What is FLOW THEORY in game design? - The Basics - (Part 1)
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- Опубликовано: 12 июн 2024
- An in depth look at the basics of Flow Theory in Game Design. We walk through the progression of getting a player into and keeping them in a flow state. Flow graphs are discussed in detail and the idea of Anxiety and Boredom in relation to challenge are covered.
Flow theory is a psychology theory that we can adapt in our game designs to create challenges that are catered to the skill level of our players. It is a fundamental theory that every game developer should have a good grasp on.
The idea of flow theory is to give a challenge to a player that is equal or slightly more difficult that the level of the players current skill. This will put the player into a flow state which is a state of heightened awareness. If we choose a challenge or task that is too easy, the player will fall into boredom and may abandon our games. If the challenge is too hard and the player's skill isn't developed enough, the player will fall into anxiety where they cannot overcome the challenge. This will make them frustrated, angry or fed up and they may leave.
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My professor showed this video in class today. She was teaching the concept of flow. The class is 'Social psychology of New Media.' Your video thoroughly captivated me - it was so, so interesting and you made the concept very easy to understand. I cannot believe this video only has 2.5k views. You totally need to get viral. Great content.
Thanks for the kind words Daniel Lim. It's pretty cool that a professor would show off one of my videos too. What program were you studying?
@@gamedesignwithmichael Some say he is still waiting for a reply..
very cool concept, and def a key component of my game design philosophy. specifically, i'm making an rpg type game with a lot of "overarching upgrades" to help them deal with harder dungeons. Something i believe that is kinda unpopular, if a player is interacting with the systems, making good and efficient decisions, and is consistently staying the best they can be at that point, they *should* be able to sorta breeze through the encounters because that is their reward for doing all that. To help relieve people who are more experienced gamers and are used to higher difficulty even at peak efficiency, I will add something- like modifiers or difficulty option, that gives bonuses for completion so it feels worth it, like more loot or rarer loot.
good example of this could be bgmi or pubj because when your in end fight or in last zone player get more focus on game because they do no from were player can attack them . at that time player forget about surrounding for sometimes .
you teach game design very good way . I 16 years learning game design from youtube
love form india
Good video. Glad to see you're back!
Thanks Espen Dammen. Good to be back. Got a bunch planned so stay tuned.
Awesome channel! I hope to see more stuff from you m8.
Thanks Alexander Pavlovsky. Glad you like the videos. There aren't any plans to stop at the moment so check back every now and then when you get a chance.
Great content!
While the flow theory is a nice place to start...
y'know how they always say "rules are meant to be broken"?
Well a lot of the games that I remember really enjoying are the kinds that I have to drop for like, an entire day and come back with a new strategy
y'know?
100%. It's just a framework to start with and works in most cases but not everything needs to stick to it. Dark souls is a good example of building a core experience that is exactly opposite to this.
Hey man, checked out your channel from your comment on that Mark Brown video... so glad I did! Such a great vid, definitely deserving of more subs haha
Thanks superspinmove, I'm happy you weren't disappointed when you got here. I am working on building up my library at the moment, then I will have to find some places that might be interested in videos with lots of charts. haha.
Also, sorry about the late reply, SOMEHOW RUclips thought your comment was spam.
Are you still doing videos ? Your last video was 6 months ago :( you are providing excellent content which helps a lot !
Hope to see you back.
Cheers
There's been a number of times where I have gotten part way through a script and just bailed on it. But I hope to be back at some point.
great video! what's the game from the min: 1:18?
Thanks for checking out the video. The game is called "RiME" and its developed by Tequila Works.
Noice vid.
so basically that means that a good player is gonna also be frustrated for times ? whats the point then of been good at the game
Possibly, but ideally no. You would try to build into your game a way to increase challenge to meet the skill of a good player. And there's a bunch of different systems that a developer could implement to do that. Difficulty Settings, Dynamic Difficulty Adjustments, Player driven goals like 3 star systems, different builds, achievements.
This is why a lot of difficulty settings these days are accompanied by a short description along the lines of: "I play 'X' amount of games and would like 'Y' amount of challenge"
Well, something that EVE Online doesn't have... That game spikes in challenge in the first few minutes.
MMO's are pretty hard to do this for. Onboarding and tutorialisation often suffers in exchange for adding new systems and content at a pace that will keep long term players playing. And then EVE is just next level hardcore as MMO's go.
whats the game? 5:47 and 1:02
Both these clips are from the early chapters of "Uncharted: The Lost Legacy" on PS4.
tutorials break my flow.
