There are a lot of similarities between the Director's challenge and that of the GCA.
1) You are at the mercy of the quality of your script/site. If you have a great piece of material to work with, you can do something quite special.
If not, you really have to draw upon all of your skills and your whole bag of tricks to overcome the material's shortcomings, and give the audience/player a worthwhile ride.
2) You have to select the appropriate tools to tell the story. What do you do to create tension, to exhilarate, to make one cry, to make one want a repeat performance. To set the mood, to vary the pace, to again take people on a ride.
3) You have to have a significant sensibility to design. You must map out the journey for the audience/player to take. You must locate the most appropriate esthetic for your material. Does it want to break new ground, does it want to be a throwback to another time, does it want to incorporate ideas from the past or boldly go where no man has gone before?
4) Each scene is the equivalent of a new hole. There is a beginning, a middle and an end to each. They should propel you into the next scene/hole. There are some that are more important than others, but they all have a role in the finished product. There should be no boring
scenes or holes in the journey.
5) Your work will last longer than you will.
Finally, it is your ass that is on the line. There may be hundreds of people who work on the project, but in the end you stand alone in the success or failure, and it has a huge impact on what your next project is or if you even are to be trusted again with someone else's money to come up with a successful creation.
Altman was a pioneer, a maverick. He was successful and a failure, but never boring. And he did it his way and never left anything in the bag. May he rest in peace.