Flow and Meaningful Design

09:06 BA2a , Interactivity 0 Comments

The theme for our games, flow, was lectured upon today. We soon learned what Flow meant from a games design perspective, seeing it as more than just a thematic stimuli.

Many other concepts came up from today, most stemming from the Extra Credits youtube videos, the first emphasised the idea of "failing faster" as a games designer, that ideas are meaningless and its all about creating, failing and improving- to not be precious but to be thick skinned and resilient in the quest to make a game the best it can be.

So Flow.

Flow is immersion, when you're so engaged and focused on something that everything else becomes meaningless, a form of sensory deprivation. It's extreme focus on a task, a sense of active control, the merging of action and awareness with which fades self-awareness, a distortion of the experience of time and the experience of the task itself being the reason for doing it. Games should be rewarding experiences. Flow can come from many things: painting, drawing, reading, gaming etc. This could be comparable to Johan Huizinga's "Circle of Play" idea.

Now, putting this in a games perspective...

If A1 is the start of a game, you'll want the player to go from A1 to A4, if a game is too easy, simple or monotonous a player will enter A2, if a game is too hard, or punishing a player will enter A3, both ample places for a player to disengage with the game. However, if the game is the right level of challenging for the player, they'll get to A4 and be in flow. Players must start in A1 to find their bearings to enter A4, Mario Kart must start off quite easy with tame AI before the difficulty is ramped up.


Flow is achieved with peaks and dips, building and releasing tension, to keep a player engaged on their road to A4, flow, complete immersion. Leaving it to players to decide difficulty is common in games, some of them, such as The World Ends With You, allows players to ramp up od drastically decrease the games difficulty at any given moment, implementing a risk reward scheme that allows players to always be in control, interaction in this regard aiding immersion and therefore flow.

Creating flow is all about setting concrete goals with manageable rules, demanding actions from a player to reach these goals within the players capabilities, giving clear and timely feedback on performance and progress as well as diminishing distractions to aid focus.

Meaningful Design

As with the flow curve, pacing in curves must follow a similar pattern of rise and fall, heres a chart used in an Extra Credits video using Star Wars as an example.

Starting off exciting will hype a player or viewer setting the scene and engagement for the peice, it should then simmer down as it marks out a baseline and introduces characters, plotpoints etc. This should all lead and build to the ending where tension is at its highest before things are resolved. Gameplay mechanics, like loading and preparing a gun in an FPS follow a macro, but similar curve. If you split up a game into three parts, the Arc being the peice as a whole, the Scene being a subsection like a level, a dungeon or a boss fight, and the Action being the mechanic and how it feels, like the FPS example above, we can see how this curve must be applied to all aspects of a game, in a broad and granular sense.

Difficulty spikes in games and the idea of shorter games with brilliant content opposed to padded mediocre games were also covered, the latter serving perhaps as a critique to much produced in the AAA sector. Difficult games should be fun yet fair, not punishing, a game like Dark Souls which is horrendously hard is highly playable because it follows its own rules and is consistent, it doesn't turn around and throw new things at you that can be conceived as unfair. A game that gives you many tools to overcome obstacles can also be hard yet rewarding, leaving players feeling that they can do better next time by taking a different approach, my personal example being any form of JRPG- what if I used this spell or equipped these items?

The Aesthetics of Play were also covered in an Extra Credits video, talking...

Mechanics- The rules and systems in place
Dynamics- The experiences the mechanics come to create
Aesthetics- Emotive reasons we go to play game, playing as a God for example in Black and White, that the dynamics come to form.

Designers build their way up from mechanics whilst players experience vice-versa. The genres we have in place for games often aren't too telling of the experience of the game, the FPS Portal is widely agreed to be a puzzle game for example. A different way of looking at games is in play aesthetics, for which there are 8, games often taking a combination,,,

Sense pleasure- a game that appeals to our senses, aesthetically, feels physically good to play (BlazBlue has really satisfying combos that just feel good) or even for the soundtrack.

Fantasy- to live out a fantasy, I love RPGs because I want nothing more than to be a fire-slinging mage.

Narrative- the story, the human drama, the affect on our emotions

Challenge- overcoming obstacles, surmounting that which is hard

Fellowship- working together, biological camaraderie

Competition is unofficial but games like LoL help express our evolutionary need to feel dominant

Discovery- Uncovering new things, new treasures- finding new skills, techniques, secrets in games

Expression- Class, Customisation- express an aspect of oneself

Abnegation- way of unwinding or disengaging, bejewled is an example or level grinding in a game, zoning out.

Meaningful play can also come from mechanics, Jordan Magnuson's  Lonliness uses mechanic as metaphor as little squares fade from you as you try to approach them, different people play it in different ways, some people keep trying, some people stop caring and ignore them. A mechanic that can be quite telling of a player.


Brenda Brathwaith is a games designer who makes many bourd games, her game Train has led this already awarded designer higher acclaim. She wanted to see if the medium of games could portray pain, like many other mediums can, it was based on the holocaust and was really quite moving. Goes to show that games can truly take many forms and be many different things!