Dear Player: Over-Flowing Games

‘Deep euphoria’ and ‘Sisyphean struggle’ aren’t epithets you would expect to attach to a game called Trackmania: Turbo (2016), but in playing this free-form arcade racer I feel like I might finally hit Nirvana, or Hell. Or, perhaps more interestingly, it suggests to me why we might never find an equivalent to Dark Souls. What I want to do in this piece is question what we really mean when we use Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi’s term ‘Flow’, and the implications a wider spectrum of Flows might have for our understanding of games.Flow has an extended literature going back to the 1980s, and has for decades been tasked with codifying and explaining a huge area of what we call ‘play’. Flow describes a feeling of synchronicity, of being carried along by the current, the intense meditative harmony between player and game at the supposed intersection of high skill and high challenge, and it has become the holy grail of designers. Through the models and taxonomies of Csíkszentmihályi (1987), and more recently theorists such as Schaffer (2013), the term has left a profound footprint on the language we use to articulate phenomenology in game design, but perhaps it is time to question the specificity of ‘Flow’. As games expand as a deeply varied medium, I wonder if we might want to distinguish the rhythmic flow of dance games from the ‘zone’ of first-person accuracy, the continuous linear flow of racing from the tight and self-aware flow of Dark Souls.

1

As a word, ‘Flow’ gets thrown around a lot – and I’m as guilty as they come – but I think that from my own perspective it’s become increasingly important to disentangle industry and behavioural theories of Flow, from phenomenological and epistemological senses of Flow. From works on gambling to gaming, Flow is variously taken to describe a huge range of ‘things’: a ‘mood’; a ‘mental state’; a combination of design factors (from goals to limitations); a blurring of identity; a simultaneously private and mass psychological phenomenon, a spiritual encounter; mindfulness; mindlessness; and ontological relativism. In short, as much as I love it, it’s a messy word. My own sense of it is informed far more by (such an odd assemblage as) Deleuze, De Certeau, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and not related intellectually to behavioural psychology and neuroscience’s impulse towards quantifying a mental event. So, from the behavioural design-oriented definition I want to further distinguish a mind-body kind of flow and more intense perhaps metaphysical kind of flow, as well as recognising the need to accept the vast spectrum of experiences we are talking about here.

2

So, we have a range of qualitatively different examples of Flow, and a range of epistemically different definitions Flow, to which I submit the following case study: Trackmania (2016). Trackmania: Turbo’s design is as pop, kitsch and iterative as its name suggests. This is a physics-based racing game where every player competes against time and topography, while never having to actually negotiate any other moving objects. While an online ‘race’ can involve over 100 cars, these are all collision-free ghosts of far-away players, and our race is not synchronous with the others. It’s a very introspective, if not introverted, form of racing. We have a window in which to try a lap repeatedly, on our own terms, and in racing other players we are as much racing ourselves. The game encourages an intensive process of learning through experimentation and iteration, as you grope around the track and gradually groc how to make a jump as seamlessly as possible. All the while you see the ghost car of your fastest time and the next step in efficiency – the medal your working towards – as you shave micro-seconds off your time again and again.

In practice the game is both incredibly exciting and incredibly relaxing because, I contend, there are multiple different kinds of Flow at work here. There is drift galore, the controller’s triggers often encouraging the player to tap out a rhythmic pattern of handbrake and accelerator to fine-tune spiralling descents. There is also an intense zen-like surrender to tracks involving fantastical loops and inversions as we manoeuvre as little as possible in order to keep our car from tumbling out of control. There is the flow of different materials, tires, dirt, asphalt and magnetised track, all of which handle differently with nuances and tolerances we need to learn through practice. There is speed itself which for some categories of car is a constant, while for others we find slowing down by degrees is as much an art as turning the car through space. There is the flow of puzzle-solving as we fit our vehicle around baroque obstacles and through narrow gaps, tuning our position in three dimensions to ensure we land with the minimum of friction, as well as the risk of bypassing whole stretches of the course with a careful jump. And then, most exhilarating of all, there is the flow of the rollercoaster without rails to which I will turn momentarily – the suffusion of adrenaline and endorphins from jaw-dropping stunts that offer instant gratification with a side-order of out-of-body experience.

3

Paring these down emphases the variety here, a variety which cannot be unique to this game but rather serves to demonstrate the diversity we elide with the generic term ‘Flow’. Puzzle-solving and balancing drift we might call more traditional, cognitive behavioural flow states – goal-focused, skill and challenge oriented and dependent on a relatively high degree of control and self-awareness. By contrast, controlling intensities (such as speed), learning materials (such as dirt), and surrendering the majority of control all involve taking a step back from intellectualising, and a step forward into a phenomenological world that often evades description. Trying to control our car as minimally as possible is perhaps the polar opposite of tightly managing corners and elevations, trying to fall in synch with the architecture of the level. And this brings me to a third area I struggle to find words for – a kind of disruptive flow, one which can give us a jolt of existential joy and terror as we let go completely.

This kind of ‘metaphysical flow’, one of both intense immersion but also a lack of input, puts the subject (player) and object (game) into an odd relationship. What I’m talking about is neither the more traditional concept of balanced mastery, nor the more phenomenal harmony of going with the grain, but a kind of flow which is barely ‘interactive’ in the traditional sense of the word. It’s not moving with the current or skilfully avoiding it, but surrendering to it entirely. It is closely related, I think, to Callois’ concept of Ilinx.

4

Ilinx, ‘voluptuous panic’, strikes the reader as an odd category of game when put beside Callois’ (1958) other definitions. Agôn and alea describe skill and risk – games of competition and chance. Mimicry is not far removed – simulation and representation, it describes games which might use both competitive mechanics and randomization to attempt as ‘accurate’ a performance of an activity as possible. In effect, all Agon, Alea and Mimicry are goal oriented and rule-bound – they describe the majority of games. Ilinx on the other hand, is not about skill, or luck or accuracy, but… ‘voluptuous panic’, “[destroying] the stability of perception”. Rather than interacting, it concerns being acted upon – riding something rather than driving it (let alone throwing dice at it). It is a goal-free rush, something almost purely sensory, drug-like – intensely felt, but also dissociative in way distinct to hyper-awareness or muscle-memory. We cast our car off one half-pipe with the hope of slipping smoothly down the inside of another, hundreds of metres to our left, and our euphoria comes when our hands leave the controller.

In short I think the disruption of tight control with phases of vertigo gives the player something special, nuances our understanding of Flow, and probes what we think of as a ‘game’. It is the disruption of the meditative clarity we traditionally associate with flow using the exhilaration of ilinx. With the arrival of VR and the exploration of ‘presence’ we might come to better understand this ‘panicked’ Flow, but in the meantime, riding with our camera on the bumper of a car is the closest kind of adrenaline-suffused motion-sickness we can get to this ‘disruptive’ Flow. More passive than active, more terrifying than meditative, this kind of Flow promises us intense joy if only we just… let… go.

Merlin Seller