Designing a persistent online strategy game - Department of ...

34 Chapter 4. Models & methods for evaluating games
3. An ability to concentrate on the task at hand. In everyday life, all sorts of thoughts
and worries constantly attract attention. During flow experience, all attention is
concentrated at the task at hand, so there is no room for irrelevant information.
4. A perceived sense of control over actions, and lack of a sense of worry about
loosing control. Failing an activity in real life can have consequences that are hard
to predict beforehand. It is also hard to predict the long term outcome of different
actions. In games, the consequences of failing are known or can be predicted in
advance.
5. The merging of action and awareness. All relevant skills are needed to cope with
the challenge. There is no psychic energy left to process any other information.
All attention is directed to the relevant stimuli. As a result people stop being
aware of themselves as being separate from the actions they are performing.
6. A loss of self-consciousness or preoccupation with self. This means to loose the
image, or concept, of self, not a loss of self. Often people are highly aware of their
bodies during the state of flow. An athlete is aware of all muscles in the body
during exercise. The loos of self-consciousness can lead to a feeling of union with
the environment and thus pushing the boundaries of being forward.
7. The transformation of time. During flow the time does not pass like it normally
does. Hours can fly by like minutes, but sometimes the opposite is true; an hard
passage that in real time is over in seconds can feel like going on for minutes.
One important aspect in the flow model that is also important in games is the balance
between skill and challenge [25]. When a player first start playing a game, her skills
are basic and she does not know how to overcome all the challenges in the game. It is
therefore important to have easy challenges in the beginning of the game. As the game
progress, the player skills become greater and greater and challenges that before were
hard are now easy. Therefore the game has to offer greater and harder challenges to
keep the player the “flow zone” (see figure 4.3). This is the ideal of how a game should
be designed. Unfortunately, players have different skills and expectations of the game
experience, some want to enjoy a moderately easy game and some want to devote all
their skill in the game [6] (figure 4.4).
One way to solve this problem is to offer levels off difficulty that the player can choose
from in the beginning of the game (easy, medium and hard). The disadvantage with this
approach is that the player is stuck with this choice for the rest of the game. Different
players also develop their skills at different pace, so what is medium challenging for a
player at the beginning of the game can be too easy or too hard at the end [6].
Some games let the player adjust the level of difficulty throughout the game by offering
several choices to the player. The player can for example be given several alternatives
with variable difficulty to complete a mission. The problem with this approach is that
it can be costly to implement. Too many alternatives could also confuse the player, and
so disturb the sense of flow [6].
According to Chen [6] the best way to provide an enjoyable experience for all types of
users is to embed all choices in the core activities. That means that when the player
becomes more experienced she can perform more actions and therefore choose how to
play herself. This is how it often works in the real world, whether it is skating, sewing