Game Flow, How to keep the player playing your game

Hello guys,
I've wrote this article about what is the Flow Channel in games and how you can use it.
The main concept is that you should try to keep the player feeling awesomeness in your game and constantly increase the difficult while the player increase his skills.

If you have good example about how you've use Flow Channel in your game please share it and let us know if you have some other suggestions to keep the player playing the game.

 

I've written elsewhere that keeping a player engaged isn't actually about difficulty — it's about accomplishment. Building skill at a difficult task is only one way to do that, and a designer is severely limiting himself if that's the only tool in his toolbox. I'm not even sure that "flow" is really all that important, given the runaway success of casual games that require very little of the player's attention — we just need to keep them coming back.

All that said, I'm working on exactly that sort of difficulty/skill game right now, hopefully for release within the next month, so I'm certainly not adverse to using this tool when it applies. One of the things still on our to-do list is to make the caves get gradually tougher as you progress.

 

You're right, but most of the time, increase the difficult means tougher challenges which means more engagement which can help to keep the player coming back, but I agree, mostly depend of the tipe of the game that you're bounding.

 

IMHO it's all about stimulation, challenge being one type of stimulation, that's why some casual games work while other don't, while being superficially similar in mechanics. Some people use "juice" or "gamefeel" to point at other way to build the stimulation curves, but even then it's limited and vague.

We have honed challenge as a way to build stimulation and are still dumbfounded when a game succeed with "poor mechanics", like progress quest, cow clicker or goat simulator.

If we look at stimulation in general and how different stimulation work together, we might start doing better original games instead of relying a cheap trick that don't work every time and don't cover all cases. And we might be more empowered to do new stuff in turning any activity into game.

 

So what is stimulation, exactly? How do we create it?

 

I class stimulation in two types, mental and visceral. Challenge can be mental (puzzle) or visceral (physically performing something). The idea is that it's a broader characterization that should makes you more aware, when engaging in activity, to different sources of interest and how they interact with each other.

It should especially obvious given that music is known to induce flow state, tend to have a ramping structure too, yet has no challenge, the same could be said for mickeal bay movie, they work because they have some sort of stimulation (that you like or not is a different matter, people react to it that's enough).

To be more precise, to me (because I would prefer letting you form your own conclusion on that), stimulation is either sensorial or internal (as in information processing), that's just a bit of nuance over mental/visceral. You can be overloaded or bored if there isn't stimuli, but zoning out when the right mix is there.

Story is for example internal (being fed information, emotion and the inference being made) it does not have to be "challenging", unless you want to stretch the notion of challenging like some people do.