What makes you want to play? What makes us love our hobbies?
While we’re playing, reading, or doing some other hobbies, we don’t usually get direct rewards, so why do we keep doing it? Why spend time on what won’t help us directly with anything? Of course this has to do with the pleasure that the activity gives us, but where does that pleasure come from?
Now, talking about games, imagine you are playing an RPG. After defeating a terrifying final boss you get your reward, an NPC talks to you and, in the middle of ecstasy, you haven’t read a word he said. After that you are transported to a different area, with nothing to tell you what to do, and realize that NPC, which you just ignored, was the one telling you what to do. You can’t go back to it anymore, and suddenly the game doesn’t even seem worth a search to figure out what to do next.
Or when that 4-year-old nephew of yours who just sits still with his tablet leaves his favorite little game open. Curious, you try to play, but realize that it’s too easy for you and soon put the tablet aside too.
What made you lose interest in these games? Why is the game that you think is so silly entertaining children so much?
Now think about your favorite game, or one that you and/or your friends spent months unable to unglue. What did these games have that others don’t?
When we get a checkmate, or defeat that intelligent friend of ours in checkers, we are enveloped by an ecstatic feeling of accomplishment, well-being and happiness, that little feeling of accomplishment, that the first two examples cannot pass. We experience something similar when we defeat a difficult boss, or rise in rank in a game. This feeling is what we’ll call flow.
The fact that we feel good when we do some activity we like comes from a number of factors, but one of the most relevant is the leveling between the activity and our abilities.
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Think about it, have you ever been excited about doing something far below your abilities? And when you were forced by circumstances to do something you knew you couldn’t do, because it required so much more skill than you have?
Our tendency, as human beings, is to find things too easy and tedious. On the other hand, the ones that seem impossible are frustrating. Especially when we’re talking about games, systems that people should experience on their own, without any obligation.
Who identified this human behavior and theorized it was the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who after living his childhood in a period of war, became interested in finding what motivated people, what makes them happy even in the middle of so much desolation.
Based on his studies, Csikszentmihalyi arrived at the flow theory. According to him, the balance between the difficulty of a task and our abilities allows us to reach the flow state.
But what is this state of flow?
It is that moment of ecstasy, happiness and completeness we feel when performing a challenging task. It’s our “eureka” moment! It’s the feeling of finally defeating the final boss after a whole night of trying.
To understand a little better how to get to the flow, we can analyze graphs like the one below:
As we can see, flow is between the frustrating and the tedious, the ideal measure between skill and challenge. But you may still be asking yourself: what does this have to do with game esign? How can I apply this to my game?
If you play frequently, you’ve definitely experienced the flow state when playing. As game designers, our primary goal is not to create a good game, but a good experience. Jesse Schell says in “The Art of Game Design” that the game is merely a way of designing that experience for people.
We must always remember that games are usually voluntary experiences, we are hardly forced to play something, so we must create designs that make people want to go through the experiences we create.
Studying and applying flow theory in your games is learning to balance and make the game a challenging and fun experience that people will want to play and spend hours of their lives with, even without any visible physical reward, despite other benefits than this experience can bring.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
