Regarding the Programming Succubus

In my usual stumbling around on teh intarwebs, I came across this post on "the Programming Succubus" in regards to experimental game design. It's an intriguing concept. Not being a game designer myself, the principles Benmergui lists aren't directly applicable, but I certainly empathize with the concept of succubi in project development. Personally, I have to deal with the incubi of sequential ordering and design.

Those pretty much sum up my problems with the Noel Heikkinen Project; I found I had to finish one thing before I went on to the next, and I had to do it all in order. The design for all nodes had to be established before I could write, and the writing had to be completed linearly, even though each node stands individually--linearity is not required. The design demon, requiring perfection, meant that I spent literally hours on the swirl motif before I could even move on to photograph selection. Hours which, coincidentally, I didn't have. By the time I got to the writing phase, I was under such a tight time constraint and so stressed out that I literally couldn't write anymore. And it's a problem I could have avoided, too; I had most of the text written out mentally months ago. I just couldn't write it until I saw what its layout would be.

Is this really a problem? Maybe only if you're also a victim of the incubus of chronic procrastination and are trying to do relatively in-depth work in a short period of time. I envy people with the internal organization to keep things on schedule. Even deadlines barely work for me anymore.