Why Doesn’t Development Hell Work?

More broadly, there seems to be relatively little correlation between the amount of time & effort lavished on a work and the resulting quality (the ‘equal-odds rule’²); as great as a film-maker as Stanley Kubrick was, looking into his working process as recounted by collaborators, it is hard to come away with any conviction that the endless churn of script revision and bizarre random fixations on changes that are reversed the next day yields any net gain rather than delay and expense. Instead of being refined to perfection, they are trapped, or outright degenerate in later revisions.

The Resource Curse

Why do creative works age like fine milk rather than fine wine? It is not for lack of time, or, often, for resources (especially the pet projects of auteurs). Indeed, ample resources may be something of a curse, allowing a zombie project to linger on long past where any objective third-party would have killed it. (Intellectual property is monopoly, and that means that no one could take away the Star Wars prequels from George Lucas and make a better one, or take away the sequels away from Disney, no matter how awful the owner’s version may be.)

Development Hell Is Not Universal

And it’s not intrinsic to creative work period, as we can contrast it with other areas like STEM. Everyone can name examples of development hell blighting fiction or games, but it’s much harder to name a scientific or technical or mathematical work which clearly suffered from a ‘development hell’; a software program might launch late and be beaten to a punch (Project Xanadu being an exception that prove the rule), and a mathematical proof might be unnecessarily delayed when it would have been adequate published beforehand (there are countless examples of interesting and publishable results in Gauss or Euler or Ramanujan’s notebooks, to give 3 famous examples of posthumous publications, which simply didn’t meet theirs, but others’, standards). A web browser or operating system given 5 years of development time may just barely be adequate; the same program after 10 years will be much better (modulo issues like bitrot/bitcreep). Likewise, if Andrew Wiles proves Fermat’s Last Theorem after a decade or two of hard solitary work on it, there will always be parts of it which could be presented more clearly, cleaned up, or extended to other problems if he had spent another decade or two on it (and indeed, other mathematicians had to do a lot of work on it, leading to unpleasant academic disputes); but we would be surprised if he did so and somehow completely bollixed a working proof.

But with a novel or a movie, if we hear that an author spent 5 years creating it, it seemed excellent, and then spent another 5 years revising it, and the end result was now rubbish, we would be disappointed but not actually surprised. Authors are routinely cautioned against over-revising works and knowing when to let good enough alone. In the Tao Teh Ching’s analogy, creating “is like cooking a small fish” (ie. if you poke it or move it much, the delicate meat will fall apart into mush).

Some reasons that come to mind:

1. Loss of novelty: many works are products of their time; what was interesting and exciting at the outset is long since obsolete a decade or two later.

   This can be cultural, or it can be technical. (Duke Nukem Forever is an example of this: because FPS computer games were advancing so rapidly in graphics, by the time one version would have finished development, it’d be graphically obsolete, so they would need to start over on a new engine, setting them back more years! The development of Shenmue—itself a perfect example of how too much funding & creative license can be a curse, with lavish spending leading to perversely inferior, rather than superior, results—likewise exhibited this as the ‘open environment’ that it provided was soon done better by other games who moved on rapidly while the Shenmue sequels languished.)

   • Particularly perversely, development hell may cause a loss of novelty by leakage: by the time something is finally shoved out the door, it may be that the novelty is gone because as people move on, taking ideas and inspirations with them into works that get released quicker. By the time the originator is formally published, everyone may have seen the imitations first! If Jodorowsky’s Dune were ever produced, it would look much less striking than the original in part because the production materials and sketches were so widely influential.

2. Loss of vision: ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. A strong consistent esthetic vision and purpose characterizes the best works; it cannot be a bunch of short films made by different people and rammed together to take up 90 minutes.

   The more time that passes, the harder it is to coordinate each involved person as they come and go, and every change makes it more of a patchwork. This can kill projects before they begin, as Hollywood is notorious for delays as everyone procrastinates, making starting projects like ‘herding katz’, if you will, but also kill them by not ending. The average of many good ideas may be a bad idea. After long enough, whatever was good about the original has been watered down or buried under a mountain of irrelevancies and mediocrities.

   • A loss of novelty may also induce the creator’s loss of vision.

     Too much time spent on a project blinds ones to its virtues and vices. One loses perspective or the ability to see it afresh; a ‘curse of expertise’ and the ‘illusion of transparency’ begin to set in, and the creative impulse degenerates into l’art pour l’art.

3. Loss of interest: closely related to the loss of vision is the need to ‘strike while the iron is hot’. A creative project thrives on a ferment of activity and interest from its creators, and the more collaborative it is, the more it depends on a little community.

   Films and games in particular are dependent on this: behind every auteur, there is a group of skilled collaborators freely playing with ideas and tricks and proposals, working 16-hours a day to make a vision a reality, with the auteur riding herd and selecting out the best. Many a perfect proposal has started off as an inside joke, or technical experiment, or random comment by a janitor, or a bug, or a ‘happy little accident’, only to take over and become the thing everyone remembers about it. When no one involved cares, when the leader takes every opportunity to go off to work on other projects, when people are punching the clock 9–5PM, the work may be professional, but it will never be perfect. Mere money and time cannot replace motivation or taste.

   For a creative work, it is vital to execute a surgical strike: get in and get out, before the energy and enthusiasm has expired, and one’s judgment becomes increasingly impaired.

4. Loss of opportunities: The opportunity cost of such projects is substantial. The cost of a zombie project occupying one’s time for a decade is not the financial budget, but the other projects which could have been done in the wasted time.

