The July issue of Wired ran an interesting article titled “What Kind of Genius Are You?“. The article explored the theory that there are two distinct types of creativity: quick and dramatic, or careful and quiet.

The quick and dramatic creators are dubbed conceptualists, and create their best work early on in their career and then never quite match up to their early genius. The careful and quiet bunch are the experimenters, toiling away over years, perfecting technique, learning new tricks, etc. The article, covering the work of an economist exploring these theories in relation to painters/art, graphs this scale of artist age against art valuations.

(More details are provided in last year’s book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.)

What’s most interesting is the author’s suggestion that these theories apply to all artistic and creative endeavors. Wouldn’t it be fun to similarly graph the age/success of some of the industries luminaries. Perhaps Romero would fall into the conceptualist camp. Will Wright an experimenter?

My personal sense is that more developers would fall into the experimenter category. In part, this would be due to the iterative nature of game development, but more so due to the cumbersome nature of creating mainstream games (ie, it is kinda hard to be a conceptualist at a young age given the tools/cost/manpower required to create a game and the unlikelihood that a company would give you the control/funds to do so).

Now, match that up with the IGDA’s demographics data from last fall showing how young we are as an industry (~31 is the average age) and the finding that the average career length is only 5.4 years.

Can we say that we are really losing developers before they’ve had a chance to do their best work? If, in fact, developers tend to be more of the experimenter type of creator, what would the industry look like if the average career length was 10 years? 15 years?