Annotations ¶
In the years since Csikszentmihalyi’s groundbreaking research, the game industry has transformed flow into a tool to intensify consumption, businesses use games to spur consumer loyalty, and corporations cultivate creativity, fun, and playfulness to increase worker productivity and mask exploitative working conditions.30
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Marxist philosopher György Lukács had also seen that play was coming, but he examined its coming critically rather than optimistically. In The History of Class Consciousness, Lukács warned that some would see play and art as a means by which modern life “may be salvaged from the deadening effects of the mechanism and reification” ([1923] 1971, 139), but people would busy themselves in individual play and playful contemplation without preparing to collectively solve political problems.39 They would go about embracing play and art as compensations for an alienated life, not using this alienation to forge political affiliation between the exploited and oppressed.
As strange as it may sound, we could understand our unfolding ludic century as a battleground between Csikszentmihalyi and Lukács, two Hungarians with very different visions of how to transform reality. For the former, play and flow would nourish the soul and save humans from a life without enjoyment. For the latter, play would contain and manage the rise of class consciousness, compensating for alienation without curing its causes.
The game scholar Helen Kennedy suggests that we would benefit from an ideological examination of video games that focuses on how they position subjects in ways that are beyond their intentional control. She explains that she “would even relate this to a reworking of Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) notion of flow to suggest that flow is not so much about a state of perfect control but more a perfect submission to the technologies” (quoted in Arthurs and Zacharias 2007, 100).2
If many video games facilitate flow, we need to understand the ideologies that lurk within it. The experience of flow often seems natural, benign, and innocuous. It is like flOw, which offers itself as a serene, calming, and beautiful experience that seems obviously less ideological than the violent first-person shooter games that populate the ocean of mainstream video games. Yet ideology travels within the protective garb of the seemingly obvious, natural, and neutral. As delivery systems for flow, often video games are not innocuous forms of mass entertainment, but rather position players ideologically through the production of flow experiences.
On closer inspection, flow theory privileges individuals over social collectives. It embraces unified, intentional agents over fragmented subjects. It privileges self-determination over the idea that human action and consciousness are shaped by external forces. It foregrounds growth and accumulation over stability. Finally, it embraces action over critical examination. By examining these issues and plumbing the depths of flow theory and its history, the common perception of flow—as an experience of intense involvement in an activity—begins to appear more nuanced, and even problematic.
In interviews, mountain climbers, doctors, chess players, artists, basketball players, and others reported being absorbed completely in the “flow” of an activity that they found eminently enjoyable. They described their immersion as a feeling of being carried away by an activity that swept them up into a stream of action. Eventually, flow replaced the more academic-sounding term autotelic experience, which the psychologist and his students were using to describe this absorbing state (Csikszentmihalyi [1975] 2000, xviii). Autotelic activities (from the Greek auto-, meaning “self,” and telos, meaning “end”) contain their ends in themselves and are intrinsically motivating. People do not pursue these activities for external rewards or extrinsic reasons, but rather because the activity is rewarding and enjoyable in itself. The autotelic nature of flow aligns it closely with play, which is also commonly understood as autotelic.4
For Csikszentmihalyi, the realization of this transformation had to begin with individuals. “The roots of the discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power” (1990, 12). In this worldview, the problems that people experience in Western democracies are not due to external causes such as poverty, inequality, oppression, exploitation, war, and so on; instead, they are internal feelings of separation from everyday life and individual feelings of a loss of control, boredom, anxiety, and rampant self-criticism.
Play and flow were perfect ideals for neoliberal, individualistic democracies and capitalist societies. At least theoretically, play and flow offered a way to salvage the power of individual consciousness when faced with oversocialization or the perceived threat of communism. They also helped to overcome the problem that consciousness was under attack, not by class consciousness, but by fragmented modern life. With the rise of the postindustrial world in the 1970s, individuals were increasingly required to solve their own problems, with diminishing assistance from the social sphere, and thus individual consciousness required unity, empowerment, and self-determined focus. Flow offered a solution to this problem as well.
The theoretical implications of the desire to empower consciousness are important because flow theory moves against twentieth-century critical theories of the subject, like feminism, Marxism, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis. These theories identify the external forces shaping human consciousness in order to criticize the illusions and ideologies of individual agency. Instead, flow theory constructs a model of the self and a flowing subject that promotes a powerful sense of agency, unity, individual growth, and mastery of consciousness through self-determination.
But what is the energy that drives human actions and is associated with flow? In Csikszentmihalyi’s contribution to the published conference proceedings, “From Thermodynamics to Values: A Transition Yet to Be Accomplished,” he struggles with the idea that the natural sciences could assist the sociologist’s understanding of human behavior (1971). Because thermal energy could not explain the complexity of human society, he instead mentions Marx’s theory of productive labor and Freud’s foregrounding of repressed sexuality as engines of social and cultural change. Yet, dissatisfied with Marxism and Freudian thought because they undermined individual agency, he speculates that there might be a “third form of energy” that drives human action (1971, 164). Play and flow became this third form of energy that he was seeking, or at least, they were examples of focused attention and consciousness that channeled and motivated human behavior.
