Never saying Gran Turismo is, but what are works that are actually perfect due to perfectionism?
It's not that the work should be perfect from some objective perspective, because that's impossible. It's about what the author thinks.
Kubrik is the usual example, he'd go to extraordinary lengths to get a very specific result. He would not stop until he got the scene that he wanted. There's still some debate about whether he was actually a perfectionist or just a very smart director who knew exactly how to get what he wanted, but it's sort of swings and roundabouts. Pretty much whatever you see in his movies, it's there because he wanted it to be there and wanted it exactly like that.
It's more like a possible (if not likely) result of perfectionism. Perfectionism can deliver good products if the perfectionist is under certain supervision or bound by certain limitations. With the abilities of modern consoles and Kaz being the vice-president of SIE, PD has a lot of freedom which is generally not good for perfectionists. The thing about making something perfect is that you cannot make something perfect. There are always things to add, change, or improve. Especially when it comes to making software, though I'm more familiar with the results of perfectionism in music or literature (both good and bad, it turns out I'm a fan of many perfectionists). Today I learned it's called 'feature creep'
Feature creep is not the same as perfectionism, or even related. Feature creep is defeated by perfectionists who understand their art, as they know that they cannot do
everything to the standard they would like so they limit themselves to what they can achieve. A perfectionist is much more invested in not being overwhelmed by additional work than your normal creator, they feel much worse when something cannot be completed to their internal measure of quality. A perfectionist is definitely not an ADHD squirrel that bounces from topic to topic, starting all of them and finishing none.
That strikes me as the difference - the perfectionist rejects anything that is not of the highest quality, the non-perfectionist is willing to make compromise on things that are of substandard quality but overall improve the product.
True feature creep is caused by greed. Feature creep is a result of undisciplined designers who don't consider the actual work involved in implementing features and think that they can add in additional elements after the initial design phase at zero or trivially low cost to the project, hence my reference to poor planning and attention span. It's not really anything to do with perfectionism. It's just bad project management, and it can happen to anyone.
You may be thinking of extended development, where production goes on and on until the perfectionist designer achieves their desired level of quality. But that's not feature creep because additional elements aren't being added as time goes on, it's the perfectionist simply refusing to release until their original vision is met. See Kubrik above, notorious for shooting scenes over and over and over and over well beyond the point where most directors would have called it good enough. It's summed up succinctly by the phrase "it'll take as long as it takes". This
is much more of a perfectionist trait, as the non-perfectionist is far less emotionally invested in the quality of the product and so is much more likely to say "good enough" and ship it.
One could see delays as evidence of perfectionism, but delays are so common in modern game production that it's almost more surprising not to see them and it's easily explained by companies not wanting to pull a Cyberpunk.
