I beg to differ. It's unbiased people like Carmack who tend to think out of the box. I don't think we can state that he did invent the FPS genre, but at the very least he was one of the initial catalysts.
People who work in the field for a long time tend to have a certain bias towards a solution. Often these people are stuck in a local maxima. Outsiders can offer a new perspective that results in a breakthrough, usually by starting from first principles or looking at different side-tracks that used to lead to a dead end.
A great example is Musk's SpaceX: when he noticed how much he had to pay for a rocket engine, he went back to first principles and said: "I'll just build it myself". Combine that with the insight that a rocket should be able to land properly to make re-use a valid option, and it disrupts a whole field.
And once someone did it, others know it's possible and start achieving it as well.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Just think about George "Good Will Hunting" Dantzig [1] with the (in)famous "I assumed these were homework assignments, not unsolved math problems" [1] or Eliud Kipchoge running a marathon in under 2 hours.
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
>Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Just think about George "Good Will Hunting" Dantzig [1] with the (in)famous "I assumed these were homework assignments, not unsolved math problems" [1] or Eliud Kipchoge running a marathon in under 2 hours.
A pretty infamous example is Citizen Kane. Welles knew very little of traditional cinematography techniques by the time he got to the production of the movie, so his planned shots more or less fit his artistic vision rather than industry standards. Gregg Toland, his director of cinematography, was at that point a 12 year veteran of the industry and hated the bland factory-line output of movie composition of the period.
Welles more or less told Toland what he wanted to shoot and how, and Toland did his best to fit that artistic image. Welles was completely clueless that Toland was using innovate and never before seen techniques to film his shots, and Toland kept quiet because he was allowed to go wild with his vision :)
People who work in the field for a long time tend to have a certain bias towards a solution. Often these people are stuck in a local maxima. Outsiders can offer a new perspective that results in a breakthrough, usually by starting from first principles or looking at different side-tracks that used to lead to a dead end.
A great example is Musk's SpaceX: when he noticed how much he had to pay for a rocket engine, he went back to first principles and said: "I'll just build it myself". Combine that with the insight that a rocket should be able to land properly to make re-use a valid option, and it disrupts a whole field.
And once someone did it, others know it's possible and start achieving it as well.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Just think about George "Good Will Hunting" Dantzig [1] with the (in)famous "I assumed these were homework assignments, not unsolved math problems" [1] or Eliud Kipchoge running a marathon in under 2 hours.
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
- John Cage
High hopes!
[1] https://bigthink.com/high-culture/george-dantzig-real-will-h...