Csikszentmihalyi calls flow an optimal experience not only because it is enjoyable, but also because it is supposedly the most favorable and productive state of the subject. The flow experience concerns the complete organization of consciousness, where all the information that enters consciousness becomes part of a harmonious pattern (1990, 7). In the flow experience, psychic order arises when each bit of experienced information is organized to obtain the same goal. Csikszentmihalyi offers the example of a rock climber who completes each movement in relation to the goal of a climb. Each concentrated moment of attention is focused on achieving this goal. The ordering of consciousness functions like a chain, where each bit of information that enters consciousness through the active direction of attention follows logically from the one before, and so on. Harmonious order emerges when these discrete actions merge, a process that Csikszentmihalyi likens to a projected film where the separate, static photographs on a celluloid filmstrip become fluid motion on the screen (1975a, 85–86). Consciousness becomes a stream of consciousness, and each discrete action dissolves into a river of continuous action.
But where does this preoccupation with growth and self-expansion come from? Csikszentmihalyi’s answers are not entirely satisfying. For example, he suggests that “it is difficult to ignore challenges” when one encounters them, and that we fundamentally seek “to stretch our skills” because this leads to further enjoyment (1990, 75).17 One sees this upward climb of flow in a diagram from Csikszentmihalyi’s book Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning, where the desire to stay within flow drives the growth of skills (figure 1.3). A critical answer to the question of flow’s connection to growth is that flow theory parallels capitalism’s obsession with growth and its endless search to produce surplus value, expand its boundaries and markets, and accumulate capital that is reinvested in the growth of the system. Flow theory’s model of the flowing subject parallels these conditions: expanding boundaries of the individual self, accumulation of new skills to reinvest in the growth and ordering of the self, further challenges to overcome that will profit the self, and so on. Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi refers to flow and enjoyment as “the psychological equivalent of building capital” (2003, 76).
From this perspective, advocating for growth of the self is problematic. In her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich critiques positive thinking, positive psychology, and self-help ideologies, arguing that they are easily aligned with consumerism, “the individual’s hunger for more,” and the growth imperative of profit (2009, 33–34).
Csikszentmihalyi indicated that replacing consumerist behavior with the pursuit of nonmaterialist flow activities “may be the hardest and least likely scenario” (2004, 104). He argues that a large set of cultural habits would need to change, which requires society to implement regulations and institutional supports to encourage this transformation. Moreover, he asks, “How would the World Bank, the Enrons and Savings-and-Loans and their political allies react if a new world-view based on voluntary simplicity really gained ground?” (2004, 104). Not kindly, of course; but this is why collective forms of action are more palpable and effective responses to capitalism and its ideology of growth than focusing on empowering individual consciousness and the growth of the self. The fact that flow theory emerges as an individualized alternative to social action and privileges powerful forms of individual agency over class consciousness can inhibit collective responses to dominant forms of power and pathological forms of productivity.
Csikszentmihalyi admits that flow “is not ‘good’ in an absolute sense,” and that particular flow experiences must be judged according to their personal, social, and material impacts (1990, 70). It is possible that this is why he rarely discusses video games, seeing them as consumerist flow activities and technological forms of play that depend on material resources and focus growth in the wrong direction. Video games that package and sell flow experiences work against the cultivation of flow activities that produce complex growth without depending on material resources.
If the key to flow is the growth of the self and the accumulation of skills to meet increasing challenges, flow theory devalues the development of skills such as performing critical evaluation and identifying forces of determination that shape human consciousness beyond the experience of flow. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler laments that capitalism, consumption, and digital media technologies such as video games and social media are producing “a colossal historic regression creating massive irresponsibility and adult infantilization” (2010, 42). He continues, “This regression is mistakenly called ‘growth’; mistaken because ‘growth’ in this context means merely what becomes larger—whereas irresponsibility is the reduction of what should be larger: esprit—individual and collective mind/spirit, whose modern form is critical consciousness” (2010, 43; emphasis in original). Critical consciousness means becoming aware of the forces of exploitation, domination, and control that limit individuals and social groups from pursuing freedom and emancipation. If the growth of the self is a key component of flow theory, then the reduction of critical consciousness is its ideological flipside.
Arguably, the twentieth century saw a remarkable growth in critical consciousness, where theorists and philosophers adopted a critical stance toward capitalism, and also toward consciousness itself, revealing that human consciousness is shaped by external forces such as the economy, society, race, sexuality, and technology. The idea of a growing, flowing subject works against these developments and cultivates a powerful form of humanism that places human intentions as the determining force that shapes the course of history. This accounts for one reason why flow theory has largely been ignored within media studies and critical theory. Critical theorists in the last half of the twentieth century analyzed the death of the author, decentered and fragmented subjects, in order to raise awareness about the absence of full agency and intentionality. Meanwhile, flow theory advocated for a subject fully capable of agency and actionable intentions. While poststructuralists and media theorists in the 1970s and 1980s drew on Freudian ideas to argue that the subject was driven by sexual impulses stemming from unconscious wishes, Marxist ideas about the determining force of the economy, or linguistic theories in order to show that the structure of language itself prevented an experience of full subjectivity, flow theory posited that a subject could attain fullness, harmony, and unity.
