RESISTANCE - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 128

smoothest experience of flow, rather than presenting some unmoving challenges to the player
and letting her decide how to overcome it—or simply stop playing. It's no wonder that many
creators of smaller games in recent years avoid DDA and simply let their game systems function
without constant adjustments and modifications. Would Super Hexagon be a better game if
Terry Cavanagh had designed it to get easier when the player inevitably fails at its extreme chal-
lenge? The shape of that game's relentless resistance to player effort would become different,
more malleable—and perhaps less meaningful for players who are willing to throw themselves
again and again to build their skills in a hard kind of fun.
DDA doesn't have to leave players' choices about how much resistance they encounter by the
wayside. flOw (2006) was one of the first games designed by Jenova Chen, who chose that
name because part of what he and his collaborators were influenced by and seeking to explore
was the idea of flow in games. Rather than adjusting the system's resistance purely based on
the player's performance, flOw tries to give the player concrete choices about pacing the game.
In flOw , you control a fish-like creature swimming in an area with other creatures that can be
eaten—and that will sometimes try to eat you. If you successfully maneuver your fish's mouth
onto one of these creatures, they burst into white food pellets that can be eaten to make your
own fish's tail longer and capable of withstanding more bites from other creatures. Each area
also has a red food pellet your fish can eat that lets you dive deeper into waters with more dan-
gerous, challenging enemies, and a blue food pellet that takes you in the opposite direction, to
safer areas. Every player's journey through the shallows and depths of flOw is slightly different
because players can retreat and advance based on how much challenge they're seeking. Also,
losing all your health doesn't result in the game ending; you instead bump up one level to an
easier area.
The organic, player-controlled difficulty of flOw is more integrated into the course of playing
the game than asking the player to choose “Hard” or “Easy” before the game starts or via a
settings control panel. Structurally, it has similarities to early digital games like NetHack (1987),
where the player learns that travelling deeper into a dungeon via a staircase she's discovered
will lead to greater challenge. In NetHack , your goal as a player is stated from the beginning:
reach level 100 and claim the ultimate prize, the “Amulet of Yendor,” before you succumb to
various threats and enemies that end the game.
flOw , like Chen's other games, is much less explicit about the player's purpose and whether she
should be trying to dive as deep as possible at all. Although reaching the bottom layer of flOw
does give the player the opportunity to unlock more varieties of fish to play as, it's possible to
play and enjoy the game while simply wandering through higher layers and surviving and eat-
ing like a simple oceanic organism, content with its lot. Many players, especially those trained
to think of games as challenges to overcome, can play flOw as a game of increasing challenge,
much like they might play NetHack , but flOw avoids stating overtly what a player must do
to win.