The pitfalls of experience

Ours is an industry that, even being very young, treasures experience. And it's not hard to understand why. An AAA game is a product that (hopefully) will be sold to millions of users, eager to find faults in your work. 
Usually your project will run from one to three years, from the beginning to the final shipped version with deadlines that most often than not, simply can't slip. In those years, you're going to face all kinds of engineering problems, from writing complicated technologies that have to work in realtime, to resolving intricate software and hardware problems, to managing team dynamics. And everything has to be done under ever changing requirements and designs.

If you add on top of that, that most of the times you're going to work in a framework that effectively discourages experimentation, with punishing iteration times and complicated, badly written legacy code that just works if you don't ever touch it, you will easily understand why expertise is such a valuable virtue.

You have one shot to accomplish anything. You have to do everything right, on time, on budget, and you have to compete in an aggressive worldwide market. Wonder why lately, games are more and more always the same? Why we tend to take no risks?

Experience works wonderfully in those conditions. Because most of the times you already know how to solve a given problem, you're an expert. And all the others, you can still see a reasonable solution. One you'll confident will work. You can quickly discard bad ideas, you understand if something is possible or not, and can estimate how much effort a given thing will take.

Experience is an effective noise filter, it filters out the average ideas other people usually have, and focus on the more productive and safe path. And it's exactly there, that things start going all wrong. You know that a given thing will work because you already made it work in the past, or because you worked on something similar, you can interpolate between things you've done and adapt them. 

You make great things possible, but totally discard the impossible ones. The impossible ideas, or even the wrong ideas, the unreasonable ideas, are the ones that geniuses have. Are the innovations, the change. Ironically, all game companies will have those words in their mission. But few do really know what that implies, and how you can encourage change. 
We've all seen impossible things being done. And then, when we were told the magic behind an idea, a technique, most of the times we see how trivial a given solution really is, if you dare to explore outside the limits of your experience.

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

This, from "Alice in wonderland", is a fundamental lesson for us to learn. The first time I realized its importance, was by looking at Crysis. One of the artists in my company used a tool (3dripper) to dump all the meshes, rendercalls and textures of a frame of the game. While looking at them, he found a texture that looked like ambient occlusion, but done dynamically, and showed it to us (programmers). 

I didn't know how that was possible, and before seeing it, I would not even have tried to do such a thing. But after I knew it was possible, it took me just a few days to come up with a shader, that then I found was really, really close to what they did. It used the depth buffer, and it did raytracing on it by sampling in steps, using a routine I adapted from relief mapping. All it took was to know it was possible.

Experience is not something that can be avoided. And it's something that indeed is useful. But as you become more and more experienced, make sure to always keep your mind open to new possibilities. 

Experiment. One good thing that helps, is always to be more curious than expert. Knowledge is noise, is made of ideas that you can mix together to create new things. Experience filters the noise. Keeping them at always in a good balance is fundamental.

Talk to outsiders. Make presentations, discuss with other people, juniors, artists, people that have a different view of the problem. Most of the times, their ideas won't directly help you, but they will shake your brain, force to have another look at the problem, give you that spark that can become a new solution. 
I've found myself often having new ideas, or finding better solution, by just presenting the work I've done. Most of the time, it's not even the discussion that helps, I have new ideas while I write the presentation, or while I explain it, even before we start debating about it.