While critical theorists in the twentieth century argued that centered, unified subjects were ideals and ideological constructions that potentially limited the goals of collective emancipation, the theory of flow posited the unified subject as the precondition for social liberation. While critical theorists explored antihumanist versions of the subject—meaning that individuals do not entirely control their actions and human intentions are not the most powerful cause of historical change—flow theory focused on the masterful possibilities of human consciousness and agency. Critical consciousness and antihumanist approaches take a step back from humans and their actions, gaining critical distance from experience in order to think more deeply about dominant and oppressive forces that circumscribe consciousness. Yet in flow experiences, “the actor has no need to adopt an outside perspective from which to consciously intervene” writes Csikszentmihalyi (1975a, 85). Individuals are swept away within the flow of action, which creates a momentum that inhibits adopting an outside perspective from which to reflect on and consider the meanings of their actions. Csikszentmihalyi writes, “Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no reason to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic” (1990, 54). If the growth of the self is the key to flow, and this growth concerns the accumulation of skills by an actor who overcomes an activity’s challenges, then the flow experience itself does not cultivate growth of the skill of critical evaluation because this is precisely what is erased through the magic of flow, a point that I return to in chapter 4. Flow experiences privilege action over critical evaluation and attaining outside perspectives. Yet critically evaluating the reasons for human action is an essential hallmark of critical consciousness.
Flow theory teaches us, as Csikszentmihalyi writes, that “to stay healthy one need not change the external stressors—just one’s mind” (1993, 47–48).
For example, while Marx identified the importance of the capitalist economy to shaping alienated consciousness (e.g., workers feeling separated from their labor), flow theory does not address economic solutions to this problem; it suggests that individual agents with a stronger consciousness can solve issues of alienation on their own. This is the idea that we do not need to remove (or solve) external causes of anxiety and worry, but simply change our minds and distract ourselves from these causes—an idea that I explore further in chapter 2. If capitalism alienates our attention, exploits workers, and causes stress through its pathological productivity, then we do not need to change and remove capitalism, flow theory suggests, but rather train ourselves to ignore or cope with its effects. This view explains the surprising and disquieting claims that Csikszentmihalyi often returns to in his work, where, for example, even prisoners in concentration camps can learn to block out their reality, seeming “sometimes even to enjoy their experience” (1975a, 193).22 The potential implications of such a view—when applied to other instances of oppression such as economic exploitation, patriarchy, racism, discrimination, and so on—can lead to a dangerous denial of reality and the continuation of violence and injustice. In this situation, flow might become more than a coping mechanism to distract people from the cruel conditions of reality; it might become a form of psychosis that disconnects people from reality.
Moreover, critical race and feminist theorists who challenge the idea of a unified subject and powerful agent do so in order to reveal it as an ideal construct linked to dominant social norms. From this perspective, challenging the false unity of the self and individual aims at dismantling a privileged form of subjectivity that is white, male, straight, Western, colonial, and bourgeois. If flow theory claims universality and timelessness, then the flowing subject opens a door to these dominant conceptions of the subject. This point is driven home by the fact that in our historical moment, flow theory is used to tout The Rise of Superman—as the title of Kotler’s book (2014b) proclaims—and self-optimization gurus and influencers seem to address a white, privileged, and often masculine audience.24 It also driven home by Csikszentmihalyi’s framing of psychic capital and flow as being threatened by racialized others. For example, he worries that immigrant workers might form a “troublesome underclass” that saps the psychic capital of individuals and a nation (1993, 90). When Csikszentmihalyi turns to discuss psychic energy and flow within society writ large, it is not only boredom and anxiety that threaten the absorption and harmony of flowing subjects, but racialized others who steal the psychic resources of the powerful.25
Csikszentmihalyi began his career wondering if there was an alternative to Marxist, collective approaches to solving problems of alienation within society. He wondered if democracies could develop an ideal that could motivate individual human action toward this end without taking recourse in an oversocialized vision of collective revolution. This required the embrace of ideas that would strengthen and grow individual consciousness and powerful forms of human agency. In his early research, he studied people intensely involved in activities for long periods of time in order to understand what motivated them. This led him to play and eventually to flow.
