BY 2.0

Dandelion Method: The best examples of this are Beatnik Turtle, Jonathan Coulton, and Ze Frank. Each of these have focused on quantity over quality, forcing a daily or weekly deadline on themselves, always thinking, always creating, and throwing their creations to the wind to see if they take root somewhere. If you throw a dart at a wall enough times, you’ll eventually hit a bullseye. Or if you throw enough seeds at concrete, one will likely take root in a crack.

(Yeah, I’m borrowing this metaphor from Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe digital distribution, the dandelion seeds being your work and where they land being paying customers or fans, but I think it works here too.)

I’ve used this model, not to the extreme extent as the above creators have done, but enough times. I was more experimental with the (retired) Geek Fu podcast as it was a catch-all personal podcast where I could try anything. I miss that freedom, honestly. But I always told my listeners that if they didn’t like funny zombie audio dramas, they could read about mythology afterlife travels, and if they didn’t like that they could read about underpowered super heroes.

Sometimes I wonder, though, if I should take a year and focus on making diamonds.

No decisions yet. Just pondering.