I read the thesis Jenova Chen wrote about Flow in games. Some interesting points and my opinion:
Elements of Flow
According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research the phenomenology of Flow has eight major components.
1. A challenge activity that requires skills
2. The merging of action and awareness
3. Clear goals
4. Direct feedback
5. Concentration on the task at hand
6. The sense of control
7. The loss of self-consciousness
8. The transformation of time
Not all of these components are needed for flow to be experienced. [Csikszentmihalyi 1990]
Once we have digested the above components and revisited them with a game design perspective, here are the three core elements a video game must have in order to evoke Flow experience.
1. As a premise, the game is intrinsically rewarding, and the player is up to play the game.
2. The game offers right amount of challenges to match with the player’s ability, which allows him/her to delve deeply into the game.
3. The player needs to feel a sense of personal control over the game activity.
For play design this might be:
1. As a premise, the toy has a playful interaction that is both invite as reward the player, and the player is up to play with the toy.
2. Challenge play: The toy offers a right amount of challenge to match with the player’s ability, which allows him/her to delve deeply into the game.
3. Sensory play: The toy offers a right amount of sensory triggers which react directly on the player.
4. Construction play: The toy offers a right amount of movement.
5. Fantasy play: The toy offers the right amount of iconisation, realism and abstraction to create a good tension between fantasy and reality.
6. The player needs to feel a sense of personal control over the play activity.As a result, the game will make player lose track of time and self-consciousness.
To make a game that different people can enjoy, the game itself must retain these four elements, especially to adjust the challenge based on each player’s ability.
Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment
Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment, also known as DDA, is a fairly straightforward and ideal concept in the game design field. The difficulty of a game should change dynamically based on its player’s skill and performance.
Flow in games is really based on creating a certain difficulty that creates the right tension between Ability and Challenge.
In play challenge doesn't always need to be there. You can only base challenge play on this information. Sensory, Fantasy and Constructionplay don't have challenge in their play. But there is a sort of challenge, which you can find in the play itself. You challenge yourself to play with your senses, or to create something or to use your imagination. So the challenge is not in the play, but in bringing and keeping yourself in a certain state of mind. So when you want to create flow when you are claying, for instance, the challenge is in finding an interesting interaction with the clay you like to entertain yourself with and playing with the possibilities. Once you've found the right balance between using your abilities as a clayer and challenging yourself to do a certain interaction, you'll get in a flow.
For fantasyplay it's about finding the right balance between reality and fantasy, using your abilities to fantasize and challenge to use more or less reality in your own world or story.Design Flow in Games
Video games as a media can be reviewed as two essential components:
Game Content - The soul of a video game; a specific experience the game is designed to convey
Game System - The body of a video game; an interactive software that communicates Game Content to the players through visuals, audio and interactions
Expand the Flow Zone
The player may feel a certain part of the game experience is a little bit harder or easier than their expectation. But he can still tolerate and maintain his Flow experience inside the safe zone.
If the actual experience gets too far away from the Flow zone, the negative psychic entropy like anxiety and boredom will break player’s Flow experience.
Passive Flow Adjustment
Performance is objective while Flow is subjective. When a player is in the Flow of just jumping around in Super Mario Bro but not finishing any level, the DDA system will have trouble to sense that.
Analysis based on assumptions - Assumptions never work for mass audience. When a player enjoys performing a suicidal stunt in Grand Theft Auto, it would be ridiculous for a DDA system to assume that the player's skill is too poor because of the death count.
Active Flow Adjustment
Considering the core elements of Flow, most of the system-oriented DDA designs were over focused on one aspect, balancing between challenge and ability. However, they ignored the other important core element, to make player feel a sense of control over the game activity.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi often describes Flow as driving a small boat in parallel to the current. Being able to drive freely gifts a sense of control over micro action, and being carried by the current offers a sense of control over the macro activity, therefore evokes Flow.In traditional passive media, like the current, the sense of control comes from the sense of progression and positive feedback. [Adams 2002] In video games, not only can players gain control from the progression, they can also earn it through driving the boat, which is in fact making meaningful choices. So why don't we give the players choices in a video game and let them navigate their Flow experience?
Once a network of choices is applied, the Flow experience is very much customizable by the players. If they start feeling bored, they can choose to play harder, vice versa.
Embed Choices into Gameplay
Player-oriented DDA offers an active mechanic for players to control their in-game Flow experience. However, the implementation of these choices is not trivial.
In order to adjust Flow experiences dynamically and to reduce Flow noises, the choices have to appear in a relatively high frequency. These frequent choices might become potential interruptions for players who are in the Flow Zone.
The easy solution that might come to mind is to implement a monitor system to detect whether or not it is a good time to offer choices to the player. However, monitor systems are still not mature enough to be able to detect player’s Flow. The only solution is to embed choices into the gameplay, let the player treat choices as part of the play and eventually ignore them. Thus their choices will become intuitive and reflecting their actual desires.
Conclusion
Designing game systems where a wide range of players can get into Flow is not difficult:
1. Expand your game’s Flow coverage by including a wide spectrum of gameplay with different difficulties and flavors
2. Create an Player-oriented Active DDA system to allow different players to play in their own paces
3. Embed DDA choices into the core gameplay mechanics and let player make their choices through play
If a game designer can apply the above methodologies upon his own design, the game will become more dynamic and flexible, allowing more people to get into the Flow and finish it.
The fun thing about play is that players adjust the amount of challenge and ability theirselves, because toys theirselves are pretty simple as they are, but evoke a lot of play value. Players like to play with a toy so that they can bring themselves into a flow.
So toys mostly don't need a DDA system, a toy is a world of play possibilities. But now toys become more and more interactive, I am wondering how these DDA system could be used for toys.
Maybe we could create a DDA system based on the elements of toy design - construction, fantasy, challenge and sensory. You can transform every toy on the piramid on play, so why not in gameplay. But I don't think this as anything to do with flow anymore. An interactive book should also have a certain adjustable balance between challenge and ability, based on play design. And the player should feel like he's in control.
FlOw: construction play (critter evolution), fantasy play (in the abiss), challenge play (challenges), sensory play (physics)
This study further emphasized that flow is a state of effortless attention.