The flow state became the ideal that individuals could strive toward. Yet flow theory promotes ideas that align with neoliberal ideologies of individuality and the pursuit of economic growth. Ideologically, flow theory privileges individuality over social collectives, self-determination over theories of external determination, growth over stability, and action over critical examination. Thus, flow theory resurrects an ideology of the powerful human agent striving toward high levels of humanist achievement that counters critical approaches from the twentieth century that challenged the hubris of human consciousness. If many video games promote and disseminate flow, then we must entertain the idea that games can also function as vehicles for the ideological content of flow. When he began his research in the 1960s and 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi could not have imagined the rise of video games that would burgeon into a powerful media industry. He rarely mentions video games in his prolific scholarship, even though they exemplify flow activities and flow has been instrumental to game design. A game like TGC’s flOw is often upheld as an expressive alternative to more overtly violent, aggressive, and ideological offerings in the video game industry, yet flOw reveals subtle ideologies within games that we tend to overlook. When we encounter a critique claiming that “video games are ‘weaponized’ texts, or disrupters of psychic stability” (Garite 2003, 8), it seems almost comical when mentioned next to a game like flOw, which intentionally deweaponizes its environment and seeks to create psychological harmony, focus, and flow (at least before the addition of the downloadable content mentioned previously). Yet this positive vision of games as producing flowing subjects is not innocuous because it establishes ideas of a stable, centered, universal, and growing subject that pushes aside the critical, antihumanist insights from the twentieth century and threatens the project of cultivating and raising critical consciousness
Game scholars Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska provide an overview of ideological approaches to video games, but they also remind us that a “strong measure of caution is always necessary when attributing to games the ability to contribute actively to the ideological shaping of the player” (2006, 207). They explain that while a video game might give a player a sense of mastery and control—like flow, which supports an ideology of the powerful nature of individual agency—perhaps another player will understand that this powerful sense of self and agency is impossible outside the game, thus believing that such agency is futile in the real world. Moreover, they point to the idea that play potentially subverts or ruptures the rigid functioning of ideology (2006, 206).
Raz was inspired to become a psychonaut upon reading Whispering Rock’s promotional pamphlet. “You were born with a special gift. But the people around you treat it like a curse,” it says, “Back home, your powers make you a loner, an outcast, a circus freak. But in this dojo, in this psychic dojo, they make you a hero.” While ostensibly about the psychic powers of gifted children, these words invoke the idea of socially rejected gamers, the dated stereotype of shunned loners playing games in their parents’ basement. In Psychonauts, gamers cast off their shame and use their gaming skills to solve the serious personal problems of adults. Psychonauts suggests that the psychic powers of play will heal depression, apathy, anxiety, and alienation, thus freeing humanity from its suffering. Play will save the day.
By promoting the strengthening of the individual as a way to solve personal and social issues, flow might produce and sustain alienation instead of eradicating it.
“Flow was a therapy for the individual,” writes media scholar Jay Bolter, “who found herself in a society without universally agreed values: each individual had to find her own path toward fulfillment” (2019a, 166).
For the majority of players, it is probably difficult to achieve mastery in Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, or even a feeling remotely akin to absorption or flow, because the game immediately demands a high level of skill. Players likely will feel frustrated and angry from the beginning, but this is the point. The game is not designed to facilitate flow. Foddy himself says that he is not interested in “good design,” which he says is “a smooth experience where you’re never confused, you’re never stumped as to what to do, you’re never annoyed, you’re never bored, you’re on a perfect difficulty ramp that gets you just enough competency so that you’re always exerting the same amount of effort and that you’re always engaged at the exact same level” (2018). This sounds a lot like flow. The conceit of the game is to toss out standard difficulty ramping, where a game’s challenges increase gradually and incrementally along with a player’s skills. Instead, players must work hard from the beginning to improve their skills and succeed.
Thoughts of my own inadequacy, anger at Foddy’s distracting voice-over, and frustration at the sensitivity of the mouse constantly derailed my actions. Awareness of myself, my anxieties, my computer, and the real world spilled into my thoughts. From the perspective of flow theory, when personal skills are unbalanced with challenges, individuals adopt outside perspectives on their actions, worrying about the self and its failures and wondering why they are doing something instead of doing it.4 As Turner explains, “‘Flow’ perceived from the ‘outside’ becomes non-‘flow’ or anti-‘flow.’ Pleasure gives way to problem, to worry, to anxiety” (1982, 56).
“Unlike so many other nations in the contemporary world,” Csikszentmihalyi writes, “we can’t blame our problems on a harsh environment, on widespread poverty, or on the oppression of a foreign occupying army. The roots of the discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power” (1990, 12).
Critic of capitalism Mark Fisher calls this “responsibilisation,” where “each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures” (2014, 9).
Much has been written about Diner Dash, particularly about the gendering of casual games and its mixture of play and work.8 Game scholar Shira Chess argues that time-management games like Diner Dash can be understood as helping women to cope with a third shift, a term scholars use to describe moments in women’s everyday life where negotiations between the first shift at work and the second shift at home are mulled over (2012). This third shift can be an occasion of intense self-reflection, where one works through the anxieties produced during the first two shifts (Bolton 2000). Games like Diner Dash inhabit this third shift, substituting the pleasurable anxiety of multitasking play for psychological anxiety and thus helping to shield players from potential self-criticism and worry in their own lives.
