Organically Growing Content

Digging through my old GMSV e-mails that I haven't read yet, I found a link to this video of Will Wright talking about the exponential level of effort required for content generation. I've hit upon this point many a time, since it's kinda the mantra of the independant game developer: you can get around having a team of content artists & developers if you're smart enough. For example, user generated content (such as in Second Life) or procedurally generated content (such as the new Unreal engine) or a mixture of both (as in Spore).

Will talks about his latest work on Spore, and how being smart about content creation allows you to avoid the mega-teams required to create the next Morrowind. Note the applause in the video when Will suggests an alternative to nonlinear levels of effort required to build titles... I have a feeling there were a lot of one-person shows in the audience...