Flow

[Merus]

So I want to talk about flow.

 

Flow's this concept from psychological studies that suggests there's an optimal balance between the challenge of a task, and the ability of a person to perform it. You can imagine game designers' ears perking up at this point. If challenge outstrips ability, a person feels frustration; if their ability outstrips the challenge, they feel boredom. If they stay in that sweet spot for long enough, they start to feel a sense of flow, a euphoria of action where they lose themselves in the task.

 

Flow seems to be a big thing in game design theory - there's a reason why a lot of games these days deliberately dial down the challenge to try and keep flow going. What's interesting, though, are the games that deliberately set out avoid creating a sense of flow; Dark Souls is constantly challenging; it's a game where players are constantly feeling frustration. Gone Home is a game with very little challenge; there's not much to the task of moving around the house, and most of the game's entertainment value comes from the story than from the act of play.

 

Is flow a worthwhile concept? Are games that deliberately set out to frustrate or bore their players in the pursuit of some other aesthetic worse games for it? How much should the task matter to a game?

[clyde]

One thing I really like about Chime is that the game appears to be one thing to novices and then transforms as you increase in skill. The first time I played, I felt that I was basically cheating at Tetris. You can rotate and place blocks any where on the grid, slightly altering the music when doing so. It appeared to be more of a toy than a game because it lacked any challenge. I've shown the game to people that don't play many games and they see it in a similar way.

But after a few games, a typical reaction is to try and fill the entire grid before the timer runs out. This doesn't appear to be difficult as blocks can overlap former matches and there is plenty of time to do this. I've seen both novice-gamers and obsessives have this same reaction; but the novices look at the challenge as approachable and the obsessives see it as a simple obstacle on their way to an actual challenge.

Once the grid is filled, there is an additional grid to be filled afterward and the transition between the two grids goes to effort to point out that you have earned more time, but noticably less than you had in the first level. This is standard fare for us, but a comfortable familiarity and maintained approachability for new players. But when that second level loads, Something caught my eye; the score multiplier (which I hadn't given any attention to) rolled over into the second level. Even though this is an explicit design-choice, the greedy, fraudulent portion of my mind experienced heightened activity to what I saw as a potential exploit. Eventually you run out of time and then you start over with your new knowledge.

If after that first match, the player comes close to finishing a second or third grid, they may make it their goal to complete that near-achievement. For me, I decided to try and get the highest multiplier possible so it would carry over to the next grid and I would be able to clean up. This is where the true challenge of Chime reveals itself. To me, the brilliance of the design is to have the challenge available, but not promote it explicitly. If they had done so, the personal bests of novices would feel inadequate. Instead, once the challenging portion of the game is discovered, knowledge of it triples your score, skill in it increases your score by multitudes. I see Chime as a game that encourages flow for a variety of skill levels and game-literacies.

[Bjorn]

Even games with a brutal difficulty curve (Spelunky, the Souls games, etc) still tap into the idea of flow for me, it's just not as accessible as most games.  It's so much more satisfying for those games when you hit a skill level that you are capable of maintaining a solid run without dying. 

[SecretAsianMan]

The intentionally difficult games still strive for that sense of flow, they just approach it from a different angle.  Rather than a game that comes down to the players level and slowly ramps up the challenge, they require the player to ramp up their ability to the game's level.  You might hit the flow less often but it's likely to be a better feeling when you do.  Both have a sweet spot, but one of them tries to come to you while the other makes you go to it.

 

On the opposite end of the scale, I think it depends on what the developer is trying to achieve.  Obviously the Fullbright Company wasn't trying to make a mechanically challenging game, possibly because it would have interfered with the narrative and atmosphere.  I would argue that Gone Home still has a sense of flow because I don't think flow only comes from overcoming a challenge.  If the point is to lose yourself in the task, then Gone Home absolutely did that for me even though the task was simple to accomplish.  In fact giving me challenges like puzzles or some bizarre form of combat would probably have disrupted the flow I did get.