In Celeste, we never know what causes Madeline’s depression. Players only see her malfunctioning self, not the cause of this malfunction. This cause is unimportant to the game. Only Madeline’s recovery matters. Yet, as philosopher Sara Ahmed writes, “To recover can be to re-cover, to cover over the causes of pain and suffering” (2010, 216). Celeste foregrounds coping as self-struggle and the resolution of conflict in terms of strengthening and unifying the self. In my estimation, this distracts us from seeing the demand to manage oneself as a potential cause and containment of suffering. In Celeste, the malfunctioning self is the cause of Madeline’s ailment, but the solution is to repair the glitch, unifying the self and strengthening it.
From a different political standpoint than the politics of enjoyment, one should not manage the self and its symptoms, but rather critique the self as causing alienation. From this perspective, capitalism sells solutions—self-help books, antidepressants, even video games—to depressed and inactive selves that turn forms of self-management into products and what Fisher (2009) calls captured discontent. From a more radical perspective, the goal would be to invest desire along lines that free us from these forms of containment.12 “We are not depressed; we’re on strike,” write the political collective the Invisible Committee. They continue, “For those who refuse to manage themselves, ‘depression’ is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep toward political disaffiliation” (2009, 34; emphasis in original). Instead of responding to the malignancy of self-criticism by purchasing temporary solutions or empowering the individual (Celeste, Diner Dash, Psychonauts), radical agendas reimagine depression as resistance, as a step toward dissolving the demand to be a self or a normal individual. Depression becomes an opportunity for channeling struggle and anger toward overcoming or abandoning oppressive norms, not coping with its effects. The game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice offers an illustration of this idea.
One key idea from this chapter is that flow theory emphasizes looking away from the causes of alienation. Csikszentmihalyi says that the politics of enjoyment begins with “the recognition that there is such a thing as positive enjoyment,” and one can focus on this positivity (1975a, 197). Yet turning attention toward enjoyment can also turn attention away from what causes suffering.16 This can be indispensable for coping—and Csikszentmihalyi says that flow is useful even “on the battlefront, on a factory assembly line, or in a concentration camp” (1975a, 36)—but the dark side of the politics of enjoyment and its extension over all of life is that the structural problems that lead to war, alienation, inequality, poverty, racism, patriarchy, and other social ills are not corrected, but rather painted over. The politics of enjoyment becomes just a bandage. No doubt bandages are necessary and useful, but they do not heal the cause of the bleeding. This is why Ahmed argues in The Promise of Happiness, “To recognize suffering by recognizing the cause of suffering is thus a part of the revolutionary cause” (2010, 168). From this perspective, suffering motivates the quest to understand what causes the bleeding, which can also motivate social action to change these causes.
Flow theory contends that individual consciousness must be repaired first, and only then can social transformation occur. The problem is that individual consciousness cannot truly repair itself. Flow might mollify the symptoms of alienation, but eventually worry and anxiety will break through the shield created by flow. In Celeste, Madeline must accept that a final solution to her problems does not exist, and she must resolve to cope with her anxiety forever, integrating Badeline into her being. In Hellblade, the last battle presents an endless stream of enemies until the player can no longer cope with the overwhelming, external challenges. Diner Dash ends with Flo almost reaching her destiny—the completion of her work, the overcoming of distracting demands, and her attainment of leisure—only to have this destiny truncated by an alarm that represents her return to work and her harried life.19 These games foreground the inevitable failure of the individual to solve the problems that emerge from outside the self.
Increasingly, games implement dynamic forms of difficulty adjustment that calibrate challenge on the fly. Chen describes dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) as an “ideal concept in the game design field. The difficulty of a game should change dynamically based on its player’s skill and performance” (2007, 8).
Zanac
In her estimation, the video game industry wants to create “lifelong gamers: people who can balance their favorite games with full and active lives” (2011, 43; emphasis in original).
This generosity depicts the video game industry as a socially responsible business that marries profits with customer care. Yet if the industry wants to create lifelong gamers, then the fastest route to this goal is through addiction.22 Writing for the website Gamasutra, game industry veteran Tony Ventrice (2012) explains that “addiction is a common phenomenon in successful games and tends to go by the name of ‘flow’ in the industry.” Indeed, capitalism increasingly revolves around addictive media forms such as online gaming, gambling, and pornography.23 Addiction and absorbing experiences like flow even function as ideologies and marketing tools in the video game industry, especially for online casual games. User comments such as “I’m so addicted to this game!” and “I can’t stop!” proliferate on mobile distribution platforms, and developers use these comments to sell games and highlight their absorbing properties.
Recommendation algorithms used on platforms such as YouTube or Netflix also recede. We know they exist, but they function behind the scenes as invisible, proprietary programs that we cannot completely understand or access. They structure an “invisual” flow, as media scholar Christopher Cox calls it; this means that hidden recommendation algorithms organize what potentially becomes visible, what “possibilities and limitations” exist for the user (2018, 441)
Uricchio argues that planned flow always had an air of ideology to it because “the timing of program elements and their organization are something other than they are declared to be, just as the world of appearances belies its material contradictions” (2004, 177). While viewers focus on the content of media, planned flow and its more recent mutation into hidden algorithms work in the background to facilitate the ongoing process of consumption and watching.
