Many a time game developers have struggled to find the balance between creating a game that is too easily digested and a game too infuriatingly complex to be digested at all.

On the one hand, you want your game to be simple and inviting to the player, but on the other hand, deep and challenging. Too simple and it will fail to keep a player’s interest; too challenging and it will push the player away.

This is where the idea of “flow” comes into play.

If you’ve ever been so enthralled by a video game where hours or even days somehow magically disappear during your play-time, you’ve experienced “flow”! Similarly, if you’ve ever been so frustrated or bored with a game that you decide to stop playing, you’ve experienced the complete opposite.

The term “flow” refers to the psychological state of being completely immersed within (in the case of video games) a virtual world, or “a state of peak enjoyment, energetic focus, and creative concentration experienced by people engaged in adult play” (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

“The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

— Mihály Csikszentmihalyi

So right about now a handful of games are probably coming to mind.

And I dare say many aren’t exceedingly difficult, and there’s a reason for that:

An easy way to achieve flow is by creating a game that is complex enough only to keep a player’s wandering attention whilst also rewarding the player at an appropriate frequency.

And that brings me to the development team, ‘From Software’, and their extraordinarily unorthodox approach to implementing the sensation of flow in their famously challenging, complex games.

You may know them as the creators of ‘Dark Souls’ and ‘Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’.