Flow State is God?

I just read this amazing post, 'To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction', by Joey Schutz. It talks about the correlation between "game designer's holy grail" aka. "flow state", and addiction design in gambling and casinos. How in the latter context the techniques to induce replay are used knowingly and in the former the techniques are glorified. Joey crystallizes a lot of vague thoughts that I've had when playing videogames. There's also great additional thoughts by SRAEKA and thecatamites in the post's comment section.

I recently started a new character in From Software's Elden Ring. I wanted to try a magician build, as usually I play very fast close combat in these kind of games. I love this game and explored the Lands Between for a hundred hours with the first character, never defeated the final boss, but was still satisfied once I put it down. I also love the company's earlier game, the first Dark Souls, even when I similarly never finished it. Dark Souls somehow felt nostalgic from the very first moments. I had never played the game before, and still it felt like going back to my childhood favourites, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and its sequel Majora's Mask. I can't quite articulate why this was, but I imagine it had to do with the sense of place in those worlds and the fact that player wasn't held by hand like in a lot of modern open-world games.

Dark Souls is hard. The system where you go through gauntlets of hard enemies, from safe bonfire to the next, felt really good for pacing. When you died you dropped your unused experience points that you had gathered from defeated enemies. You could get the points back if you reached the place where you dropped them. As long as you didn't die again. If you died while trying to get them back, you would lose them forever. This made a great feeling of rush bubble up inside you: "Can I get them back?" Once you had enough points you could level up your character at a bonfire, to challenge even stronger enemies.

Joey gives us a great anecdote about chess, how when a well flowing match ends suddenly in mistakes, you get this feeling of wanting a rematch with the newly found knowledge. But to start a rematch you have to clear the chess board and put the pieces back by hand. And that gives you enough time to think in peace if you actually want to play again or if there's something else you could be doing.

For me, there's a similar, clear cutting point in Dark Souls. The big frustration of defeat after the rush of trying to get your experience points back. This is different from the "calming work" you have to do when wanting a chess rematch. Dark Souls has you in an amazing flow state, which is only intensified with the 'getting back rush.' But as the game is fundamentally very hard, you're bound to die twice in a row at some point. And there you have a good reason to close the game and try again another day.

In Elden Ring the developers managed to design around that exit door. They essentially injected the modern open-world game formula into Dark Souls' systems. While Dark Souls only had two or three "routes" you could try your hand at when getting defeated in another, in Elden Ring the world is HUGE and when you're defeated by strong enemies, you have what feels like an infinite other "routes" to explore. And while exploring you get stronger all the time with experience points. And soon you can defeat the ones that defeated you before. The flow state persists and there's no clear cutting point. The world is designed in a way that has something around every corner. Or not even around corner, but more like when you find something, you can already see a glimpse of the next two things.

You can see just a tiny sliver of the Elden Ring's world in this screenshot. And you can find items and challenges every few meters there. Image courtesy of From Software.

I love Elden Ring, but this induces severe addiction in me. I can't stop playing. I believe videogames are perfect for that "world: off" switch, that we all need sometimes. But there's a line (different for everyone!) that when crossed, it all becomes just unhealthy. After reading Joey's post I realized I felt the same in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its sequel Tears of the Kingdom. All these games have the perfect combination of systems and world design that makes me want to try again and again and again, without the condescending handholding feeling that for example Witcher 3 left me with. I guess this is the natural conclusion to "great" game design when we let the market control the process.

I've been part of (indie) videogame developer scene for a long time. And I realized I've been unknowingly inducted into a cult of "flow state is god" and "flow state is unquestionably a good thing." "The longer you can keep the player in the flow state, the better the game has to be. Meaning the better game designer you are." While I believe there's a place for flow (the off switch) I honestly can't think about it like I've been taught to think about it anymore.

I want videogames that gives you clear cutting off points into the flow. Places where you're given time to think if you want to restart or continue on. I want games that don't just give a crude exit, but are designed from the ground up into something that you can think about, or let your unconscious try to solve in the background, while not playing. I want interesting worlds that you dream about when not in there, without the compulsion to go back. Like a lot of times when I'm baffled by a complex programming problem, I let it (and myself!) rest. Come back to it tomorrow or a day after. And a lot of times the problem is solved just like that. This sounds like I should be playing hard puzzle games, but I like action games! I want to play an action adventure game like that!

This will definitely be a part of my toolbox when designing and programming my videogames. I'm thinking about joining the Löve Game Jam that is starting soon, with a simple arcade game idea inspired by some of the core systems of Dark Souls (who isn't inspired by it lol.) And I will definitely think about the stuff Joey wrote while making it.

Some thoughts that came while writing this, that I'd like to blog about in the future:

• Go deeper into techniques and ideas on how to design a game that you want to think about while not playing it
• Trying to articulate what made Dark Souls feel nostalgic like going back to Ocarina of Time
• Ruminate on why games like Witcher 3 feels bad to me

Thanks for reading! Cheers!

Jukio