Game Flow

Have you ever thought of playing a game (or doing any activity, really) for 15 minutes, only to emerge three hours later, shielding your eyes from sunlight, looking for sustenance, and wondering where all the time had gone? If you have, it’s most likely because you were caught in the throes of game flow.

In the 1970s, a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi christened a concept called flow (or cognitive flow) which evaluated emotional states of engagement depending upon the difficulty of completing a task and the skill level possessed while completing it. When the skill possessed is low but the task is hard, people become anxious. When the task is easy but the skill level possessed is high, people become bored. In the middle of these two undesirable states is the promised land of flow, characterized by a loss of awareness and complete focus on the task at hand.

Cognitive flow

Almost every activity in Stardew Valley falls within the zone of flow. Let’s take fishing as an example. After casting your fishing line and waiting for a hit, you enter into a battle of practice and reflexes, trying to keep the ‘green box’ inside the icon of the fish.

Fishing

In case it isn’t clear from the GIF, this task is far from easy, especially when you’re just starting out. The fish icon flails, jerks, and flies across the screen, making you hurl abuse over essentially failing at a mini-game that even toddlers can understand.

But even after losing a battle, you keep coming back and getting better at it, because it follows the four tenets of game flow:

Concrete goals with manageable rules: The goal is clearly to catch the fish. The basic rules are visually clear — keep the fish icon within the green box until the meter on the right fills up. There are more complex rules too, like how your green box is affected by inertia and momentum if you move it too fast. But however complex these rules, they are fair, and thus there to be mastered. Goal achievements fit within player capabilities: The game doesn’t throw the biggest, baddest fish at you from the start. Players can always catch easy fish (with some practice), gain experience points, level up their rods, add bait and tackle, and come back to face that 40-inch tuna that hitherto troubled them. Every player is capable of starting their fishing journey, and is provided with the tools to progress through that journey. Clear and timely feedback on goals and performance: You get immediate feedback after every fishing interaction. Consider this GIF below — once the fish is caught, it jumps from the water into the player’s hands, visually confirming ownership. You see the name and size of the fish, after which it goes into the inventory on the bottom right. It’s clear that you’ve caught the fish. In terms of long-term feedback, you level up your fishing skills with time, which acts both as a reward for the work put in so far and a necessary upgrade for the challenges ahead.

Feedback from fishing

4. Diminished extraneous distraction: Once you get a hit, all distractions are off. The rod shows up on the center of your screen, and the game beseeches you to focus all your attention on it. You can’t do anything else until this interaction is over. Until the next interaction, and the hundreds after that.

Take any activity in Stardew Valley, and you’ll probably see these elements of game flow executed excellently. Mining, combat, and even comparatively tedious chores like foraging and watering crops all have the potential to be endlessly immersive.