Flow theory

In this post I will talk about flow and how I relate to flow theory when I thought about the design for our game. I will mainly talk about the three things, difficulty curve, the rules to flow and mental complexity. I will I will try to recap to my last blog post about subconscious design and how flow theory support to implement subconscious design in your game.

My impression of what people most take with the with the flow is the difficulty curve (see picture), for example is the difficulty curve mention in art of game design (Schell, 2015), while he not mentions the rules to obtain flow or that you should try to design for mental complexity. I personally think the rules of obtaining flow and mostly how you want to obtain mental complexity have more value to me when I think about design.

Difficulty curve

You properly know the concept already. That you always want to be in the flow channel, where your skill match the challenge you are facing. In the post before I talked about the two system that Daniel Kahneman´s book thinking fast and slow (McKibbin and Kahneman, n.d.). System 2, the slow thinking system witch handle reasoning. System 1, that do the fast thinking, like what your eyes should focusing on.  I explain the two system in my last post on subconscious design, I recommend reading that to understand this post better.

I try to connect the two theory’s where your slow thinking system 2 trying to handle the challenge you facing. This is express with the thought “Hmm… now I just moved around, I going to try to teleport next time”. While system 1 working automatically in the background. My theory is that your system 2 handle the part of the challenge that the system 1 don´t handle automatically. I express this in my new graph of the difficulty curve.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book flow gives us rules to stay in the flow channel. To keep the system 2 to work on a specific challenge instead of doing something else. The reason we play games at all, why we just don´t put down the controller and walk away. Mihaly gives us the answer mental complexity, to handle difficult challenges seems more enjoyable then handle easy challenges. We want to train our system 1 to handle automatically handle harder and harder challenges.

Instead of regular life where you fine all kind of different levels challenges games give people the opportunity to slowly increasing the challenge level, to obtain high mental complexity. In the book flow Mihaly gives a set of rules to enter and maintain flow. I go through the rules; first I use football as an example then I will talk about how we use that rule in the design for ours.

Rules of flow

1. Clear obtainable goals
2. Clear obtainable sub goals
3. Feedback of your actions
4. Clear rules
5. Acquiring new skills
6. Use the newly obtain skill
7. voluntarily participation

In my football example I going to us. I will reefer a match between two teams that have a fixed time limit. I think this is important to point out, because how you relate to the game differ if you play game with your friend, in school or a match against another team.

1 Clear and obtainable goals

Football: You probably know the answer to this already, to win the game by scoring the most goals. It becomes boring if the team your facing is to good, because you know you never will win.

Our game: Stay alive to get the most score as possible to place you on the high score. This is the biggest game loop in our game.

This is both clear goals that is easy to understand for you brain. You could have trying to balance 30 balls on top of each other with four people only using their little fingers. That is not a clear and Obtainable goal.

2 Clear obtainable sub goals

Football: The most obvious is to score a goal. But is can also be to focusing on the opposite team not to score because you are a head.

Our game: We have two core loops for this. The smallest is kill an enemy to get a reward that increase your score multiplier. The other bigger loop is to kill all enemies to advance in level which gets you closer to achieve higher score.

3 Feedback of your actions

Football: In real world, it more clear with the feedback. When you kick the ball you clearly see it flies away, if it gets to your team member or a member of the opposite team. The list is enormous here, but you also become better to reward you self. “Aah! I managed to dribble the best player in their team”.

Our game: The most important here is the number that pops of how much score you get to clearly visualize your progress. Another example for self-feedback is trails to see that you just escaped the enemies attack.

4 Clear rules

Football: The rules of football is very clear, a field, two teams, get the ball inside the net with only your feet’s.

Our game: In games, you try to communicate these rules clearly, the biggest example in our game is that we clearly show where an attack is going to damage and then count up when the damage is being dealt. We only have one enemy that don´t change up in their behavior.  There is a lot of things we excluded to not make it messy for the player. For example, adding another fucking enemy.

5 Acquiring new skills

Football: You learn to dribble your opponent, shoot in a straight line, manage to pass the ball to another player.

Our Game: In games, we have the opportunity to fake acquiring new skills. In our game, we reward the player with a damage up if you catch the combo object. If you achieve high score you get to add your name to the score board or you can become better at dodging attacks.

6 Use the newly obtain skill

Football: There is a fine line between rule number 5, this is when you use your dribble technique, your straight shoot flies in the goal and you score.

Our Game: You can easily see the faked skill of doing more damage when you kill the enemies faster. You get better at dodging attacks which rewards you with better score.

7 Voluntarily participation

Football: This is known to all us nerd, it was not stimulating to play football in school. But when you play with your friends and just have fun, suddenly it becomes stimulating.

Our Game: In games, this is very important. You don´t want to put a player in a situation they don´t want to be in. Therefore, I like the teleporting mechanic, you will never end in a situation where you feel that you didn´t want to be. For example, you don´t want to be in a situation where you can survive because there is too much attacks. With the teleport, you can always survive the attacks. You have the control.

I want to make a note that we as human beings have this long before football and video games. We are built to set up these rules for our self. This means that you can set up different goals for yourself inside the magic circle for example in football. Like your main goal is to score only one goal if you facing a really hard team that you know you not going to win against.

The biggest example in the games that show how we as humans a capable of setting up our own rules are probably Minecraft. It gives you clear rules to work inside, but you as a player set up your own goal and sub goals. In the beginning of the game you just try to survive and when you starting to get a hang of it you can set up you own even more complex goal then the one you set up before This is my transition to mental complexity.

 

Mental complexity

Mental complexity is a broad topic. It can explain why game developer like more to make games then to play games. The challenge of making games much is harder which gives a higher mental complexity level then for example playing Mario cart. You could argue that it´s the very reason we try to develop as human beings at all. Why we try to learn new things. If we get the same stimulation of rubbing our belly button as everything else, why would we not just sitting and rubbing our belly button?

How should we relate to this when we make our games? Games can give very clear rules and goals. It much easier to build a computer in Minecraft then I real life. In Minecraft, you “just” have to think about the component and blocks that builds them. In the real world, there is so much thing that can go wrong. You need to have the right voltage, current, the craft itself of etch microchips. This makes it too complicated for your system 2 to handle if you haven´t gone through a lot of learning.

If you have clear rules in your games it much easier for the system 2 to find the right level of difficulty. You only need to focusing on one clear goal refine your system 1 to handle the different challenge better and better.

In my last post I talked about subconscious Design, this is design directly focusing to train the system 1. The system 2 can only handle one challenge at the time while system 1 is really quick, I my last post I mention how system 1 catches a picture that only where showed for 0.02 seconds in a MRI scan. The brain lit up in respond but afterword the participants said they didn´t see a picture. We try to do the same thing.

We make the attack shoot to the beat of the music. The theory is that system 1 which is good at patter recognition will find the rhythm to the music and start to “feel” when you should teleport away from the attack. Meanwhile the system 2 can focus on good strategies like move in a seatrain pattern to catch score multiplier better.

What I take with me the most with mental complexity when I think about game design is “I need to stimulate the brain”.  You want the player to constantly trying to think what it should do next. There is a bunch more I could talk about in this topic but… ehm, this post is now 1750 words so I think I stop here.

Ps. I’m… in this post i only take up the positive things of how our game design works with flow. I want to note that we have alot of bad things also.

Subconscious design

Two systems

The concept of two system that handle how we work as human beings keeps popping up in different research. Lieberman in his book “human learning and memory”¹ talks about different journals³ and research that brings up two systems of learning. That we automatically learn things in some situations and in other situations we seem to have more control over what and how we learn.

Other research on two systems is more oriented towards behavior science. David Kahneman is a noble price winner in economics. His researches lead to a whole new field that’s called behavior economics. He talked about how the two systems explain how we behave in different ways.

System one could be explained to be our subconscious. This is doing all present thinking, all the processes that make us work as human being that we don´t think about consciously. Our conscious thoughts are defined as system two. In the book² “thinking, fast and slow” David Kaneman talks about different characteristics of the systems.

“System 1: Operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2: allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration”

David Kahneman have an example of how system 1 operates without us knowing. “…The two picture above where showed to people lying in a brain scan. Each picture was shown for less than 2/100 of a second and immediately masked by “visual noise,” a random display of dark and bright squares. None of the observers ever consciously knew that he had seen pictures of eyes, but one part of their brain evidently knew: the amygdala, which has a primary role as the “threat center” of the brain, although it is also activated in other emotional states. Images of the brain showed an intense response of the amygdala to a threatening picture that the viewer did not recognize “

Implementing the subconscious design

 

Our only enemy has an attack behavior that first visualizes the area it will do damage in and then does the damage. This lets the player react to the attack with its teleport mechanic. What we work on now is to implement this behavior to a rhythm that looks like this:

T1 is the time for the enemy’s laser. T2 is the time it takes for the black circle which indicate where the attack will do damage appears. T3 is time it takes before damage is dealt in the black circle at the end of T3. Then the enemy moves for 2 beats before repeating it´s pattern. As you can see, this is a four-beat rhythm.

It´s easy to see that when the expanding red circle end it´s time (t3) you will take damage. You make a conscious decision with system two to connect that when the red circle reaches max it will cause damage. Maybe your thought process the first time you see the attack is “Aah, so when the red circle reaches max it does damage, I shall avoid that next time”.

While you play our game, you will also notice subconsciously that the enemy behave in a rhythm.  Your system one will finetune your behavior to not die in the game. Slowly you will adapt your behavior to the rhythm.

