Frustration in a New Key

I want to write about frustration (again) this week, but in a slightly different key. For the most part, I’ve been writing about coding as a frustrating experience, and I’m now beginning to locate that frustration in register that is unpleasant, fictive, antagonistic. I don’t think those attributes describe all kinds of frustration. I think there are other kinds of frustration, in other words, and I think I experienced some of that this weekend.

Perhaps I’m missing some clear, descriptive emotion as I write my way through the retelling of the frustration I had this past weekend, and if so it will sprout much later on or someone will tell me. Until then, I want to describe my experience this past week as a kind of generative frustration (in contrast to a demoralizing frustration, which I started off the first few weeks with). And my experiences this past week come at a serendipitous moment in our discussion this week of gaming. The frustration I felt this week drove me. It had an addictive quality. I was captured, drawn in, ensnared by the challenge and frustration of building notPacman. I remember as a kid playing Mega Man, Metroid, Myst, Metal Gear or any other number of games and not being able to get through a stage, challenge, or boss. I would die over and over and over again, sometimes throwing the controller across the room, but always returning to try again. Failure after failure after failure, and I came back for more. Sure I was frustrated, but I was also entertained, challenged, determined, canny, focused, addicted, driven, and more.

That’s what I felt this past week working through the task of putting pieces together in notPacman. I hesitate to draw to clear an analogy to addiction, but I seriously found myself neglecting other parts of my life trying to get the pieces together. When I was drawn into the workflow of coding, the frustration of things not working was, on balance, much more motivating than it was demoralizing. Many of us have discussed frustration in relation to coding, but this afternoon, as a Aden, Kelly, Diana and I were working through bugs in the game, I think I saw some of this in Diana, too. Diana, tell me if I’m wrong, but I thought I saw, as you were trying to get that ball to move to the keys on the keyboard, a sort of fierce determination, fed in part by frustration, that drove you to figuring that bloody code out. Diana, let me ask a question I’ve been working through myself, was it pleasurable?