Overcoming struggles while maintaining a love for what you do
As I watch Grant furiously code away on Unity, a software engine used to create video games, his focus continues to intensify more and more as it is clear he is struggling with some chunk of code. He exerts a hefty sigh during any moment when it becomes apparent that whatever he was just working on is failing to process.
“It is all just part of the process: trial and error,” says Grant.
The game Grant is working on is, as he describes, “a competitive multiplayer seagull collectathon, which just means it is a game where players compete, as seagulls, to collect the most items on a beach.”
For Grant, his “recent work for this game has been creating a character selection screen. Before players start a game, they have to pick one of our four seagulls. After that, the game loads the seagull they chose as their avatar.”
Personally, ignorant may be the best word to describe my understanding of the coding process. My only real experience prior to this study was an AP Computer Science course in high school, which saying I simply “struggled” in it would be putting things lightly. I can recall during my personal struggles with coding losing sight on any creative projects we may have been working on due to my mind being so zeroed in on the computer science behind the project, and not the goal of the project itself. Recalling on my own experience with these frustrating situations, it begged a question for me to ask Grant: how do you maintain that creative drive which initially inspired you?
“I think it feels the same as struggling with anything; its hard” Grant said. “My group mates and I have worked really hard to make a game. So running into issues on the way can be frustrating, but so far we have been able to overcome all of the obstacles we were met with.”
“At first, my motivation was that it was for a class, and it looks good on a resume. The more we worked on it, though, the more it mattered to me. I want people to like this game as much as I have liked building it.”
Anand Pandian perfectly relates back to this concept in Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation, in his chapter on love. He points out how “There was, to be sure, a mild feeling of terror in all this…This love, too?…How easy is it to distinguish love from other ways of becoming overly entangled in some environment of overwhelming feeling?”
By saying this, Pandian is explaining that of course the creative process is difficult and full of trials to face and overcome, but this is all just another cog in the machine that makes the end product work, and is why its creators love making it. This is all because love cannot always be easy, especially when you are striving to create something. There will always be problems, like in Pandian’s example where he details the encounter with the snake, or whenever Unity freezes on Grant, putting a pause on his work.
As they say these struggles are not necessarily a bad thing, but just helps them realize and rationalize what love is in these circumstances.
