The ongoing conversation between Greg Costikyan and Warren Specter is fascinating. What started as an impassioned diatribe against the direction of the game industry. Has turned into a wonderful statement on why "making do" is not enough.
A Specter is Haunting Gaming the orginal
A Specter is Haunting Gaming (Warren, that is) the reply
Specter vs. Spector the rebuttal
I couldn't agree with Costikyan more. I left my last job due to making do (among a variety of other reasons). When I first got there, they were excellent designers with good web sites. What they lacked was the proper understanding of the technology to push their sites up into the same category as the design work. ...They were moving in that direction, though. I got there and the work went faster. Soon every site we did the users liked, clients could update painlessly, and we could upgrade/expand upon easily. We had optimized the system and the tools for creating those sites realtively quickly and easily. But it wasn't perfect. The things we created were grounded firmly in that era of the web - what browsers supported (not much. these were the days of netscape 4 and ie5)... and what people expected (even less than the limited browser capability, due to the speed at which things were being done). There was plenty of room to grow. Instead we held on tightly to the few things we had that most folks hadn't taken the time to develop themselves (and are now common place). Maybe sneaking a small something in here and there. Trading something new for something easy.
That's all well and good. But I was bored. I love what I do. Not because I think I do it well or because it comes easy. I love it because there's so much room to do it better. The potential has no forceable limit, as long as people keep pushing. With out the pushing there's little creativity. Just duplication. With out creativity your not so much living life as watching one lived for you. It's all much too short to be content with purely spectating.