Flow

"The notion of flow is the idea that there is a state that is characterised by complete immersion in an activity, by a constant response to stimuli, and a perfect match between your ability and the challenge in front of you. This combination puts people into a state that has often been described as feeling like ‘flow’, where you are learning and acting and responding at a super-efficient rate. This physiological phenomenon has been likened to many things – to what happens when a sportsman is hitting the perfect drive in golf, or a musician is performing a piece at the peak of their powers. It’s a notion that has really been taken up by the gaming community because games are an interactive medium in a way that nothing else is – you’re getting many of thousands of tiny responses a second. And they’re a dynamic medium, in the sense that they can offer you an environment that adapts to your performance. Recently, an influential game called Fl0w was designed by a man called Jenova Chen, the idea behind it being that if you can come up with an adaptive environment that responds to what people are doing, they are learning at a much faster rate and their ability to respond to this environment is exponentially increased, as is their pleasure and immersion in it. ‘Flow’ is a term that can be over-used and isn’t always too precisely defined, but as an idea it’s one of the most exciting things around in games theory. Because we can actually start to measure this kind of state neurologically, and start to break down this resonant but imprecise word into a number of human phenomena relating to learning, to action and to memory. This gives you powerful insights into how we can make a whole spectrum of activities more intuitive, more appealing, and more open to a wider range of abilities – how we can draw in people from higher and lower ends of abilities, and give them both a satisfying environment. It’s as relevant to schools and businesses as it is to entertainment companies, and it’s only just beginning. Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii is a beautifully designed game world – loving attention to detail, the quality of design, it’s just immaculate. I have also been really enjoying a clever cheap game on the PS3 called PixelJunk Monsters, which is a tower defence game, because I think it’s a very simple, beautifully executed example of a game you just want to play again and again and again to get better at particular tasks: in this case, building towers to defend cute furry things against cute monsters. I have always had a very soft spot for the original SimCity game. I still play it. It’s a great example of how simple rules can give rise to amazing, emergent complexity and how satisfying it is to play with a city as a virtual toy and complex system. People often miss the fact that the most popular type of games are not violent, but rather systems management games. The idea of a city, where you play god, try to make it grow, is very satisfying. I also always loved Super Metroid on the SNES. You could play it in different ways – either just complete it, or complete it and try to find every secret in the game, and it was so well designed it was an absolute pleasure to try and discover all the bits that the designers hid around the place. Oh, go on then, World of Warcraft. I have been playing since Beta – so for its total existence – and what’s interesting about it is what it allows people to do. You can go in and be a twat, you can go in and help people. I’ve made friendships within it, I play it with my wife, I play it with good friends, with a guild on the east coast of the States, who we occasionally fly over and stay with. We’ve had people who’ve never left the States before come over and stay with us. It’s a delight. It’s a game that gives people a large selection of different things to do. It doesn’t set out to suck out your life, rather just present players with a broad choice of activities. Only a few people play it obsessively at the top end; most people just enjoy it because it’s witty, post-modern, and well-designed. It is the daddy. I know you only asked for five, but I can’t finish without mentioning perhaps the cleverest single game of the last decade, Portal, which just has a brilliant concept – you fire a gun that allows you to create wormholes, instantly transporting you between any two surfaces in a maze-like 3D landscape. Brilliant gameplay, but also a wonderful script and amazing voice acting. The script is hilarious; it’s a comic masterpiece. It shows that games can be well-designed, fun to play and funny."