I work in digital creative development with lofty goals of shifting towards television eventually down the line. Something I've noticed more and more as of late when submitting ideas to studios is that you have to sign an agreement which basically says, "just because you send us your idea, we turn it down, but then we later produce something that seemed similar to your idea, does NOT mean we stole your idea." It practically suggests that in an age where so many people are producing ideas, attempting to submit them for development and so on, that it's near impossible for you to create a truly original idea. It's touched on in this article: ideas are a dime a dozen, and while anyone can say, "I came up with something JUST like that!", that's far different from "I saw that idea through from conception to completion."
I pretty much adhere by that quote. Being an "idea-person" is easy and not looked for in creative jobs. I'll sometimes see a good idea for an app, TV show, or book and think "I could have/have come up with something like that." But I didn't capitalize on that idea, so I can't get angry or discredit whoever actually executed the idea. The world is huge, and the internet is even bigger. Action is more important than ever in the creative space in this day and age.
Many people that I know (myself included) in my game development club try to avoid "idea-people". Basically they are dead-weight. There to take credit and not contribute. Some of us even go as far as excluding designers and producers (needed in the field, but not needed for hobbyists) because they pretty much do nothing in the club. So yea, "idea people" are basically everyone. There's no dedicated "idea guys" on the team. Just people who work and contribute ideas.
I think that's a big hurdle to jump over. Even in the game development field, designers and producers know how to code or do art to some degree. It's great to have those ideas, but going out and applying those ideas makes you much more talented in my eyes.
Yea. But in the field, producers and designers are much more useful as well. Producers are needed for large teams (not small). Larger the team, better the producer needs to be. Small teams don't really need a producer since they can communicate amongst themselves fine. But on a 100+ person team, a producer is needed so everything goes smoothly. Designers are only needed when the game demands it. Smaller games, it's easy to have a programmer/qa/designer mix of a person. But those three get separated as the game becomes larger and more complex. But everyone on the team needs to know at least a general understanding of what the others do. So they know what's going on and how to communicate.
That's actually a really good point that I didn't think of. I'm imagining how huge the development team for Grand Theft Auto V is -- pretty sure the credits are half an hour long. Everyone needs to have that collective vision which is delegated by the producer. Otherwise concepts won't be cohesive.
That's what the producers and designers are for :P. Designers usually work in a team to come up with a comprehensive gameplay, missions, etc. Then they pass those off to the producer who makes sure everyone is working correctly and efficiently. Larger games are insane when it comes to that. Which is why they are so needed. But in, say, a team of 5 people, it's easy to just unanimously agree what needs to be done.
This is something a family friend helped me to realize. Furthermore, he helped me to realize that I had already done that myself. While it's a generalist statement, the idea behind it is powerful. This is in fact, the way our family friend runs his business. In principle, it's fairly simple. He runs workshops based around certain subjects and lets the group's conversations and interactions decide how the subject matter is revealed within a loose framework. The whole thing works because of his experience and his execution and of course someone could copy the format, but they wouldn't be stealing his product because the product in his case, is generated by a given group of people interacting with each other and him through the filter of their collective experiences and perceptions. Edit: I really think that this fits in well with the presentation theadvancedapes posted earlier.You can't steal execution
I struggle with this a lot too. It seems whenever I come up with an idea, it seems so unoriginal and I always think "Oh that's been done before." and it really bogs me down. But I've come to learn to counter that mentality with "But it hasn't been done your way before."
It is a weird twist from the art world where I end up thinking that short term derivative works are stealing. Medium term derivative works are homages. And long term derivative works are -isms. But once the "means to an end" ... the money ... plays in then any derivative works becomes "stealing from me/ borrowing from you." NDAs are single-nucleotide polymorphism in the DNA of culture. Both literally and figuratively oddly enough.