Good tutorials are really hard to do but they are super important so you don't hit knowledge blocks further down the line. I have been the victim of some pretty bad tutorials in my time so I know the feels.
Dark Souls literally put you straight into the boss fight as if it has 0 concept of flow
Yep, which is why a decent chunk of people bounce off it immediately. Luckily for Dark Souls it managed to carve out its own space as a respected product despite its wall of difficulty.
@@gamedesignwithmichael To be fair knowing first hand how tough the game is. It is actually a perfect tutorial. Usually for a tutorial you are in a closed area that is or isn't a scripted story event to get familiar with the game. Dark souls in the first few seconds of play shows the player that the game will be constantly anxious and difficult. The anxiety is built into the game and it makes the player know that it isn't going to be fair.
Why the Flow Model is illogical: A contrarian perspective on Flow from the perspective of affective neuroscience
On the surface, the graphical representation of the flow channel is simple to understand. When you arrange a demand/skill match, flow happens. For any task, the problem is that although demand moves up or down dependent upon the exigencies of the moment, skill should be relatively stable during or within the performance, and only change, and for the most part gradually between performances. Thus, one may accomplish a task that from moment to moment varies in demand, but the skills brought to that task are the same regardless of demand. What this means is that for any one-performance set, skill is not a variable, but a constant. That is, one cannot adjust skill against demand during performance because skill can only change negligibly during performance, or in other words does not move. Thus, for performance that requires any skill set, the only variable that can be manipulated is demand. For moment to moment behavior the adjustable variable that elicits flow is demand and demand alone. But that leaves us with figuring out what demand exactly is.
A demand may be defined as simple response-outcome contingency. Thus, if you do X, Y will occur or not occur. It is thus inferred that demand entails a fully predictable means-end relationship or expectancy. But the inference that the act-outcome expectancy is always fully predictable is not true. Although a response-outcome is fully predictable when skill overmatches demand, as demand rises to match and surpass skill, uncertainty in the prediction of a performance outcome also rises. At first, the uncertainty is positive, and reaches its highest level when a skill matches the level of demand. This represents a ‘touch and go’ experience wherein every move most likely will result in a positive outcome in a calm or non-stressed state. It is here that many individuals report euphoric flow like states. Passing that, the moment-to-moment uncertainty of a bad outcome increases, along with a corresponding rise in tension and anxiety.
Momentary positive uncertainty as a logical function of the moment to moment variance occurring when demand matches skill does not translate into a predictor for flow, and is ignored in Csikszentmihalyi’s model because uncertainty by implication does not elicit affect. Rather, affect is imputed to metaphorical concepts of immersion, involvement, and focused attention that are not grounded to any specific neurological processes. However, the fact that act-outcome discrepancy in relaxed states alone has been correlated with specific neuro-chemical changes in the brain that map to euphoric, involved, timeless , or immersive states, namely the co-activation of dopamine and opioid systems due to continuous positive act/outcome discrepancy and relaxation, narrows the cause of flow to abstract elements of perception rather than metaphorical aspects of performance. These abstract perceptual elements denote information and can easily be defined and be reliably mapped to behavior.
A final perceptual aspect of demand that correlates with the elicitation of dopamine is the importance of the result or goal of behavior. Specifically, dopaminergic systems are activated by the in tandem perception of discrepancy and the predicted utility or value of result of a response contingency. The flow model maps behavior to demand and skill, but not only is skill fixed, so is the importance of the goal state that predicates demand. However, the relative importance of the goal state correlates with the intensity of affect. For example, representing a task that matches his skills, a rock climber calmly ascending a difficult cliff would be euphoric if the moment to moment result was high, namely avoiding a fatal fall, but would be far less so if he was attached to a tether, and would suffer only an injury to his pride is he were to slip. Finally, the flow experience correlates also with a state of relaxation and the concomitant activation of opioid systems along with a dopamine induced arousal state that together impart a feeling of euphoria, which would also be predicted as choices in flow are singular and clear and therefore avoid perseverative cognition. It is the sense of relaxation induced pleasure and a feeling of attentive arousal that constitutes the flow experience.
This interpretation is based on the work of the distinguished neuroscientist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan, who was kind to vet the work for accuracy and endorse the finished manuscript.