Reality TV
An entire history of hidden rules and algorithmic adjustments exists. These are not features such as Easter eggs—which players salivate over and are meant to be found—but secrets, buried in code, not meant to be found or thought about. A recent Twitter thread exposes some of these hidden rules in popular games. Game designer Jennifer Scheurle (2017) asked developers to discuss some of the hidden mechanics in their games. The responses were, well, revealing. The developers of the Gears of War series noted that novice players were given damage bonuses before their first few kills to keep them playing (or “stay,” as Williams might have said). A BioShock developer mentioned that shots from enemies always miss in the beginning of an encounter, and Big Daddies—a major enemy in the game—slow down when they are behind the player.26 These examples point toward concealed rules that seek to balance challenges with player skills without the player being aware of it, which reasserts questions of control in games.
Players are haunted by the possibility that their perceived achievement is false, or, if players are on the other side of the adjustment in a multiplayer experience, that they have been cheated. This even creates a situation where DDA systems do not cause and sustain enjoyment, but perhaps the opposite.
While includification—or designing games to include players based on differing levels of ability—is a laudable pursuit, tailoring video games for individual players also buttresses the economics of commercial gaming.27 When summarizing research in the field of personalized gaming, scholars Sander Bakkes, Chek Tan, and Yusaf Pisan note “that game personalisation raises player loyalty and enjoyment which in turn makes gaming experience a (commercial) success” (2012, 2). This parenthetical mention of commercial success highlights that the economic forces behind personalization are often understood as secondary to player enjoyment. This is another example of how the discourse of enjoyment and fun obscures a deeper, commercial logic. If the ideal of personalized gaming “is a game in which every single component of the game is tailored to the individual player” (Bakkes, Tan, and Pisan 2012, 1), then game design, DDA research, and personalized games research will mix player-centric, design-centric, and algorithmic monitoring systems into media forms that will increasingly offer individuals customized cocoons of consumption. These individualized channels of enjoyment will expand to cover the entire flow diagram (as shown previously in figure 3.3), thus extending playtime and optimal experiences for all while extending profits for the few.
Players search for experiences beyond flow and challenge-based immersion, and players even appreciate games that seek to produce flow through DDA systems for diverse, multidimensional reasons, not just because they are absorbing. Understanding flow as a natural component of games or as an ideal, optimal experience that games should pursue smooths over the diversity of their possibilities. Nevertheless, at this historical juncture, the intensification of playful consumption through the use of flow theory will likely persist and escalate with the further development of DDA systems, personalized gaming, machine learning, and other elements, even if this will occur largely within mainstream game titles or independent games bent on market success.
Vampire Survivors / Balatro
Today, the absorbing and enjoyable properties of flow align with capitalism and its mobilization of enjoyment to sustain consumption. The desire to liberate games from commodification, flow from games, or even play from games stands in for a deeper desire to free ourselves from capitalism’s dynamic adjustment of our desires to the rhythms of its streams of consumption.
The fact that flow theory is central to games as a medium produces a dark vision of contemporary media culture. Games, play, and flow experiences inscribe a focused attention, meaning that they align with an attention economy that seeks to extend media consumption. Why have video games come to dominate contemporary culture and entertainment? Why are people playing so many video games? Why has gamification arisen as a way to create loyal customers and intensify consumption? These are multifaceted questions to be sure, but when games and play are commodified or used to aid the process of commodifying other experiences through gamification, their cultural associations with fun and enjoyment will mask the processes of commodification at work under a veneer of innocence. Why do we spend so much time (and money) playing video games? Many of us would probably respond because they are fun, because they offer an enjoyable escape from a harsh reality, or even because they challenge us. We are less likely to respond that we play video games because they are designed to capture our attention while keeping us playing and paying. We are less likely to exclaim that many video games are designed to technically induce flow, as Henricks says, and thus seduce us to keep playing (2015, 218). Living as if the former answers are true—that video games are simply enjoyable and fun—is easier than living the truth of the latter.
In film studies, teachers extol the pleasures of taking a step back from the typical, absorbed experience of watching a film in order to analyze its composition, history, politics, and forms of representation. Being immersed within a film can bracket this articulation, similar to the function of flow. Indeed, flow can counter the critical attitude. Flow is the “quieting of doubt,” as the popular author Steven Kotler tells us (2014b, 47). If one pauses to take a step back, think, doubt, and evaluate, then flow can disappear.
Thinking begins in what may fairly enough be called a forked road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives. As long as our activity glides smoothly along from one thing to another, or as long as we permit our imagination to entertain fancies at pleasure, there is no call for reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way of reaching a belief brings us, however, to a pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another. (Dewey 1910, 11; emphasis in original)
Game scholar Markku Eskelinen highlights this when he writes that “in art we might have to configure in order to be able to interpret whereas in games we have to interpret in order to be able to configure, and proceed from the beginning to the winning or some other situation.”11 From this perspective, the cultural analysis of games is not the primary function of interpretation for players. In games like chess, Tetris, Half-Life, and even the cerebral Psychonauts, interpreting their meaning recedes as understanding their mechanics, rule systems, and goals assumes precedence.
