🌊 Flow (Flow State)
Illustration: Flow State — the perfect channel between boredom (too easy) and anxiety (too hard), where the player is completely immersed in the action.
In game design, Flow is an extreme psychological concept where the player is 100% immersed in the game, reacting automatically without thinking, and forgetting all concepts of time and the real world. Often referred to as being “in the zone”.
This concept is borrowed from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
The Flow Channel
For a game to put the user’s brain into a Flow state, it must maintain a delicate balance between 2 extremes:
- Boredom: The player’s ability far exceeds the game’s challenge. (The game is too easy).
- Anxiety: The game’s challenge far exceeds the player’s current skill. (The game is too hard).
Excellent Game Design must continuously increase the game’s difficulty along a diagonal line parallel to the player’s increasing skill.
Identifying Characteristics When Gamers Fall into “Flow”
- Loss of self-consciousness: Muscles automatically type on the keyboard / Controller without needing to think about which button to press.
- Time distortion: It feels like playing for 1 hour, but in reality, the sun has set.
- Clear goals and immediate feedback: Players know exactly what they need to do immediately and instantly see damage Hitbox/reward sounds popping up on the screen.
Rhythm games like Osu!, Beat Saber, or intense action games like Sekiro are extremely meticulously crafted to ignite this “Flow” zone with EDM background music synced to every dropping beat.