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
- Clear obtainable goals
- Clear obtainable sub goals
- Feedback of your actions
- Clear rules
- Acquiring new skills
- Use the newly obtain skill
- 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.
Pål Schakonat 