Csikszentmihalyi explains that the flow experience removes interludes where questions arise such as, Why am I doing this? Should I be doing this? Flow erases the need to reflect on the why of one’s actions and to “evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out” (1975a, 38; 1990, 54). Flow quiets doubt, the hallmark of the critical attitude. It does not exercise and grow this form of questioning because it threatens the immersive experience of flow itself. Yet such questions occupy the heart of the critical attitude and enterprise. Why am I doing this instead of something else? What determines and conditions my actions? What external forces or dominant cultural norms drive people to pursue this activity?
As the philosopher Judith Butler explains, “Criticism usually takes an object, and critique is concerned to identify the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears” (Butler 2009, 108–109). On the one hand, when a flow experience ends or is interrupted, one has an object that draws critical attention: the experience just completed. When players die in a video game, they can turn back toward the activity, critically evaluate their performance, and calculate new strategies. The critical distance associated with critique, on the other hand, might examine broader questions: What ideologies influence the game that I am playing? What are its political meanings? Why am I playing it? Should I be playing it? Why am I pursuing flow instead of something else?
My argument is not that video games completely replace reflection that functions at this level, but that many games displace it by promoting calculative reflection and using flow to turn thought back toward the activity itself. Thus, many video games are symptoms of the containment and truncation of critical distance in contemporary culture.
Chell and the player are too exhausted from their puzzle-solving and calculative labors to complete their emancipation—a point that figuratively illustrates how critical instances gratify but dissipate critical energies, or, as Huizinga put it, they “[consume] a quantity of intellectual energy that might have been better applied” ([1950] 1955, 199).
Like Half-Life and Portal, The Stanley Parable provides time and space for this reflection. The game is a walking simulator, a term used to refer to games where players stroll around and explore a space without requiring complex game mechanics such as running, climbing, jumping, and shooting. It is an example of a “slow technology,” a term that Sicart uses to describe a game that “breaks the flow of the interaction and creates moments of awareness” and “reflection against the pressure of function, efficiency, and speed” (2013, 72–73). These moments are necessary when game designers want to provide time for narrative comprehension or interpretation. Brian Upton, a game scholar and veteran of the video game industry, explains, “If a game mixes narrative and gameplay elements, the player must have the necessary mental space to engage with the story. If every moment of the experience is packed with interesting and challenging gameplay decisions, there is no room for narrative play” (2015, 273).
While The Stanley Parable does not offer direct answers to these questions, it ridicules players for being complicit in their inability to escape. Eventually, the stuck players can only choose to quit and press the esc key, thus becoming the simple button-pusher whom the narrator mocks. This moment satirizes the commonplace idea that games are a form of escapism where, as critical theorist McKenzie Wark puts it, gamers “click to opt out of making history,” choosing simulation over reality, play over politics (2007, 165). Ironically, escaping returns Stanley to his office, where he and the player are still trapped, beginning the game again. The moment of critical distance that politicizes the game is eclipsed as the player returns to play.
Game scholar Ian Bogost calls irony “the great affliction of our age.” He further explains, “Irony keeps reality at a distance. It has become our primary method for combatting the external world’s incompatibility with our own desires. Today’s irony uses increasingly desperate efforts to hold everything in between welcome embrace and sneering mockery” (2016, 10).
For Bogost, play offers a solution to an ironic affliction that causes people to waver between rejecting the world and accepting it, and ironically mock consumer culture while also reveling in it. He explains, “Play is the opposite of irony: rather than distancing ourselves from things, in play we draw them close and meld with them” (2016, 92). If irony holds things at arm’s length, then the world is within reach and can be drawn close through play.
According to cultural theorist Mark Fisher, our reality is capitalism, and “it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative” (2009, 2; emphasis in original). Yet if play is defined as “a seeking of alternatives to established cultural patterns” as play theorist Thomas S. Henricks suggests, then play may make it possible to imagine alternatives to capitalism (2006, 205). Play allures because it offers hope that another world is possible, that one can escape the strictures and norms of society and enter into a separate existence with different rules, ones that we have chosen; playfulness allures because it suggests that we can perceive these alternatives in our everyday lives, within the strictures of our existing realities.
Within ludic capitalism, playfulness has become the norm. But what happens when everyone is urged to play, innovate, create, break the rules, think outside the box, and imagine alternatives? What happens when revolutionaries and entrepreneurs play, when artists play to create and students play to learn, when businesses institute play so as to extract more labor from workers? What happens when books such as The Serious Entrepreneur’s Playbook: Playing and Winning the Business Game (Haynes 2015), Game Changers: What Leaders, Innovators, and Mavericks Do to Win at Life (Asprey 2018), and The Playful Entrepreneur: How to Adapt and Thrive in Uncertain Times (Dodgson and Gann 2018) begin to populate online wish lists? As life becomes increasingly playful, play itself becomes the only alternative.
