flOw: A game of zen

Here’s a truly gorgeous little Flash game: flOw. It’s a simple concept: You control a little amoeba-worm-like creature, and you use your mouse to move it around and eat smaller things floating around in the primordial soup. Each chomp makes your amoeba longer, and more “powerful”. There are also little blue and red thingies; eating a red one dives you down one layer deeper into the soup (if you think of “deeper” as “receding away from you, inwards towards your computer screen”), and blue ones make you rise back upwards. As you go deeper, you begin to face various freaky cephalopodic enemies that try to kill you, but they also drop power-ups that make you bigger and more powerful yet.

The interesting thing about flOw is that the designer, Jenova Chen, designed it based on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow. Csikszentmihalyi called “flow” the exhilirating sense of engagement we get when we’re wrapped up in a task that is perfectly matched to our skills. If it’s too easy, we get bored; too hard, we get frustrated. But hitting the precise mid-point puts us in “the zone” of flow.

Most video games, Chen argues, try to adjust their difficulty on the fly so they perfectly match the player’s aptitude. But games are also largely based on the emotional logic of the side-scroller — by which the game slowly ramps up in intensity as you go along, under the theory that it will tease you to slowly improve your skills. Games like this take their metaphoric cues from the relentless march of time; you can’t opt to scroll backwards if you’re getting freaked out. Chen designed flOw in a different way, as a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal notes:

Mr. Chen’s concept hinges on users unknowingly setting their own difficulty level. “Not with an option box that says easy, medium and hard,” he insists. “I want the player to control it subconsciously, based on what they’re doing.” In the face of a frustrating enemy, players are free to avoid the fight and search for more food, evolving into a more potent form. (Mr. Chen says the first squid-like enemy, encountered at level five, was made excessively difficult on purpose to see if players would instinctually flee from an unfair fight.)

On the other hand, if creature-on-creature combat is too easy, players may gravitate toward more fighting and less eating, and that self-imposed diet will make “flOw” tougher. Mr. Chen hopes players over time will self-select the correct difficulty — keeping the game engaging, but not frustrating — without ever really thinking about it.

An interesting idea! Not entirely revolutionary; one of the reasons people like World of Warcraft so much is that you can choose to plunge in and pick the most dangerous, hard-driving fights one after the other, or ease back and simply kill the same enemies over and over again to slowly gain experience.

What’s far, far more revolutionary about flOw is its artistic beauty. The graceful, looping movements of the ameoboid life-forms, coupled with the trippy, arrival-of-the-mothership ambient music, give the game a totally meditative feel. Trippy!

(By the way, Chen has previously created Cloud, an equally zen-like game where you fly through the air collecting clouds and drawing patterns with them. I wrote about it earlier this year for my column in Wired News.)

(Thanks to El Rey for this one!)


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I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
V. A. To me death seems to be an evil.
M. What, to those who are al­ready dead? or to those who must die?
A. To both.
M. It is a mis­ery, then, be­cause an evil?
A. Cer­tain­ly.
M. Then those who have al­ready died, and those who have still got to die, are both mis­er­able?
A. So it ap­pears to me.
M. Then all are mis­er­able?
A. Ev­ery one.

January 24, 2010 » 03:22 PM

One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

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January 15, 2010 » 01:36 PM

BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

January 14, 2010 » 10:04 PM

“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)

January 11, 2010 » 01:45 PM

I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.

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