Imagine you're brought on as an artist onto a project and are told by someone, who doesn't really know what they want, to make the art for their game.
I think you misunderstood. I'm saying if you're not paying them, you have to give them a large influence over the design of the game.
If you're actually getting paid, naturally you want to know exactly what the client wants (because at that point they're a client) so you don't have to redo anything.
I think that goes for any contractor.
Let's say, for example, you're making a JRPG.
Turn your Volunteer artists loose making monster concepts, and also let them make up the story and some of the abilities of those monsters, where they show up, etc.
It's a juggling act to delicately balance and mitigate bad ideas which will inevitably come along with the good.
In a volunteer project, the project manager and often lead designer's work is very different, and runs more along the lines of disaster control, and trying to shoehorn all of the ridiculous nonsense people come up with into something that kind of works together.
You have to make everybody feel like they're making big important contributions to the design of the game, and not just coming up with an art style (which, trust me, is not enough to keep your artists happy if you're not paying them: it's like telling programmers they can comment their code however they want, but to do this and that for free; people have certain passions, and you have to play to those to keep them motivated).
If you have money to pay, then by all means, that's always the best.
One thing you do allude to, which is critical, is "stakeholder buy-in". You don't need to give everyone on the team creative control / input on the game design.
Unfortunately, you usually do if you're not paying them.
Think of it this way:
Everybody thinks their own ideas are awesome and will make millions of dollars (no matter how much they actually suck). People will only risk a revenue share later if they're under the delusion that their own grand ideas are the force that's going to push the project to financial success.
Whether those grand ideas are about talking swords that transform into dinosaurs, or a race of cat people who have three sets of ears.
It's a functional necessity in a volunteer team to humor whatever you get.
Chances are actually really good that most people are actually not very good game designers. It's actually *really hard* to do correctly. A programmer is an expert at writing code. An artist is an expert at art. A producer is supposed to be an expert at project management. A writer is an expert at writing. Game designers are experts at building game systems. You wouldn't want your artist writing code, or your programmer creating art, so why would you have either of them doing game design? That's not their specialty, and not the only way they have creative input into the production of a game.
Absolutely true.
You wouldn't necessarily want them to. Unless you want them to actually get any work done at all without paying them. ;)
If you've run a volunteer team, or worked on one, before you start to understand the nearly impossible situation the project lead ends up in.
Like I said, if you have money to spend, it's better to just contract people, in which case you're right that they'll want clear direction.
Unless you meet a rare gem who has really good ideas.
Yes, this is bad. What you describe is exactly what you want to avoid in a serious project.
Absolutely, which is something that makes commercially viable free/volunteer projects nearly impossible. Successful teams are rare and neigh mythical creatures, with a strong shared passion and usually years of friendship and working together in person.
Mismatched graphics and buggy execution is something I expect from hobby indie projects: it's not the end of the world to just get something done and get the experience you need from it.
Once things are just *done* you can always go back and clean things up, and invest in new art, etc. The point is to get things done at that stage of the game.
