Friday, September 23, 2016

Csikszentmihalyi deez

This DIGRA paper deals with somebody else's "Flow theory," specifically "in design and analysis of digital games." It isn't research-oriented; it's a paper about previous papers, and while this doesn't have to be a death sentence, it's an urgent warning to look for useful conclusions.

Flow's uses for games are dubious. Here's an introduction to Flow:
1. There are clear goals every step of the way
2. There is immediate feedback to one’s actions
3. There is a balance between challenges and skills
4. Action and awareness are merged
5. Distractions are excluded from consciousness
6. There is no worry of failure
7. Self-consciousness disappears
8. The sense of time becomes distorted
9. The activity becomes autotelic ["Autotelic" means done for its own sake.]
Some of these (45789) are straightforward consequences of having fun. So long as those conditions are satisfied, what's the importance of the others (1236)? If you're having fun without clear goals or immediate feedback, or with the worry of failure, what are you falling short of? Fun things are still fun.

A lost sense of time is a good (though not complete) test for fun ("time flies when you're having fun"), but this is real-world time ("self-consciousness disappears"); you can still be hyper-conscious of time in a game while having fun, such as when trying to beat a lap time in a racing simulator. Obviously in that case you can also worry about failure, and fail a lot, and still be absorbed. Some definitions make fail states essential to games. (The paper's own example of a Flow experience mentions a "dozen or so attempts to get past this one section" — many failures.)

"Clear goals every step of the way" is a difficult thing to reconcile with fun games. As the popular Sid Meier adage goes, a game is a series of interesting choices. Player choice and fixed goals clash. Players actually complain about "hand-holding" when games narrow their choices in the interests of moving them further along toward the game's goals. Many games are open-ended, with no victory conditions and no explicit objectives.

Feedback isn't always immediate. When you launch a torpedo in a Silent Hunter game, it can be over a minute before you find out whether it hit its target. There are things to do in that time (check sonar, launch more torpedoes, move in to follow up with the deck gun, begin escape), but the feedback isn't immediate and that's not a barrier to the fun.

It gets even trickier when you consider "immediate" more strictly. Street Fighter V has eight frames of lag; is it less Flow-y than Street Fighter IV, which had five? Perhaps "feedback" is best interpreted as merely being some relatively prompt UI indication that you pressed a button, so you know the game hasn't locked up. Crashes do take me out of a game.
challenge must not be too great (or else frustration would result) or too slight (yielding boredom)
A challenge/skill balance isn't always necessary for fun, but it can help. Balance is often the most hotly discussed topic in a game's online community.

Anyway, so far so familiar. Flow as described above is roughly half a mirror of commonplace ideas about games as entertainment, and half dubious advice on how to get them there. The DIGRA authors reach a similar conclusion ("The first three conditions of Flow are more or less heuristics for the kind of experience which might then lead to the remaining six").

With the addition of the following, it gets a lot worse.
meaningful growth promoting experiences

Some of these experiences can be enjoyable, but these episodes of Flow do not add up to a sense of satisfaction and happiness over time. Pleasure does not lead to creativity, but soon turns into addiction – the thrall of entropy.

a creative feeling

the ability (or even need) for Flow to provide meaning to the lives of those who experience it

on the one hand Csikszentmihalyi claims that Flow can provide meaning, and gives examples of socially relative positive meaning encountered in Flow, but on the other insists that Flow must be free of external motivating influence if it is to provide enjoyment.

Flow experiences will necessarily yield a satisfyingly meaningful outcome for individuals, and ultimately 'enjoyment' on the one hand, while admitting that some experiences, while fulfilling the stated conditions of Flow, do not yield satisfaction and enjoyment, but rather mere pleasure without meaning and potentially entropy or addiction.

society has a role in teaching young people what activities they should be enjoying in order to grow personally and culturally

better if our children learned to enjoy cooperation rather than violence; reading rather than stealing; chess rather than dice; hiking rather than watching television.

the difference between Flow as a positive, meaning producing, satisfyingly enjoyable experience and Flow as a negative, addictive, entropy inducing, merely pleasurable experience, is the individual's sense of growth in normatively agreeable directions.

at least two kinds of Flow. Good, meaningful, worthwhile, personal growth promoting Flow, and the bad, addictive, meaningless, waste of time kind.

While they might find playing games to be 'pleasurable' on occasion, the deep engagement that they experienced was not ultimately enjoyable.

Ultimately, however the experience is judged by the individual to lack enjoyment or value, and does not generate a sense of long term, personal meaning.
In other words, the old demand that entertainment be didactic, which typically comes at the cost of its power to entertain. With that in mind, no one should be surprised that on the subject of games themselves, Csikszentmihalyi Eberts. (And of course chess is used as a positive contrast to games, as if chess isn't solved and chess expertise isn't a matter of rote memorization.)
Playing the stock market in order to make money is not an autotelic experience; but playing it in order to prove one’s skill at foretelling future trends is – even though the outcome in terms of dollars and cents is exactly the same.

