Rage-Quit - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 72

performance, single-minded focus, loss of temporal perception, and
complete ensorcellement in the task at hand. More importantly, it feels
freaking amazing. Flow is one of the many things that keep us playing
games. While the causes of flow are complicated and far-reaching, the
quintessential portion that we can harness in game design is that skill
level and difficulty have to ratchet up simultaneously, both through
good instruction and well-designed experiences to test that instruc-
tion. This is also true in education—students achieve a flow state when
they are learning at an alarming rate of efficiency; each new tidbit of
information is being met precisely with an appropriate challenge to
their current schemata and skill levels.
Because we know that frustration and boredom stop people from
playing, logically there must be an opposite end of the spectrum: the
things that keep people playing. Flow is one such thing. Flow is a
widely used buzzword often employed to describe more or less any
focused amusement. When someone is engaged heavily in a task that
they appear to be enjoying, oftentimes this will be referred to as flow.
Factually, there are many ways to measure flow experiences, and there
are studied and established metrics used to demonstrate whether the
psychological state actually emerged, or if the players were simply dis-
tracted. I am certainly not saying flow doesn't happen in games by any
means. A plethora of studies have illustrated through scientifically
rigorous means that flow is definitely happening. * What I am suggest-
ing is a general increase in rigor in determining whether something
genuinely constitutes a flow state. There are instruments available to
measure flow experiences, such as the DFS-2, which has been evalu-
ated against game experiences on numerous occasions. † Suffice to say,
even these scales and tests often become the subject of license fees
and more. It is paradoxically difficult to measure flow physiologically,
as the things that would measure flow would also discourage it; for
example, sticking a person's face full of electromyographic electrodes.
As a boil down, a flow state is indicated if many of the following
things are observable in the player:
* Procci, K. et al. (2013). Measuring the flow experience of gamers: An evaluation of
the DFS-2. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(6).
† Wang, C. K. J., Liu, W. C., & Khoo, A. (2009). The psychometric properties of
dispositional low-scale 2 in internet gaming. Current Psychology, 28.