Perfect is the Enemy of Good: When is something good enough?
I have been playing video games for as long as I can remember. We inherited my cousin’s original Nintendo system when I was five or six years old and ever since then I’ve been hooked. Whether it was the competitiveness of a sports game or the immersion of a open-world role playing game, video games as a medium have always found ways to sink their claws into me and make me care about the story.
Last week I started reading Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, a book by games journalist Jason Schreier in which he relates the stories of popular video games and the struggles the development teams face in getting them to their customers. There are life and business lessons in every chapter, but I was struck by the juxtaposition of two stories in particular and their approach to the industry term “Perfect is the enemy of good” in a world where being on time is paramount.
In the first two chapters, Schreier describes the development processes of the popular crowdfunded classic-style RPG Pillars of Eternity and the major Playstation title Uncharted 4. Both of these games saw several delays and story swaps and had the senior members of the team wondering when the game was good enough to be done. Eventually, both shipped and saw several post-release patches that made the games “perfect.”
The third chapter, however, tells the incredible story of Eric Barone, the one-man studio that created the hit game, Stardew Valley. Barone started development on Stardew Valley as a side project while looking for a job in 2011, but continued tweaking, iterating, and reworking parts of the game for five years before releasing the game in February of 2016. The game has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but if you ask him, it’s still not perfect.
All three of these games had incredibly successful commercial releases and were recognized for their originality. Where the first two certainly took their time to polish their projects, they understood the game was not complete when they released it and released fixes for various bugs and added more story after the commercial release. Barone, on the other hand, kept working on his game until it was as perfect as he could make it — and even still, he isn’t satisfied.
I have been thinking a lot about when something is good enough as I have plotted my return to blogging regularly. Is this well-sourced enough? Have I thought as much as I want to about this topic? What am I trying to communicate? How can I make this perfect?
I can’t. If I tried to be perfect I would never publish anything. There is always another book, another article, another blog that will add color to my writing and shift my perspective. In planning this, I originally wanted to write a separate blog about each one of these chapters, examining the different challenges the developers overcame and how their leadership styles were perfectly suited for the problem the faced (I may still do that). But in the end the phrase I kept circling back to tied back to something I’ve been thinking about for going on a month now.
This is not a perfect blog. I may never write a perfect blog. But I think it’s a good blog, and that makes me perfectly happy.