That is, it is the individual who is autotelic (capable of acting without external drivers), rather than the activity. Csikszentmihalyi presents examples of individuals who approach every day activities with autotelic intent (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990); essentially gamifying their everyday experiences.
Now we have come full circle — fun is presented as something you should experience while doing what you have to do anyway, not something to pursue for its own sake. Who needs games? It's jobs that are fun! Applying this theory to entertainment is the abolition of entertainment.

(How should an individual become capable of finding fun in everything, then? Drugs? Csikszentmihalyi explicitly condemns drugs as "entropy," using a word with a specific meaning in the hard sciences to make his own scorn seem more scientific.)

And of course it's connected to the Jane McGonigal idea of gamification, which is similarly destructive. If you could create fun games simply by adding a point-scoring system to an existing (and often unpleasant!) activity, game design as we know it wouldn't exist.
In data collected in interviews as part of a broad ranging study of players’ relationships with games (Salisbury 2013), a significant subset of players lamented the time they had spent playing games despite (in fact in a couple of cases reinforced by) having experienced apparently Flow like engagements when they did.
This is to be expected. Fun for its own sake is valuable in the present, while toil for a future outcome is a burden in the present but has potential value in the future. Once you are in that future, past fun has only a past value, and past toil would have only a past cost, but a present value. How easy it is then to discount the cost of that toil and the lost fun it replaces, and to overestimate what would have been gained.

These people may also simply be influenced by the low social status of games.
breaking value down into three broad areas of human experience, the economic, the social, and the cultural (Bourdieu 1986)
This is just to get Bourdieu into your bibliography, isn't it? In the previous version of this paper, cultural capital is discussed in more detail, but the obvious conclusion — that fun for its own sake can be a cultural value — is not reached. This idea is not the submission of selves to the culture, but the culture's submission to selves, since different people have fun different ways. Even if you don't enjoy what someone else does, letting them enjoy it sweetens the social contract for them. This doesn't mean fun is being had for the sake of an external value — it means that the value of fun for its own sake is recognized externally, and the pursuit of fun is tolerated, perhaps even protected and encouraged.

I wouldn't say cultural capital in the knowledge/skill sense means fun is being had for an external purpose either. The knowledge and skill acquired by having fun in games is almost entirely useful only for having more fun. I won't gain political or economic capital from my investigation of how to rebuild the German navy in Hearts of Iron. No real gunsmith has any use for my Warframe-derived knowledge that a gun can be improved by putting a blue potato in it.
10: The activity must present an opportunity for meaningful growth of the self which is valued by the individual participant.
And so the paper "solves" the problems of Flow not by discarding the theory, but by adding this clause, which is awkwardly split between personal ("valued by the individual participant") and external ("meaningful growth of the self"). The difficulties of 1236 are not addressed, nor the redundancies of 4578, nor the difference between principles of diagnosing Flow and principles of creating it (apart from a mention in passing).

It's all to easy to see how this would impact game design: a "meaningful growth" imperative disrupting the focus on fun. Set alongside "clear goals," "immediate feedback," and "no worry of failure," it's a recipe for a game that always tells you exactly what to do next, lacks long-term elements in its gameplay loops, is too easy, and promotes an ideology or has an intrusive edutainment element. (Meanwhile there are no provisions for interesting choices, different styles of play, or forward planning.)

Flow theory has nothing of value to offer gaming, and in fact agitates — especially with the new tenth condition proposed by this paper — for goals which will damage games as instruments of fun. It should be discarded. It certainly shouldn't be a research or presentation topic. Don't underestimate the existing community's knowledge of the field — gamer clichés and design proverbs are a sounder foundation to build on than commandments from academia.

In the event that I'm wrong, what advocates need to do is demonstrate the advantages of adhering to Flow theory, the more practically the better. Make a Flow mod for an existing game, bringing it closer into line with the theory (constant clear goals, immediate feedback, no worry of failure, promotes personal growth), and see how positively players react to it.

I remain skeptical. I don't play games in search of a deeper meaning. I just want to enjoy part of my life. I just want not every tick of the second hand to poke like a pin. I just want fun things to be fun.


As an aside, this is a bad idea:
Chen (2007) employs a modified sense of optimal challenge based on Flow, which calls for an approach to the design of any single-player game which will allow the player to dynamically select the difficulty of the challenge through their actions. Expert players performing identifiably expert actions make the game more difficult, while novice players who act in identifiably novice ways make the game easier.
Give us manual difficulty selection instead, or different playstyles with different levels of difficulty. Let people decide for themselves how hard they want a game to be for them. For the struggling player, having this decision taken away is a further loss of control.

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