Jamie Fristrom, who once upon a time did 'Manager In A Strange Land' as a column for Gamasutra, has published a new 'MIATS' column on his weblog, named 'Quality vs. Scope', and it's as perceptive as ever.

He explains: ""Scope" is a fancy project manager word for "Size." I don't know why I use it. I guess to look fancy. You've heard that expression: "Cheap, fast, or good: pick two." (Or, as the guys from Id put it at the last DICE: "Cheap, fast, or good: pick *one*.") Well, there's a variable missing from that equation. What we really should be saying, is: "Cheap, fast, good, or big: pick three." Or, better still: "Cheap, fast, good, or big: prioritize them and find a balance you're happy with.""

Fristrom also has some interesting musings on this general issue of working out "...when you're doing something that's going to improve quality, or if you're just making the game bigger at the expense of quality" - which is much trickier than it might seem!

He concludes: "If this all seems obvious, I have to ask - why does choosing size over quality seem so epidemic in our industry? Maybe it's the schedule - it's easy to write down an estimate for how long it will take to "Get Snowblower Mode In"; it's not so easy to estimate how long it will take to "Get framerate to 60" or "Smooth out player experience.""