Hello there!
I summarize the paper “Flow in Games (and Everything Else) (2007)” in this post.
Flow theory
Why does a particular experience have broader appeal than others? Flow theory in psychology and video game design plays an important role to answer this question. Have you experienced the moment that you concentrate on a certain activity and lose track of time and worries? That is the experience of Flow. Flow represents the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment. Flow is also called the optimal experience, or being in “the Zone”. In order to experience flow, there are eight important elements.
- 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
- An altered sense of time
It is not necessary to have all of these elements for an activity or technology to give users the experience of Flow, but most of today’s video games deliberately include and leverage these eight components. As a result, the duration of the Flow experience becomes a crucial criteria for games to evaluate whether or not they provide the means to positive user feelings.
Flow zone
How games or other activities can maintain and extend user’s Flow experience? The important concept here is “Flow Zone”. Flow Zone is a fuzzy safe zone where the activity is not too challenging or boring and where psychic entropies such as anxiety and boredom do not intrude the experience. The right balance between the level of the challenge and player’s ability is necessary to maintain a user’s Flow experience.
Offer adaptive choices
However, as the number of players increases, it becomes more challenging to design such a balance, because the ability gap among each player becomes larger while no two people experience the same thing in the same way. Thus, the experience cannot be the same for all players, and any such experience must offer many choices, adapting to different users’ personal Flow Zone. However, it is important to keep in mind that too many choices and requiring to make frequent choices could overwhelm the user. The best way for game designers to avoid these counterproductive situations is to embed the player’s choices into the core activities of the interactive experience.
Summary
When designers design activities in games, toys, or Web sites so on, they must keep below four steps in mind and evaluate the activities presented to the user.
- Mix and match the components of Flow
- Keep the user’s experience within the user’s Flow Zone
- Offer adaptive choices, allowing different users to enjoy the Flow in their own way
- Embed choices inside the core activities to ensure the Flow is never interrupted