Flow Experiences

[Sotha]

"Flow Experience" is an event that occurs when you get so absorbed doing something that you lose your sense of self and time. Time just flashes by and you might not even notice that you are hungry. After many hours, you snap out of it and realize you have spent hours when you thought they were only minutes.

 

Generally, a flow experience is triggered by an interesting task that has a reasonable challenge level. If the challenge is too low, the task is routine drudgery and cannot trigger a flow experience. If the task is too difficult, you only get frustrated.

 

Flow experiences are a good thing, as they often generate happy thoughts. They can also be misused in the sense that you may get addicted and not pay attention to other Important Things. Workaholism, for example.

 

What triggers flow experiences in you?

 

For me, analyzing and reporting scientific data does that almost every time I do it. The main reason why I map for TDM is getting Flow.

 

In gaming, difficulty plays a critical role: sometimes, when a game is too difficult, people get frustrated. On the other hand, modern gaming is too easy in my opinion. When I started playing Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, the first gaming sessions were flow experiences, but then, suddenly, I realized that I can win everyone in combat trivially and the only variable is the method I use to win. That totally put me off. The game became drudgery, a work I must do to complete the game and get it over with. The game tries to vary the experience by giving new options and tools later in the game, but since the core is so laughably easy it does not help.

 

From a mapper point of view, this presents how important difficulty is in a stealth game like TDM. The difficulty should be spot on to trigger a flow experience. This is very difficult to achieve. I think the critical thing here is the player tools: the player gets the option decide whether or not to use tools to make their risks lower. Therefore, the mapper should make sure the player has a reasonable arsenal of tools at their disposal. Generally, I think TDM missions give too few tools. Grayman's missions are an exception here.

 

Any thoughts on how to make TDM FM difficulty more adaptive to the player skill so that a larger amount of players would be sufficiently challenged? Other than tools?

[RJFerret]

Actually there's two ways to go for Flow, you hit optimal Flow when the balance between challenge and reward are equal. TV watching has poor Flow because there's little challenge but lots of "reward". Things where you have to work to hard for little benefit have bad Flow too.

 

Video games tend to be self leveling if they are open enough.

 

Other elements that encourage effective Flow would be player options. People achieve optimal fun when they choose and feel in control of their destiny.

 

FMs that are too linear, where the player can't do what they want, but have to do only what the designer set up fail that.

 

One of the hardest parts I've found with FMs is the discovery element. Sometimes players get caught finding that last bit of loot. Meanwhile, the reward is simply completion/continuation. Worse, FMs where there's little clue where to find a critical lever that prohibits advancement. The reward is minimal, but you have to go out of the game, search forum threads, potentially load the FM into DR, all sorts of effort for next to no reward.

 

Other things critical to FMs would be clear Objectives. If the player isn't understanding what to do to progress, it fails. To a lesser degree, this is why folks sometimes clamor for maps, as being too confused where to go breaks the immersion too.

 

Understanding Flow, what makes things fun, is invaluable to game design. You see the best game companies capitalize on it, and that's how addictive experiences are created. I've linked the Wikipedia article in so many forums I know the title name by heart now, heh.

 

PS: In the quality of life department, appreciating the measures of "fun", increased my pleasure in activities, and altered how I invested my free time.

[AluminumHaste]

I've had that experience playing Thief 1 for the first time. 6 hours went by and it felt like 20 minutes, didn't want to stop playing.

Also Mirror's Edge gave me that feeling.

[Diego]

Video games tend to be self leveling if they are open enough.

 

Very true. Any competent sandbox will drain hours of your day. I think I've been playing Kerbal Space Program for years and each play session tends to steal my entire morning/afternoon/night.

 

I live for this feeling, actually. Everything I do is because I want it. Sometimes it can be pretty frustrating though; for example I dedicated a few years of my life to study physics, but I haven't achieved this flow state in physics as frequently as I would like to (sure, it happened a few times) because one needs to be doing research on its own feet to properly get the flow. Until then you're pretty much following a set path, it's less exciting. It's like painting, but you only get to paint a canvas after a decade of hard work.

Edited June 16, 2014 by Diego