The Successive Creator's Privilege

The sentence — this is the creator's privilege — was first mentiond by one of my colleagues during the presentation stage of the second hackathon held by iftech (opens in a new tab). This sentence, in my opinion, repersents the kernel of the engineering culture, and influences me a lot.

The creator's privilege means that creator has the full control of their creations, and if there are controversial decisions to be made, the creator can take charge of deciding. For example, the creator could repudiate to implement an unattractive feature in their own creation despite of the potential profit. Noticing that privilege is not an equivalent of ego, because decisions are made based on rationality rather than just personal will.

I believed this view, and the engineering culture beneath, for many years. And as time goes by, here come some new prespectives. Those points are all related with continuity, and that's why I add the word 'successive' to the original sentence.

The first opinion is that not every creator can use the privilege correctly. Adept continuous creators have the ablitiy to make right decisions hence can cope with the privilege. In contrast, creators with little experience do not. Given the discrimination between difficulties of one-time creation and them of successive development, it is impractical for novices to make right decisions. Based on the circumstance, novices who try to make something different may just make things worse. For example, some developers add easter egg codes in their application in order to entertain themselves, despite the fact that it is not attractive to others. This is the abuse of privilege. Imagine that people who screw things up and then say it is the creator's privilege, it cannot be more rediculous.

The second prespective is that successive creators can resonate with their audience via the privilege, especially creators of serial works, while other creators can hardly achieve. Take my recent experience as an example, I found the rythem of two songs from two games resemble each other, and then found interconnection between them: Voyage of Promise (opens in a new tab) from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and Demon Castle Pinnacle(悪魔城最上階) (opens in a new tab) from Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (悪魔城ドラキュラ 蒼月の十字架). If you a fan of Castlevania series, you must know the relationship between this series and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night : the latter is considered a spiritual successor to the former, and the latter's development was led by the same producer 五十嵐 孝司 (opens in a new tab) and many other people from original team, and both of the songs mentiond early was composed by one same composer 山根ミチル (opens in a new tab). The game team met a multitude of obstacles and overcame them, and finally shipped the game as they promised. In this context, the musician composes a song that has similar rythem with their previous work, and name the song 'Voyage of Promise'. I think this can be called the best example of the creator's privilege: anybody who has played their previous work can readily resonate with the creator due to the alike rythem, and this man can easily understand the reason why the song is called 'Voyage of Promise' — because it is the voyage promised by the game team.

In conclusion, the right descisons made by creator, the resonation between creator and audience, and the interconnection between their work, are all based on continuous creations, that's the reason why I'd like to specify the privilege, as the successive creator's privilege.