Rage-Quit - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 73

• Perfect balance between challenge and skill. Player is
accomplishing tasks, but using all of his or her energy to do so.
• Loss of self. Player becomes unaware of surroundings.
• Autotelism. Only observable in interview post-activity, player
seems to want to continue activity for no reason other than
the intrinsic value of the activity itself.
• Temporal distortion. Player becomes unaware of passage
of time.
• Clear feedback. Player is able to relay the success/failure of
his or her performance with perfect clarity.
• Loss of awareness. Player reports a feeling of acting by magic
or automation to meet tasks and challenges.
• High self- efficacy. Player feels capable of meeting tasks
assigned to him or her.
• Clear goals and outcomes. Player states he or she knew
exactly how to achieve goals/outcomes.
Because flow is awesome, we want to encourage it in our game
design. Because flow is rooted in psychology, educators are able to
manipulate and change their teaching styles in such a way as to bring
it about. Following that logic, game designers can teach their players
to play their games in such a way as to bring about flow experiences
in games. There are three points in the flow experience checklist pro-
vided above that are particularly notable to the tutorial and teaching
design of the game: balance between challenge and skill, feedback , and
clarity of goals and outcomes. Each of these relate to how players have
been taught to play the game: their skills need to improve along with
the challenges in order to match properly, they must be given regular
and clear feedback, and there must be clarity in purpose.
Balance
The first component of flow I will elucidate with reference to the
game's teaching mechanics is balance of skill and challenge. In some
of the code demonstrated earlier, I made it clear that it is possible to
detect when players are having trouble in a game. In the examples
given, players were unable to properly cast a spell, unable to prop-
erly swim, and so on. In education, we use tests like these to verify