Too many people confuse "lack of attention to detail" with "attending to detail you aren't paying attention to". You only have so much time, so much money, and so much material (or even so much understanding): you have to make decisions between a nearly infinite number of constraints.
Plants vs. Zombies has really really well balanced game play: many game designers, even of quite popular games, are winging the game play, while paying incredible attention to things like sprite animations.
I have personal experience at a game company where the atmosphere rendered on planets took weeks to perfect: implementing the behavior of light through atmosphere so accurately that if you flew so close to the planet that you crosses /into/ the atmosphere it was still correct. The game, mind you, wasn't the least bit fun.
I also know people (mostly designers, sadly) who agonize over the color choice of icons (or admire the work of specific products), but completely miss that on iOS panels aren't supposed to slide from the right over others, or that highlights are supposed to fade as you go back, not stay lit or fade after click.
As someone who cares a lot about the experience of using a console, Apple's Terminal app is the epitome of "not caring": just changing some defaults would makes it indirect more usable, and that's minutes of work. The fact that it fails to correctly handle certain common escape sequences, though, makes it nearly unusable.
Yet, people love Apple, and they claim "the attention to detail". These same people tend to go "oh, I didn't notice" when I point out such problems. There are tons of tiny things wrong all over the place, and you get "oh, I didn't notice"... and at the same time they are playing the "did you notice game" about other things, and winning (and they often do: Apple has such a large profit per user, and always have, that they can afford a lot of attention on otherwise inane things).
This article, sadly, plays into this same flaw. The child notices some things, but is going to be oblivious to others. People don't get worse at detail as they get older: they just focus on different things: they might focus on the amazing detail the author paid to nailing the feeling you have when you find out your father died, as opposed to the grammar.
Some people are also just different than others. I know someone who seriously watches movies and afterwards is talking about the buildings. It was a love story, but they paid no heed to that: the question of whether the architecture of the time and location was presented with accuracy is what they are focused on.
Developers care a lot about things like efficiency, stability, and security (with different balance depending on the person, sometimes lacking entire categories ;P). These are often the kinds of things you don't even notice unless they /don't/ work, and even then, most people will just get lucky.
People, though, then compare the product with carefully designed animation that has a common "corrupts your file" failure case with a carefully engineered one that "looks ugly" and claims the former has this property of attention to detail, and the latter somehow doesn't. :(
Go to a designer, or a film critic, or even a child, and they are not going to be saying "did you see how they actually were running nmap, from a real shell, in order to prove the enemy computers in The Matrix Reloaded?". That is what all the geeks I know paid attention to: every terminal
in every movie gets extreme scrutiny.
Even if the child wanted to pay attention to that, they can't: to even know what nmap is required a peculiar technical experience. With age comes an expanded set of things we understand, and an infinitely diverse set of different and very interesting things to care about. This is not a failure of age: at worst it is just a difference.
(This was typed on my iPhone at a party; I was thereby forced to pay less attention than I normally do to high-level editing, and I trusted the iPhone's spelling corrector more than I should: it sometimes corrects words to things that are ludicrous.)
Also, I think your analysis is spot on. Another way to look at this is that perfection often kills products—people stress so much over getting every single detail right that they never ship, or fail to execute on the overall vision due to overreaching.
In the Plants vs. Zombies example, there are actually 24 different zombies. If they needed to create different artwork and game rules for every zombie interaction with the plants, the project good quickly spin out of scope.
Perfectionists can generally find an angle to criticize any product.
One of the things that I do is help designer/UX folk understand developers better (and vice versa). There's a fascinating little exercise that I do that involves showing folk some screen mockups and getting people to write down the important details.
From the designers you get things like descriptions of the visual hierarchy, guesses as to what people want the user to do most/least, comments on why fonts were chosen, comments on the grid and vertical rhythm of the page. Questions about why some functionality is there, etc.
From the developers you get lots of comments on the what the features will be doing, pointers to edge cases that the UI doesn't handle, comments on the complexity of implementation, suggestions for features to be added, things that they personally prefer (as opposed to designer comments about what the user might prefer), etc.
They're all very detailed oriented - just different details. Getting both groups some idea and appreciation for the other folks details makes everybody playing nice together much simpler.
Came here to say pretty much this. Kids aren't stupid but they are not going to have the same things on their mind as dad. Dad's got a million things on his mind, and he's probably meta-observing the entire play session at the same time... he's not going to notice the arm sprite of a zombie in a plant. Now reframe this as a question: what the hell else is a little kid going to pay attention to other than what's in front of them right here, right now? That's part of what forms the beauty of childhood.
Plants vs. Zombies has really really well balanced game play: many game designers, even of quite popular games, are winging the game play, while paying incredible attention to things like sprite animations.
I have personal experience at a game company where the atmosphere rendered on planets took weeks to perfect: implementing the behavior of light through atmosphere so accurately that if you flew so close to the planet that you crosses /into/ the atmosphere it was still correct. The game, mind you, wasn't the least bit fun.
I also know people (mostly designers, sadly) who agonize over the color choice of icons (or admire the work of specific products), but completely miss that on iOS panels aren't supposed to slide from the right over others, or that highlights are supposed to fade as you go back, not stay lit or fade after click.
As someone who cares a lot about the experience of using a console, Apple's Terminal app is the epitome of "not caring": just changing some defaults would makes it indirect more usable, and that's minutes of work. The fact that it fails to correctly handle certain common escape sequences, though, makes it nearly unusable.
Yet, people love Apple, and they claim "the attention to detail". These same people tend to go "oh, I didn't notice" when I point out such problems. There are tons of tiny things wrong all over the place, and you get "oh, I didn't notice"... and at the same time they are playing the "did you notice game" about other things, and winning (and they often do: Apple has such a large profit per user, and always have, that they can afford a lot of attention on otherwise inane things).
This article, sadly, plays into this same flaw. The child notices some things, but is going to be oblivious to others. People don't get worse at detail as they get older: they just focus on different things: they might focus on the amazing detail the author paid to nailing the feeling you have when you find out your father died, as opposed to the grammar.
Some people are also just different than others. I know someone who seriously watches movies and afterwards is talking about the buildings. It was a love story, but they paid no heed to that: the question of whether the architecture of the time and location was presented with accuracy is what they are focused on.
Developers care a lot about things like efficiency, stability, and security (with different balance depending on the person, sometimes lacking entire categories ;P). These are often the kinds of things you don't even notice unless they /don't/ work, and even then, most people will just get lucky.
People, though, then compare the product with carefully designed animation that has a common "corrupts your file" failure case with a carefully engineered one that "looks ugly" and claims the former has this property of attention to detail, and the latter somehow doesn't. :(
Go to a designer, or a film critic, or even a child, and they are not going to be saying "did you see how they actually were running nmap, from a real shell, in order to prove the enemy computers in The Matrix Reloaded?". That is what all the geeks I know paid attention to: every terminal in every movie gets extreme scrutiny.
Even if the child wanted to pay attention to that, they can't: to even know what nmap is required a peculiar technical experience. With age comes an expanded set of things we understand, and an infinitely diverse set of different and very interesting things to care about. This is not a failure of age: at worst it is just a difference.
(This was typed on my iPhone at a party; I was thereby forced to pay less attention than I normally do to high-level editing, and I trusted the iPhone's spelling corrector more than I should: it sometimes corrects words to things that are ludicrous.)