Modern psychology makes games more fun.

This post is in reaction to Jenova Chen's recent article in the Communications of the ACM, titled Flow in games (and everything else).

Chen writes an interesting article about how the psychological concept of flow is relevant to modern video game design. The trick is essentially that a game must be sufficiently challenging to significantly captivate the player’s interest, but not too difficult to cause constant frustration. Any dedicated gamer would agree, getting into the “zone” is a highlight of the gaming experience.

While this may sound like common sense, it is useful to have descriptors and measurements for flow, especially when it comes to video game design. Who wouldn’t want a game that is more attuned to that “zone” of creativity and mental acuity we all find so enjoyable?

The concept of flow was introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s, and is now considered one of the fundamental building blocks of modern psychology. According to Wikipedia, “Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.”

According to Csikszentmihalyi there are 8 major component’s of flow:

• A challenging activity requiring skill;
• A merging of action and awareness;
• Clear goals;
• Direct, immediate feedback;
• Concentration on the task at hand;
• A sense of control;
• A loss of self-consciousness; and
• An altered sense of time.

Any good video game designer will attempt to touch on as many of these as possible. Chen provides charts suggesting that flow zones for different players will occur at different difficulty levels. Like the GREs, video games that encourage flow will adjust their difficulty levels according to the ability of the player. Some games take a deliberate approach to this – we’re all quite familiar with Halo’s Legendary difficulty setting, for example.

What Chen does not touch upon, and which may be interesting research in the future, is to analyze which kinds of experiences prove to be most fulfilling for different types of users. I am not certain what all the dimensions of measurement should be, but it seems that World of Warcraft could provide at least some basic insight.

World of Warcraft approaches flow in all the right ways, and this is, I believe, the primary reason it is such a popular game. The concept of leveling is not new to the RPG genre, but Warcraft provides just the right amount of difficulty at each level to make the experience rewarding, even if you’re soloing. It succeeds because it provides opportunities for players to engage the game on many different dimensions. If you’re interested in finances, you can play the Auction House; if you’re a team player, there are dungeons and raids aplenty; if you’re a strategic sniper, you can do that; if you’re into narrative and stories, just follow the quests; and the list goes on.

A game needn’t be as vast and multivariate as WoW to promote flow. Seemingly simple games like Checkers, Tetris, or Mario 3 can be just as engaging, though perhaps not to as wide an audience as Blizzard’s masterpiece. The simple “speed-up” of the falling blocks in Tetris was always enough to keep my interest piqued, and the anticipation of what’s just beyond the edge of the screen in Mario could be a great thrill.

For myself, appropriate anticipation of future events in a game is what is most exciting. When I am forced to analyze the current situation, imagine what the future scenarios might be like, and to prepare my character/team/army appropriately, I am most engaged in the process. In Warcraft, the options of what to equip when, whether to use my druid’s cat form or feral form when attacking an enemy, how to cast heals on my teammates appropriately so I don’t run out of mana and so that none of them die; all of these things are what I find most intriguing.

My personal flow also manifests itself in RTS games like Homeworld or Total Annihilation, where the build-up is just as important as the actual fight. Of course, the fight itself often requires as much awareness and pre-cognition (to borrow a term from Philip K. Dick) and is also enjoyable.

What do you find generates the most flow for you?

Hopefully understanding flow will help game designers to create even more engaging games in the future.