How video games can induce flow
Over 227 million Americans–including 70% of adults–play video games[1]. An overwhelming proportion of players indicated that playing video games had a positive effect on their lives with 90% saying playing video games brought joy through playing, 87% that play is mentally stimulating and 87% that play provides stress relief.
The question of how video games result in such positive emotional and cognitive states of mind is beginning to be studied by neuroscientists and psychologists alike. A concept that captures much of what video game players experience is that of flow, first introduced by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi[2]. You feel flow when you are completely engrossed in an activity, losing track of time passing, and feeling deep focus and concentration – it’s that feeling of being “in the zone.”
A helpful way to understand flow is as an evolving balance between the challenge of an activity, and your skill level (see Figure 1). If your skill far exceeds the challenge of an activity, you will feel bored: remember the last time you played tic-tac-toe with a young child? On the other hand, if an activity is too challenging for your skill level, you will likely feel anxious, and eventually frustrated by repeated failure. In contrast, a well-paced video game, in which the challenges–and rewards–increase in tandem with your skill level, is likely to put you in a state of flow.
Figure 1. The likelihood of achieving a Flow state is optimized in activities where the challenge increases approximately as quickly as your skill increases. If the activity is not challenging enough for your skill level, it becomes boring. If the activity’s challenge outpaces your skill learning, you will become frustrated as you begin to fail.
Importantly, challenge and skill should not increase in lockstep: subjectively, it is better to sometimes have your skill outpace the challenge – giving you a sense of mastery and achievement – and to sometimes have the challenge rise more quickly than your skill, giving you some feeling of tension. Thus, the sawtooth pattern in Figure 1 is a better subjective experience than traveling in a straight line. The most fulfilling activities in life – from games and stories to careers – will have this characteristic shape: challenges of an appropriate size that push personal growth, punctuated by a period of relaxation where you can reflect on your successes and consolidate your skills, before being faced with the next challenge.
Of course, there is no one ideal path for everyone: our unique personality and skillset that we’ve developed over our lifetime make us more or less easily frustrated or bored in different situations, shifting the boundaries of our flow channel (see Figure 1). The speed at which we’re able to grow the necessary skills can push us either into frustration or boredom. Unlike many of the challenges thrown at us by life, games are designed to provide players with clear objectives (completing a level, defeating a boss) that are of the appropriate difficulty level for our current skills–and that provide immediate feedback (points and punishments) that help us learn the skill, while staying motivated and engaged. Still, not everyone finds the same games fun – and research[3] is starting to reveal why different personalities, motivations, and skills result in different levels of fun, flow, and engagement.
Skillprint’s AdaptivePlay platform can enable games to dynamically adapt gameplay to each player based on their in-game performance and personality metrics, personalizing the experience in order to maximize flow and engagement. We believe the experience of flow is positive for people physically, emotionally, and cognitively, and that helping individuals find their flow state will provide each with an invaluable resource that they can continue to draw on in games, and in life.
[1] 2021 Essential Facts About the Video Game Industry, the Entertainment Software Association
[2] Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: HarperCollins.