Berridge’s Site
sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/
I offer a more detailed theoretical explanation in pp. 47-52, and pp 82-86 of my open source book on the neuroscience of resting states, ‘The Book of Rest’, linked below.
The Psychology of Rest
www.scribd.com/doc/284056765/The-Book-of-Rest-The-Odd-Psychology-of-Doing-Nothing
This all seems to make sense and I even find the idea of demand mapping well to game design, but I can't help but feel it's over complicating what most entry level developers (likely my audience) would be using flow for in game design.
From a game design perspective, flow works as a starting point to structure out the challenge of a game and is a very powerful tool for both construction and for evaluation of the challenge in a game. But it is just that, one tool in a toolbox. From there, a developer could choose to progress further into what is discussed here as a means of getting more out of their work. Which I'm sure would give a greater understanding that would translate to better game play. I wouldn't think, however, it would yield better returns than learning flow to the level discussed in normal game design settings and then focusing on other tools in the toolbox to compliment its benefits like story arcs and balancing methods.
So it becomes a balancing act for each individual dev of optimizing your understanding of flow versus being a more rounded designer.
@@gamedesignwithmichael Thank you for your comment. For a much greater analysis of gaming from affective neuroscience, please go to pp. 137 to 144 of my other free on line book on the psychology of business networks
www.scribd.com/document/119487008/B2-The-Old-Art-and-New-Science-of-the-Business-Network
also my work is based on the neurologically based incentive motivation theory of Dr. Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan, His link is here sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/
What’s a game? First, let’s have the incomplete definition, courtesy of Wikipedia. “A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements.”
The problem with this definition is that it doesn’t define what ‘structured’ is, and it doesn’t define how and why positive affect or enjoyment is elicited, how it rises and falls, how it changes motivation, learning, and attention, and how it is reflected in the activity of the human brain. It also errs by separating from games the monetary and personal remuneration we get from our business and social networks from participating in games, which as I will demonstrate also comes from games. Finally, it does not consider how merely watching a game can be as rewarding as playing a game. Correcting for this, I offer a hopefully better and more succinct definition.
Complicated version: A game is the continuous elevation of decision utility through a present or anticipated timing variance that provides continuous and high positive prediction error and corollary positive affect. Simple version: a game is a continuous positively uncertain task that makes the task fun.
Complicated version: Gamification is the matching or overmatching of decision utility with the predicted utility of future dependent outcomes through the employment of continuous positive prediction error.
Simple version: Gamification is a game married to a positive and surprising outcome.
Both the timing variance and value of the predicted outcome determine resulting affect that is governed by the activity of midbrain dopaminergic systems, or biochemical activity in the human brain that correlates with focused attention, heightened learning, ‘energy’, and ‘pleasure’. This activity in turn is elicited by the perception or anticipation of surprising act-outcome discrepancies, or novelty, as well as the degree of importance of the goal of behavior. Finally, a game is rewarding as a task that is performed by an individual or as a performance by others that is observed. For example, football players are rewarded by playing the game, and football spectators are similarly rewarded by watching the game.
To illustrate, consider a simple deck of cards. If you were to consciously arrange them in different patterns representing suit or rank, manipulating a card deck would be a predictable and boring affair. However, establish a set of rules for the ordering of the cards that make the moment-to-moment predictability of successfully completing the task variable, and we in effect have created value from nothing. Finally, increase the value of successfully completing the game by a monetary reward, trophy, or other emblem of success, and affect rises in tandem. In other words, it just feels better, and not only for the player, but also for the individuals watching the game itself.
Motivation from a Deck of Cards
Behavior can be a game if it leads to no goal or it can be gamified if it leads to a tangible goal. Sometimes that goal is practical, such as completing your job better and faster, with pleasure and without stress. In this case, you are rewarded with monetary tokens. However, gamification can also occur if no monetary reward is attained, as in winning a chess match, but with the token award of the regard of your friends, peers, or the public at large.
