feels like my gamedev superpower is “not getting frustrated easily by tasks”. when something goes wrong frustration is hardly ever what i feel. when it is, it’s pretty hard to push through and often i just don’t. but it’s rare
i always see someone hitting a concrete wall that for me (even if stumped) would feel like a speed bump, they get so frustrated they get angry or depressed and i’m like, geez, if i was that frustrated there’s no way i’d be able to solve this same day. and it’s just luck. i’m not pushing through where others give up, i’m just not experiencing the same thing. which is pure random brain shit i have no control over
which connects to my feelings about aptitude and productivity in general. like i don’t really think “laziness” exists, that’s just person A being mad something’s harder for person B to do/motivate for. when you’re like “i don’t know how you do it, that’s so hard” you’re often talking to someone for whom it was just less hard
this (the frustration thing) is probs most of why i’ve been able to get good at anything or ship anything or get so many different skills, because i do bounce off most shit as soon as it frustrates me at all, but i never see any dev advice about managing frustration or general emotional outlook, it’s all scattershot technical and managerial shit.
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
There is so much friction in the daily world of computers that it’s just infuriating. I don’t even think it’s just game dev. When I worked at Google they went out of their way in the developer and engineering workflow to try to make it all frictionless (that was then, this is now, and I think they’ve forced everyone internally on their incredibly shitty GCP platform that they also force onto external customers without learning any lessons about what made the old internal stuff good); even then, though, what I think is the most frictionless system I’ve ever used was still replete with annoyances. Also, people then don’t use the frictionless stuff and make their own jank. I recently used Borland Pascal 7.0 on DOS and was forced to the ground, weeping, from what they had taken from us.
Also, is this about Ryan leaving Epic? 😀
Haha no, hadn’t related it at all
Yeah, I saw a lot going through a game dev undergrad degree. It was… depressingly easy to see people who were going to drop out because they would be angry at the computer.
Pretty much the whole gig is rife with random meaningless nonsense, top to bottom. Every piece of software, every piece of process, every business decision, full of so much unpredictable nonsense, often of your own creation. Either you live with it or you burn out… really fast.
I think my “annoyance resistance” varies wildly depending on what type of problem it is and who’s involved. I can slog through a fairly thick bog of annoying Computer Shit that is bad just because it’s old tech and/or some hobby project that a person didn’t know how to do in the best way. The stuff that really gets me down is when I can feel a sort of organization-level malice at work that is trying to control how I use it. Or likewise if I’m on a team and there are people who clearly don’t understand or value my job yet get to determine how I do it. And of course there’s the classic “open source thing that is powerful but hard to use, and the little clubhouse of dipshits running it like it that way because it keeps the riffraff out” scenario.
Common thread is feeling the full psychological burden of a dysfunctional social system. That shit kills me because I can see it operating very clearly and know exactly what creates it and how devilishly hard it is to fix. Dysfunctional technical systems are so much easier to handle / fix / work around / walk away from.
And obviously burnout / the pandemic / mental health shit is a multiplier on how much energy it takes to deal with anything.
In a work setting almost my entire way of operating has gradually become about minimizing the harm that I do in this respect, thinking about what my collaborators are doing and need, how to work well together, how to communicate so that I’m not taking more of their energy than I’m giving back. I think if we as an industry followed this path to its conclusion the processes and technologies of game development would look almost unrecognizably different. But also it’s a curse to be able to see this level of reality operating all around you.
yeah 100% my feelings. i had a bit in the post that i guess i took out about, when i am super frustrated with something, at which point i’m at high risk of falling off it, it’s usually some bullshit i went in hating but have to do anyway like “supporting achievements”.
the interpersonal element you mention, people who don’t understand your job being in charge of how you do it, is a pretty impassable barrier to me, frustrating to the point of being soul-annihilating, something i have to spend time healing from even if the work environment itself is basically cordial, and it’s why i just quit a well-paying job doing stuff i in principle enjoy (at what feels like an idiot time to do so, but i gotta). i’m not at all sure that “not easily frustrated” is a better trait than “able to cope with constant frustration” but it’s what i’ve got
i feel like i’m valuable to hire only because of expertise i develop passively/automatically whenever i’m feeling creatively motivated, and being in a job like that i can feel the entire creative-motivation part of my brain falling away like a wet cake. it’s only sustainable if i stay in that job forever. which also makes it feel more on-purpose-oppressive than it probably is
whenever i get frustrated with a problem, i probably just need to eat or drink some water. getting up, walking around, and doing some stretches to get the blood pumping also helps. (a shower can have a similar effect)
sometimes a nap feels like the right play but it never makes things better—at best it forces me to have some distance from the problem but thats all. i find that i simply cannot sleep easily when i have a problem on my mind, so a nap is really just “lie down frustrated for a few hours,” and then i get more frustrated that im not actually getting sleep, so it just makes the problem worse.
more recently the problems i encounter dont evoke frustration, but rather… i just stare at the screen. i think its basically just executive dysfunction, because i know what i need to do but i just dont wanna. thats a different kind of wall to hit, and the best i can think to do is just close the editor and maybe force myself to do something else, and i’ll get some progress on that other thing and maybe that progress will make it easier to work on stuff another day.
then there are some things that are so frustrating and i am just so out of my element (like multiplayer/replication) that the best thing for me to do is just say “fuck it” and throw the whole project out.
yeah, it’s not frustration but there are plenty of times that i basically get on the computer and open the thing up and make some sort of start but basically am not functioning, and the earlier in the day i realise that and just stop trying the better. for me personally i usually don’t recover from a “this just isn’t happening” state same day and there’s nothing worse than sitting there all day trying to make it work anyway. at best i solve a 1 hour problem in 8 hours
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