We can use this aesthetic intolerance to construct a more genuine Prisoner’s Dilemma without inviting aliens or anything like that. Say X is a writer and Y is an illustrator, and they have very different preferences for how a certain scene should come across, so they’ve worked out a compromise.
As it happens, I do know of a real-world case of this kind of problem, where the parties involved chose… defection. From an interview with former anime studio Gainax president Toshio Okada:
Okada:NADIA was true chaos, good chaos and bad chaos! [LAUGHS] On NADIA, Anno didn’t direct the middle episodes, Shinji Higuchi did. And some episodes were directed in Korea—why, no one knows exactly. [LAUGHS] That’s real chaos, not good! What I mean to say is, controlled chaos—that’s good. Controlled chaos is where you’ve got all the staff in the same room, looking at each other. But on NADIA you had Higuchi saying, “Oh, I’ll surprise Anno”, hide, and change the screenplay! Screenplays and storyboards got changed when people went home, and the next morning, if no one could find the original, I authorized them to go ahead with the changes. No one can be a real director or a real scriptwriter in such a chaos situation. But on GUNBUSTER, that chaos was controlled, because we were all friends, and all working in the same place. But on NADIA, half our staff was Korean, living overseas. We never met them. No control.
This may have been responsible for the much-execrated ‘desert island episodes’ arc in Nadia.
As it happens, I do know of a real-world case of this kind of problem, where the parties involved chose… defection. From an interview with former anime studio Gainax president Toshio Okada:
This may have been responsible for the much-execrated ‘desert island episodes’ arc in Nadia.