When you design by consensus, you end up with this. When a single person is responsible for most of the major decisions on a project, the project will either spectacularly fail or will be amazing, depending on the genius of the person. But when you take the same genius, and force him to change his concept to bring in elements of more traditional people, you will tend to create a normal product.
Designing by consensus will always lead to an average product. The only way to create a blow-out success is if a single person handles the design part of things.
No major artwork was created by a comittee. None of the great books were written by a newsroom team. Engineering has to go the same way. Let people use their imaginations without being constrained by the opinions of tens of other people.
Actually, William "The Princess Bride" Goldman argues in his famous book about screenwriting (Adventures in the Screen Trade) that all movies are created by committee. He lists a bunch of people that need to do their jobs correctly in order to make a movie any good, starting (obviously) with the screenwriter and the director but also including: The cinematographer, the casting director, the designers and costumers, the film editor, and the composer. To say nothing of the producers, who need to come up with sufficient money or the film doesn't get made.
Goldman makes this point in the course of lampooning the "auteur" theory of criticism, in which entire films are attributed to the genius of one person -- usually the director. It's because of those auteur theorists that we tend to speak of "Hitchcock's" North by Northwest, ignoring the fact that a lot of that film's genius was contributed by Cary Grant, to say nothing of Bernard Herrmann.
A great example is Star Wars, which as we all know sprang from the brow of George Lucas. Except, of course, for the parts that were actually created by Ben Burtt (sound designer), John Dykstra (FX supervisor), Rick Baker (makeup artist), Ralph McQuarrie (production illustrator), John Williams (composer), and Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas (film editors). And that's just scratching the surface.
A game on the scale of Spore is also, inevitably, created by committee. The question is whether you can keep the committee on the same page. It sounds like Spore's team had some struggles, which had to be mediated, and which were ultimately resolved in a way that isn't quite to my taste. Which is not to say that the enterprise is a failure. It's sold a lot of copies, and no doubt many people are pleased with it. I played with the creature creator, and it was very cute.
I upvoted the comment, and definitively agree in general, but of course there's no rule without its exceptions. Half-life for example was very much designed by comittee, and we all know how that went ;)
Designing by consensus will always lead to an average product. The only way to create a blow-out success is if a single person handles the design part of things.
No major artwork was created by a comittee. None of the great books were written by a newsroom team. Engineering has to go the same way. Let people use their imaginations without being constrained by the opinions of tens of other people.