\nThe Virtue of Execution
Within local sectors of culturespace, it’s traditional for people pursuing creative projects\u2014writers, programmers, musicians, and so forth\u2014to heavily prioritize originality, uniqueness, and other such things, when pursuing their craft. To try to stick out from the crowd on the basis of, in some fashion, making a different sort of content from the rest of the crowd.
This is, as far as it goes, a good and valuable thing for people to do. More exploration of contentspace leads to more chances that a particular person’s idiosyncratic tastes will happen to be perfectly hit upon. But it’s just that: exploration. It’s a way of finding new and interesting sectors of contentspace; it’s not a way of producing maximally good content within those sectors.
So, yes, originality is something to celebrate. But equally valuable, and far less celebrated, is execution. The creation of works, not necessarily original, which stick out from the crowd by being good rather than just by being new. Which polish all the pieces already floating around the memespace, and present them in a prettified and optimized form rather than in minimum-viable-product form.
Consider, by way of example:
- Fallout 3 was the game which defined the broad shape of How 3D Fallout Works. But it was Fallout: New Vegas, not Fallout 3, which ended up as the widely-regarded best of the 3D Fallout games and the most enduring classic among them, having imported most of Fallout 3’s mechanics but combined it with substantially better writing and more interesting world-design. (This now-common opinion, I’ll note, stands in contrast with reviewer consensus upon release, under which New Vegas’s mechanical similarity to Fallout 3 was treated as reason to give it lower scores than Fallout 3 got.)
- Also on the video game front, see the various games which sit solidly within their genres, which aren’t known for being particularly mechanically or narratively innovative, but which execute their mechanics well, have pretty visuals and pretty music, are well-written, and in general are exceptionally good implementations of their genres. Celeste, among precision platformers; Hollow Knight, among metroidvanias; Divinity: Original Sin 2, among talky isometric RPGs; et cetera.
- Gwern has written previously about the surprisingly-large increase in how many positive comments his website got, once he’d put sufficient effort into improving its design above and beyond the design standards of most of the internet. I myself have noticed that, since his various design upgrades, I’ve become far more prone to reading his website than I used to be.
- DM of the Rings created the campaign comic genre, but it’s Darths & Droids which seems to have come out as the enduring classic of that genre, the shining example whose standard of quality other comics try to live up to.
- There are lots and lots of artists on the internet who are clearly pursuing very similar styles in their art (e.g. the crop of Standard-Issue Concept Artists, the crop of Standard-Issue Anime Character Fanartists, et cetera), but who have substantial gaps between one another in terms of how good they are at that art, in terms of quality of lineart and shading and lighting and so forth. None of these people tend to be particularly original; but many of them are very good.
…et cetera.
The virtue I’m gesturing at here is a very different virtue from the virtue of originality. It’s a virtue seen, not in discrete flashes of brilliance, but in the slow iterative process of taking a good-enough product and polishing it until it shines.
(And, if one does that enough, then eventually one will become practiced enough with it that even one’s first passes will look pretty shiny. A skilled artist’s ten-minute sketches are likely to look better than the best art I know how to make even given hours of time-investment. But nonetheless those artists’ ten-minute sketches tend to be substantially inferior to what those same artists can do over the course of many hours of their own.)
I call this virtue execution, for lack of a better name. It’s not a virtue I see celebrated nearly as often as originality; but it’s an important one nonetheless, one worth celebrating.
I mean, before webcomics were a thing at all, I was reading Knights of the Dinner Table on paper in the comic book shop where I played Magic.
Written and set in Muncie, it joined Madison-based The Onion and Wisconsin-based John Kovalich as part of the ‘90s midwestern slacker vibe that tended to get overlooked behind Austin and Portland and largely merged into '10s Funko Pop & board games geek chic; it was kind of about the players, and while their party wasn’t illustrated it was about them playing so you’d follow the campaign, though in fairness turns of the campaigns mostly had “stakes” in terms of how they’d effect the group.
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