   A perfectionist dragging out a project for decades could at a more normal tempo have created several other works in the same timespan; even if, contrary to all the other problems, the project improved, it almost certainly didn’t improve enough. If a director could have filmed 5 other films in the same time as 1 delayed film, what are the odds that the 1 delayed film is better than each of the other 5, better than the best of those 5, or better than all 5 put together?

   The equal odds rule strongly suggests that this will rarely be the case.

5. Loss of feedback: or the ‘mushroom problem’ (being kept in the dark and fed horses—t).

   Great new things can’t be created by focus-testing the masses, as the masses just ‘want a faster horse’ if you ask them; but the whims of a single person is too idiosyncratic. Creators do not and cannot know what is good or what will unexpected appeal to other people; what succeeds often surprises the original creators most of all. (They are not necessarily pleased by this, as they feel something else was their greatest work which is why posterity should remember them.) Because of this, development hell may simply let a creator go off on a wild goose chase indefinitely.

   One of the key parts of a successful collaboration is getting feedback from a few good people with shared interests and tastes (often a “scene”); eg. George Lucas’s first Star Wars trilogy benefited enormously from a ‘scene’ of indie filmmakers, like his film-editor wife, or people critiquing his early scripts & improving his infamously clunky dialogue.

   These let a hypothesis or feeling be explored deeply, until a finished work produced; the final work can then be shown to the target audience, who may then discover what they never realized they wanted. Or, it will fail, and someone else, perhaps with better ideas, can take up the baton. Both are better outcomes than continuing to labor. Periodic feedback at all levels is important.

6. Confounding from selection effects: we shouldn’t forget that development hell may simply select for bad projects.

   The very fact of being in development hell suggests that something is not good enough to convince people to release it. People typically don’t sit on great things for no reason: they want feedback, fame, and fortune! If it’s hot s—t, they want to ship it!

   • Another way for development hell being a selection effect would be regression to the mean. Regression to the mean should never be neglected, and it seems like at least some of this may be just regression to the mean: as development hell is rarely possible with first works (who have no reputation nor money from earlier successes), if someone makes an extremely successful film and becomes overnight famous, their second film should be expected to be considerably worse. Thus, a second film entering development hell may simply reflect everyone’s awareness that it’s just not good yet, the bills being paid by the success of the first work, and development hell becomes a way of delaying the reckoning or hoping to pull it off.

Of these reasons, I think #5, loss of feedback, and #2, loss of vision, are the key ones leading to development hell being so much worse in creative fiction/arts than in more technical STEM-like areas.

Intellectual Rot Can Be Kept In Check By Reality

In STEM areas, while there are still problems where ‘too many cooks spoils the broth’ applies (leading to observations like the second-system effect), one is heavily constrained by Nature. When there are real world consequences, hard requirements, demanding users, or formal rigor, unproductive navel-gazing and architecture astronauting are less likely.

It is much harder to gradually degenerate when the problem itself continually provides feedback: changes to such a thing either do or do not work to a much greater extent than rewatching one’s edits to the rushes of a horror film for the one hundredth time clearly does or does not work. Whereas the more abstract a pursuit, the greater the danger of development hell yielding a bloated monstrosity, of interest only as a freak and failure; I am reminded of von Neumann’s warning about mathematics being particularly prone to this.³ As the feedback becomes increasingly delayed and the work unmoored from the world, the proxy measures like ‘taste’ increasingly risk going haywire.

Further, Nature tends to be inexhaustible: no problem is ever fully solved, no theory is ever truly complete, no proof ever perfectly expressed from God’s book. (There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than dreamt of in any “writers’ room”.) There is always something more to be said, some additional angle to follow up on. Creative premises, on the other hand, seem to easily ‘run out’; the fish, cooked for another hour, doesn’t get any tastier—just mushier.

If STEM-like areas are mostly fine as they are, how can fiction or artistic areas balance the need to explore unique visions with exploiting existing visions while avoiding development hell?

Explore Vs Exploit: Create Wildly, And Gradually Invest More

The metaphor I find attractive is that of ‘plazas and warrens’, which can perhaps be formalized as “super-amplifiers”: the ideal is a lot of small frugal niches in which a few like-minded creators can bounce ideas off each other, based on their own idiosyncratic attitudes and goals, who periodically feed into a smaller number of larger super-niches, which themselves feed into larger ones and so on, like a tree; many of these niches will be failures, producing uninteresting or ugly or even revolting works, but some will create promising new trends, which can percolate upwards into successively larger audiences, and eventually some will become universally available.

Many creative ecosystems naturally follow this pattern already: small in-person socially-connected groups which create and discard many works, feeding into larger groups of strangers such as festivals, eventually being picked up by big commercial entities to go global. In Hollywood, “nobody knows anything”, so one has to throw lots of things at the wall to see what sticks—and then feed the ones which do.

From this perspective, the problem of development hell is it violates the natural tree architecture: they are bulges of resources, where a node grows cancerously, all out of disproportion to its current (if not forecastable) success.

Too Much, Too Long, For Too Few: Redistribute!

The cure, then, is chemotherapy and surgery to excise and shrink the cancerous and pre-cancerous lesions.

Concrete ideas that come to mind: set limits in advance; increase FLOSS media and open development processes to enable more feedback, and also forks, or allow third parties to legally take over⁴; address imbalances in an ecosystem by encouraging more terminal nodes of small indie creators or subcultures… Development hell is not inevitable.

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