The shooting mechanic and the rhythm are the two mechanics that work together to form the behavior of our only enemy. The visual effects for the attack leans more towards design for system two and the rhythm mechanic leans more towards design for system one.

This adds more depth to the game. First you will use your system two to figure out the rules of the game. Then you start to finetune your behavior to clear the goal you set up inside the game rules. You try out the mechanics and how you should use them for the most benefit. This includes you subconsciously adapting your behavior to the rhythm. My hope is that this leads to more complex thinking but still give simple rules to the player.

Thanks for reading : )

 

Ps. I know the rhythm picture is not that good but… you know.

 

¹Lieberman, D. (2011). Human learning and memory. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

²Kahneman, D. (2015). Thinking, fast and slow. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

³McClure, S. (2004). Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards. Science, 306(5695), pp.503-507.

 

Planning fallacy

 

 

This post I will dedicate to the meeting where we discuss what we were going to focus on for the rest of the project. I will go through Daniel Kahneman concept of Planning Fallacy. Because of the knowledge of the Planning Fallacy we end up of not implementing anything new to the game even though we come far with the game we have. Instead we want to focus on the communicating and refining the component we have in our game right now.

In the discussion, we were thinking and almost did implement another enemy.  We counted the weeks we had left and went through the things we wanted to implement. We were just managing to implement what we had left with the weeks we had. This included a second enemy. Now we had to decide if we should implement the new enemy or not.

If you read Clinton Keith book Agile game development with scrum he says you should multiply the time you think it will take by two. If you are new to scrum, you probably should multiply by three. With this outside view on our project we should defiantly not add anything to the game. Even though we thought that we really could implement a new enemy. Why is it that? Why do we think we can do much more then what the outside perspective says we can (In this case the scrum book)? Daniel Kahneman have coin the concept Planning Fallacy.

 

For explaining the Planning fallacy, you first need to know about WYSIATI (Yes, that is the name).  The WYSIATI is a concept of how we form decisions in the moment. When you making a decision, your brain do a search in your brain for the accessions that you remember from before that match the decision you want to make in the moment.

For example, if you think of choosing a pizza while looking at an ordering board. You probably going to remember how a juicy taste of you last pizza. When you compare with the price you probably will look at the other prices on the pizzaboard, maybe you see a 50kr under the pizza you want order and the pizza you thinking about cost 70kr. When you make the decision if you going to buy the pizza or not, you think the price is 40% expansive because of the price under your pizza and you really want a pizza, because you remember the taste. That is the two factors you base your decisions on, even though they not at all make sense to only use those variables.

You could think about what you budget is for this month and how 70kr match how much you can spend on food this day. Note that you make this decision all the time. Daniel Kahneman names the two perspective the inside view and the outside view. The inside view is when you look at the

 

In our case when we planned if we going to implement the next enemy. We were positive that we could implement it. Because we only see what we just implement to our game. The outside view here is Clinton Keith Book, that states that you properly need a lot more time then you think, even triple the amount. That perspective is the outside perspective. Because of WYSIATI you are drawn to make decision on your inside perspective. Even though the outside perspective is properly much more reliable source. I am glad that we knew this and made the decisions that did.

 

Ps. I want to make a note that there is more than just the WYIATI effect happening when you decide.

 

 

Reward contridictions

Combo System

For our shoot em up we have a combo mechanic. Right now if you kill an enemy they shoot out a “combo Object”. You as a player may try to shoot it and if you hit you get combo increase in combo Level. The combo Level makes you do more damage. If you miss the combo objected you combo level will resets. The thought process is that you going to kill an enemy to get stronger and kill enemies faster. This makes it fly out more combo object at the same time, which makes it hard to actually hit the combo objects with your shoot before the leaves the screen and reset you combo. This gives the player a feeling of reward to their action and development while raising the stakes.

 

The problem

The problem with this was that it takes time to shoot the combo object. This led to a conflict of feedback. You reward the player with the power up to kill enemies faster but to maintain that you need to destroy the combo object. Witch flies out every time an enemy dies. Instead of feeling empowerment of the combo level and kill enemies faster you spend most of the time trying to hit combo objects. This contradicts the purpose of the combo system.

 

Possible solutions

First solution we discuss in the group is to change so that the combo mechanics drops rate. This will make the combo Objects stick out and not feel like it´s a reward itself if an enemy drops a combo object, instead of being a part of the enemy.

Another solution could be that you shoot faster and maybe around you 360 degrees. This would make the player to shoot combo object and enemies at the same time instead of now that you need to put “a lot” of time focusing on killing the combo object.

What I think is the key is to reward the player so it don´t contradict each other. Either, it need to feel the empowerment of doing more damage with an increase in combo level. But still feel like that the stakes are rising when you advance.

PS. Sorry for the green color on my picture, but i just want to see the world burn.