Play and Flow

PLAY
Caillois: "Play is the quality of mind during enjoyable, captivating, intrinsically motivated and process focused activities."

-captivating: player is fully engaged/absorbed in the activity
-intrinsically motivated: free, activity is not obligatory
-process-focused: player is engaged because of the activity itself and not for the outcome.


FLOW
Csíkszentmihályi: "Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity."

-energized focus - the person is engaged in the activity very actively
-full involvement - the person is fully engaged/absorbed in the activity
-success in the process of the activity - person is more engaged in the activity when he is succeeding


Flow is based on positive psychology, it is completely focused motivation. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.




Everytime I think about flow, I always remember how I (as a toddler) could enjoy myself with a piece of Playdough for hours and hours without ever getting distracted of my single action: knead the clay. It was play in all it's simplicity. But it was also flow.

Play and Flow have got similarities and points that could intwine perfectly. When done properly, play en flow can go hand in hand and even create a more amazing experience.

One game I really got into a flow was Traffic Rush, a simple game for the iPhone where you needed to let all the cars cross over safely. The only things you could do was swipe to increase the speed of a car or tab a car to stop it for some seconds. That simple. But there was a right balance in difficulty. Once it got more difficult, you get in a flow and you don't want to get out of it, because once you get in that flow, you really feel like you're playing it right.

Now ofcourse, there is a game based on flow, called Flow.
One of the makers, Jenova Chen, came up with with the game Flow, after doing his Thesis about flow in games, which you can read here.

So some more knowledge out of this thesis:
In order to maintain a person’s Flow experience, the activity needs to reach a balance between the challenges of the activity and the abilities of the participant. If the challenge is higher than the ability, the activity becomes overwhelming and generates anxiety. If the challenge is lower than the ability, it provokes boredom. Fortunately, human beings have tolerance, there is a fuzzy safe zone where the activity is not too challenging or too boring, and psychic entropies like anxiety and boredom would not occur. [Csikszentmihalyi 1990]

The description of Flow is identical to what a player experiences when totally immersed in a video game. During this experience, the player loses track of time and forgets all external pressures. It is obvious that gamers value video games based on whether or not those games can provide Flow experiences. [Holt 2000]