Perhaps this is one reason why it is so difficult to envision an alternative to capitalism: today’s ludic capitalism generates a maelstrom of endless alternatives, drawing on play as an inexhaustible source of creativity for producing these alternatives. In such a world, play no longer operates as an alternative to mainstream reality—it becomes the dominant reality.
Even seemingly progressive games like World of Goo (which narratively reconstructs its ludic unbinding to create a political message and breaks the fourth wall, a Brechtian form of distancing and self-reflexivity) encode the logic of renovation rather than that of opposition.13 However agreeable a critical and socially aware game industry would be, perhaps renovated by progressive games like World of Goo or Donut County, it is doubtful that the industry will become imbued with moral consciousness and abandon its profit-maximizing cycles to pursue the goal of real opposition. It is an error to think that capitalism can work this way. Social entrepreneurship is still entrepreneurship, and it will never transform the game industry into an anticapitalist space of equality, social responsibility, and utopian diversity and inclusivity.
We must be critical of reformist mindsets that suggest that oppositional forms of narrative and gameplay can slowly transform the industry. We should question the idea that things will always get better while at the same time staying largely the same—what Brecht understood as renovation without true innovation.14 And make no mistake: independent games are part of the industry that they purport to oppose. Fisher says—and others have said before—that independent media “endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream” (2009, 9; emphasis in original). A game like World of Goo repeats gestures of opposition—narrative reconstruction, Brechtian distancing, and playful subversion—that we have seen before.
The game’s interruptions in the player’s flow also seem designed to interrupt the dominance of flow in driving game design. In his book Uncertainty in Games, game designer and critic Greg Costikyan interrupts his text “to embark on a tangent that has nothing to do with the central argument” and advocates that game designers should break flow in their games (2013, 25).
As the critical theorist Alexander Galloway has put it, “The world does not need new ideas. The challenge is simply to realize what we already know to be true” (2012, 139). We already know the problems of the video game industry; as the journalist Simon Parkin (2018) explains, “The problems, from the long working hours, employee churn and burnout, are deeply ingrained and systemic.” And we now know that these and other industry problems are imbricated with play itself, particularly its use as an ideology aimed at intensifying work by making it seem more enjoyable.20 We even have viable proposed solutions, such as unionization, being forwarded by organizations such as Game Workers Unite and argued for by popular game magazines and even mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.21 Perhaps playfulness is not what is needed at this moment.
Playfulness can generate excitement, novelty, and even subversion, but by itself it does not lead to emancipation. Playfulness requires a critical attitude to channel its energies toward political opposition. In his article “Toward a Critical Theory of Play,” sociologist Francis Hearn argued that “the playful celebration of freedom is nonrational in origin and, by itself, incapable of producing human emancipation,” and therefore “play must be informed by critical discourse” (1976, 160). The political must come before the playful. As the game designer and scholar Mary Flanagan suggests, a critical play design process would integrate values and critical discourses into the process of playful design from the very beginning (2009, 254–259). One needs to know one’s political ends before designing play to facilitate them.
Flow can cause tunnel vision, where we forget “everything else but the activity itself” (Csikszentmihalyi 2009, 394). This is likely why new media theorists Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey see the experience as “endemic to stupidity” and as “the automation of habits” that “hijacks intelligence” (2012, 171). Flow threatens to shut down thought and reflection about and beyond itself—which is a problem when its proponents say that we should live a life of flow and when flow pervades media culture.
Today, we live in a flow culture, says media scholar Jay Bolter (2019a, 2019b). “One of the principal pleasures offered by both video games and social media is the experience of flow,” Bolter writes, “Flow is an aesthetic principle for first-person shooter games, for platform games, for puzzle games. It is also the state induced by watching one YouTube video or Netflix episode after another or by monitoring Facebook feeds for hours on end” (2019a, 100). Bolter focuses on the loss of self-consciousness and time consciousness associated with flow to explain that media experiences such as the endless scroll of Instagram and Twitter allow users to lose themselves within streams of content that promise to go on forever.
Media scholar Joost Raessens (2014) explains that we are experiencing the general ludification of culture, where a playful attitude toward life transforms networked and social media, cinema, television, the arts, politics, health, business, entrepreneurship, and so on. Video games are the central media form within this ludic transformation, the most culturally visible examples of flow for the masses, and flow and its ideologies are pervasive in video games. For this reason, they are a key medium through which to study and transform flow and the culture that the experience increasingly influences.
Gamification scholar Sebastian Deterding explains that those who follow a modern politics of “critique, resistance, subversion” must ask themselves if, first, their critiques speak to the “already converted”; second, if they create “a form of repressive tolerance that discharges revolutionary energy and resells it as commodified dissent”; and third, if they enact “refuge from the world” that “is always already instrumentalized as a restoration for that world” (2014a, 49; emphasis in original).
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