Games are typically looked upon as trivial, or distinct from important activities like work. However, the opposite is the case. Games are necessary to do work. Just ask our really distant ancestors. For animals, life is unpredictable, and thus potentially dangerous, so evolution favored creatures that could attend and deal with it. To cope with unpredictability, you had to seek it out and make it predictable and safe. Unpredictable events could be experienced in the wild as when a creature forages for food or fight to win a mate, or they could be modeled as when creatures play. The need to make the unpredictable predictable is necessary for animals to survive, including the human one. It is in our nature to seek out unpredictability, particularly if it is mated with a higher and future purpose. The higher the purpose, the greater the affect or ‘pleasure’. We are in other words ‘hard wired’ to be attracted to games or gamified environments, with an inborn preference for games that have meaning. The only problem is that our notion of what games and gamification mean is faulty.....
I was the downvote.
The what you reclassify everything into the flow state is dumb.
It also doesn’t take into account my son and daughter who have completely different play skills.
Ever since they been teaching game design; games have been getting worse. The “loops” are created like this rather then thinking about “fun” like they used too.
It’s like you are truth to tell an artist they have to draw the way you do. Not because they should but because you labeled everything in a way that prevents any other way.
It’s a very leftist thing to do. Anyways, if yours truly a discussion on it; let me know.
Thanks for your comment. I'm not sure I understand or agree with all your points but that's okay. Many of the things in my videos, including flow theory, are tools and structures to help add certain qualities to games. Like a lot of good art though, once you understand the 'rules' people are used to, you can make a conscious and deliberate choices to go against them.
Game Design by Gigity McD I strongly disagree with the last point made. It’s almost the opposite entirely.
Once you learn it, you can’t see it any other way. The idea that you are fighting against it is irrelevant when you know “of” it and still applies it.
Ignorance is bliss and other phrases like that come to mind. But rather then bliss, it’s creative.
When people made games in their basement and garage for their friends; it was more creative. Now that people are following the rules you lay out here (learned), what is “creative” about it?
Take classic WoW for example and apply it to what you said here. How can it fit?
What about Anthem? Does the same context for what you said here apply to that?
Last one, spades?, what about here? Does the fun curve still exist?
What (in my opinion) you are doing is equivalent to labeling creative colors, their by also labeling non creative colors... to only pencil it in later; you can choose “non creative colors” 😂
It's okay to disagree. Not all game devs like this type of design. Daniel Cook is a good example.
But to one of your points.
Would you agree to the statement, most films created in Hollywood are not creative? Because they employ similar techniques to format their plots.
Also, classic wow and Anthem have tonnes of flow theory in them. Spades I'm not familiar with.
Game Design with Michael no, it seems to me that “flow” will require interaction with the content; so it can’t applied.
Unless you are going to say directors put in slow sections to be slow; rather then to preform the task, like story telling.
That’s the point, sorry I’m not able to grasp the words to better explain my position.
Many have said that learning anything is a way to restrict/limit creativity, but will you just don't let your children go to school? For example, after Newton published his three laws of physics, would you say it limits other creativity? Maybe it is wrong, right? And yes, after a long time, it turned out he was wrong on the quantum scale. Would you said people should not learn those physics laws because it limits other possibilities? I don't think Einstien didn't know those laws before he developed the relativity laws. Any theory if it is based on experiments and facts, has practical use based on how we use them. You just need critical thinking to determine it is applicable to your situation or not, or even develop new theories. War Tome your point of view is like telling Einstein don't learn anything before developing the relativity laws.
I think that flow theory is really a good strategy to make good games as I think that it explains why players have joy while playing. I think that it is because players can have growth in the game(usually RPG games). They grow with the character, they face challenges and conquer them together, and finally reached their goal. In these challenges, the player can form bonds with the character and become a wonderful experience and memories in their mind. But how to design those challenges? It would be better with some guidelines, and flow theory is one of those. We can use flow theory to determine if the challenge is hard enough or not for the player to feel rewarding.
Good games exist before flow theory and most of the game developers in the past didn't know about that, but their level design strategies are similar to the flow theory. The difficulty is easy at first and requires more skills in the latter part of the game. Too easy or too hard in the middle would make the game too boring or frustrated.
Flow theory is not applicable to any games, my example would be music games like guitar hero/beat saber. They are round base and experience players just won't bother playing the easier levels, they want to beat the hardest challenge only. Another example would be dark souls series, they put you in an extremely difficult state immediately in the first stage and that scare away a lot of players (But sure it is a great game).
For your son and daughter problem, I don't think it is the problem of learning flow theory. Instead, it would be the person who teaches them game design stuff. Teachers should teach knowledge to students, but more importantly, to guide children to think WHY, HOW and think outside the box, think critically.