What We Make Work Is What We Want Working?

House of Eratosthenes comments:

I played a video game, which of course essentially means goofing off — using technology. Then I attended to some businessin’, again using technology. My irritation detonated while in the second of those two activities, during which time not only did seemingly everything in the world go wrong, but I experienced a pretty-much-constant confusion about states of things... 

I find this aggravating because, having mucked about somewhat with the intricacies of 3D rendering, I have an understanding of what’s going on at the “bleeding edge” and what an organization has to do to meet with these arcane concepts, for just the visual experience of playing the game. It involves considerable effort just to get everything coordinated. And yet this common pattern holds up, that if your effort has to do with goofing off, then everything works great.

I would argue that the main problem here is not focus, but complexity as measured by inputs.  A game has relatively few inputs.  The more complex the game (for example, World of Warcraft) and the more inputs are possible, the more difficult it is to handle those inputs properly.  When you exit a relatively controlled realm and enter into an environment where any number of inputs outside of your control can happen in arbitrary order, you're going to constantly run into edge cases.

Which doesn't make it any less frustrating.