Tag: games

Harmonious interfaces, martial arts and flow states

Screenshot of the game flOw

There’s been a few posts from the UX com­mu­ni­ty in the recent past on flow states (most notably at 37signals’s Sig­nal vs. Noise). This got me think­ing about my own expe­ri­ences of flow and what this tells me about how flow states could be induced with interfaces.

A com­mon exam­ple of flow states is when play­ing a game (the play­er for­gets she is push­ing but­tons on a game pad and is only mind­ful of the action at hand). I’ve expe­ri­enced flow while paint­ing but also when doing work on a PC (even when cre­at­ing wire­frames in Visio!) How­ev­er, the most inter­est­ing flow expe­ri­ences were while prac­tis­ing mar­tial arts.

The inter­est­ing bit is that the flow hap­pens when per­form­ing tech­niques in part­ner exer­cis­es or even fight­ing match­es. These are all sit­u­a­tions where the ‘sys­tem’ con­sists of two peo­ple, not one per­son and a medi­um medi­at­ed by an inter­face (if you’re will­ing to call a paint brush an inter­face that is).

To reach a state of flow in mar­tial arts you need to stop think­ing about per­form­ing the tech­nique while per­form­ing it, but in stead be mind­ful of the effect on your part­ner and try to visu­al­ize your own move­ments accord­ing­ly. When flow hap­pens, I’m actu­al­ly able to ‘see’ a tech­nique as one sin­gle image before start­ing it and while per­form­ing it I’m only aware of the whole sys­tem, not just myself.

Now here’s the beef. When you try to trans­late this to inter­face design, it’s clear that there’s no easy way to induce flow. The obvi­ous approach, to cre­ate a ‘dis­ap­pear­ing’ inter­face that is unob­tru­sive, min­i­mal, etc. is not enough (it could even be harm­ful). In stead I’d like to sug­gest you need to make your game, soft­ware or site behave more like a mar­tial arts fight­er. It needs to push or give way accord­ing to the actions of it’s part­ner. You real­ly need to approach the whole thing as an inter­con­nect­ed sys­tem where forces flow back and forth. Flow will hap­pen in the user when he or she can work in a har­mo­nious way. Usu­al­ly this requires a huge amount of men­tal mod­el adap­ta­tion on the user’s part… When will we cre­ate appli­ances that can infer the inten­tions of the user and change their stance accord­ing­ly? I’m not talk­ing about AI here, but what I would like to see is stuff more along the lines of flOw.

Surprises in Animal Crossing: Wild World

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So I’ve been play­ing AC: WW for over a weeks now and I must say it has lived up to my expec­ta­tions. It’s a cute and quirky game that does not fol­low con­ven­tion­al game design rules. There is no way to die, no (real) way to loose or even win. In a sense it’s more like a toy than a game; you can play with it end­less­ly, there is no goal to reach (apart from dis­cov­er­ing all it’s lit­tle secrets).

Cockroaches

One of those secrets was par­tic­u­lar­ly fun to dis­cov­er. After a few days of play I con­vinced my girl­friend to give it a try. So she put the car­tridge in her pink DS Lite. While I was cook­ing din­ner, she went through the begin­ning stages (dri­ving to the town in a taxi, get­ting a job with Tom Nook). A bit lat­er, I picked it up again and went about my busi­ness (I think it was fish­ing, I still have a large loan to pay off after the first house expansion). 

After a while I went back into the house and found (shock! hor­ror!) a bunch of cock­roach­es run­ning around my care­ful­ly kempt inte­ri­or. “We have cock­roach­es!” I shout­ed to my girl­friend while run­ning around the house try­ing to squash them. The appar­ent source was some apples lying around. “Didn’t the ani­mals tell you don’t leave stuff lying around the house?” I asked her. They had, but where should she put them (the apples) oth­er­wise? Good point. 

We had a good laugh after that episode. Be care­ful who you play this game with; it might be a chal­lenge liv­ing togeth­er in the real world – Ani­mal Cross­ing is no dif­fer­ent! But the real genius of the game is in these things. It’s a rules based world for sure (leave apples around the house, get cock­roach­es) but the mini-nar­ra­tives that it allows you to build in this way is crazy.

Letters

Anoth­er exam­ple is the let­ters I find myself writ­ing to the ani­mals. I’m sure they’d be hap­py with any kind of let­ter, as long as I men­tion some spe­cif­ic words maybe (like ‘hap­py’ and ‘friend’). In stead, I’m writ­ing ful­ly formed sen­tences, and include lit­tle details that would be appre­ci­at­ed by real peo­ple. In that way, it’s allow­ing for sub­tle role-playing.

Charity

On the sub­ject of role-play­ing (and there not being a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ way to play the game); I know I should be hard at work pay­ing off the afore­men­tioned loan (to progress to the next ‘lev­el’). But in stead I find myself spend­ing a lot of time and mon­ey on present for the ani­mals, and dona­tions to the muse­um. That might be role-play­ing (or that might be my real per­son­al­i­ty influ­enc­ing what I find plea­sur­able in the game) but the coolest bit is that it doesn’t mat­ter; any way of play­ing is valid.

Have any oth­er peo­ple had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences with the game? Are there ways to apply this log­ic (the pat­terns inher­ent in the game) to oth­er domains?

Some closing links: