El Bastardo
Literary elitist
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Your attempted example is, no offense meant, a fallacy. A professionally-developed game would not be published after a week's worth of work. Maybe someone could throw together a small-time, independent, self-published work with a week's time, in which case the amount of time would be inconsequential in the grand scheme of analyzing the work, unless said amount of time is an inherent factor in its creation. For instance, was it a part of some competition, where all designers were given a week's worth of time to create a working game of some form? Then yes, development time can be, but does not necessarily need to be, included in analysis and judgment of the published work. But even then, it's just a comparison thing unless you get into heavier restrictions. And it's tied to genres, since you couldn't compare someone's attempt at a week-long RPG to someone's attempt at a week-long arcade-style 2D shooter.
Have you ever heard of that nanowrimo thingy? I think it has capital letters in there, but I can't remember where. The basic idea is you try to write a working novelistic something in a month's time, I believe it is. There is a finite time constraint. So one could compare and contrast between different writers. Length is an obvious one, but that can be misconstrued: one person finished with a short piece, one person failed to finish a long piece. Genre limitations exist here, too: despite a similar time constraint for all parties, one person writes a character-centric drama and one person writes a plot-driven Sword & Sorcery story with nary a care for character development. Once at this point, the time constraint doesn't matter. If someone had to choose which was "better," it should come to the weight of the words.
Past that, where time is variable - in the case of supposed rush-jobs or delays - the critic, the analyst, whatever one might want to term the person judging the work, cannot, again, account for anything. There is no evidence. There is no proof. George R. R. Martin has finished his fifth A Song of Ice and Fire book this year, after ~6 years, I believe. Without a doubt, the book cannot live up to the subjective hype regarding the book by his fanbase. Does that mean the published work will be bad? No. Does that mean the published work will be as good as his previous works? No. But if we try to factor time, a delay of that amount of time indicates that it should be the best thing ever in the history of ever, because he's had so much time to work on it so there should be no flaws, blah blah blah. But it doesn't work like that, and delays are not additive, not multiplicative, not quantifiable*. Vice-versa, neither are cuts and "rush-jobs." Nobody, except maybe a head honcho of the development team or developer him/herself, can definitively state what would have been in the game if they'd had more time. And even if a definitive statement does come out, nobody can account for how well or how poorly it would have been implemented in the game. As such, these factors cannot enter into any literary or artistic analysis of the final product.
(*, above: I stated in an earlier post I might be interested in delays, just to see how the game is, with the idea being that it might be interesting to look at if the game is still bad. This extends to anything. While there's potentially less subjective excuse to have a bad -something- after a delay, it still doesn't change whether that something is good or bad. Similarly, while there might be potentially more subjective excuse to have a bad something when time has been cut, it still doesn't change whether that something is good or bad.)
The best example I can give is the majority of work Roger Ebert has done as a film critic. Sometimes he's snarky, especially lately, but his best work has always been one that follows strict criteria. Does the director know what he's doing? Are the actors talented in their roles? Stuff like that. How long the screenplay was sitting around, how long the director worked on the project, how many problems might have been on the set - none of that factors into it. The movie as seen is the end result, and so is what must be judged.
Have you ever heard of that nanowrimo thingy? I think it has capital letters in there, but I can't remember where. The basic idea is you try to write a working novelistic something in a month's time, I believe it is. There is a finite time constraint. So one could compare and contrast between different writers. Length is an obvious one, but that can be misconstrued: one person finished with a short piece, one person failed to finish a long piece. Genre limitations exist here, too: despite a similar time constraint for all parties, one person writes a character-centric drama and one person writes a plot-driven Sword & Sorcery story with nary a care for character development. Once at this point, the time constraint doesn't matter. If someone had to choose which was "better," it should come to the weight of the words.
Past that, where time is variable - in the case of supposed rush-jobs or delays - the critic, the analyst, whatever one might want to term the person judging the work, cannot, again, account for anything. There is no evidence. There is no proof. George R. R. Martin has finished his fifth A Song of Ice and Fire book this year, after ~6 years, I believe. Without a doubt, the book cannot live up to the subjective hype regarding the book by his fanbase. Does that mean the published work will be bad? No. Does that mean the published work will be as good as his previous works? No. But if we try to factor time, a delay of that amount of time indicates that it should be the best thing ever in the history of ever, because he's had so much time to work on it so there should be no flaws, blah blah blah. But it doesn't work like that, and delays are not additive, not multiplicative, not quantifiable*. Vice-versa, neither are cuts and "rush-jobs." Nobody, except maybe a head honcho of the development team or developer him/herself, can definitively state what would have been in the game if they'd had more time. And even if a definitive statement does come out, nobody can account for how well or how poorly it would have been implemented in the game. As such, these factors cannot enter into any literary or artistic analysis of the final product.
(*, above: I stated in an earlier post I might be interested in delays, just to see how the game is, with the idea being that it might be interesting to look at if the game is still bad. This extends to anything. While there's potentially less subjective excuse to have a bad -something- after a delay, it still doesn't change whether that something is good or bad. Similarly, while there might be potentially more subjective excuse to have a bad something when time has been cut, it still doesn't change whether that something is good or bad.)
The best example I can give is the majority of work Roger Ebert has done as a film critic. Sometimes he's snarky, especially lately, but his best work has always been one that follows strict criteria. Does the director know what he's doing? Are the actors talented in their roles? Stuff like that. How long the screenplay was sitting around, how long the director worked on the project, how many problems might have been on the set - none of that factors into it. The movie as seen is the end result, and so is what must be judged.
, X-Men comics are the bulk of what I purchase on a month-to-month basis (though starting to get edged out by independents). Batman and the X-Men were my first superhero loves.
