{"id":23101,"date":"2013-11-27T08:51:58","date_gmt":"2013-11-27T13:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23101"},"modified":"2013-11-27T08:51:58","modified_gmt":"2013-11-27T13:51:58","slug":"first-person-shooter-games-and-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/11\/27\/first-person-shooter-games-and-flow\/","title":{"rendered":"First-person shooter games and “flow”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The New Yorker<\/em>, Maria Konnikova<\/a> examines the psychology of first-person shooter games:<\/p>\n

By August, 1996, Doom<\/em> had sold two million copies, prompting Wired to name it \u201cthe most popular computer game of all time,\u201d and it had spawned a new sub-genre of video game, the so-called \u201cDoom<\/em> clone.\u201d Though Doom<\/em> itself was not the original first-person shooter (a game in which, as Nicholson Baker wrote in his 2010 article about video games, \u201cyou are a gun who moves \u2014 in fact, you are many guns, because with a touch of your Y button you can switch from one gun to another\u201d), it catalyzed the genre\u2019s popularity. First-person shooters are now responsible for billions of dollars in sales a year, and dominate the best-seller lists of current-generation gaming consoles.<\/p>\n

What is it that has made this type of game such a success? It\u2019s not simply the first-person perspective, the three-dimensionality, the violence, or the escape. These are features of many video games today. But the first-person shooter combines them in a distinct way: a virtual environment that maximizes a player\u2019s potential to attain a state that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls \u201cflow\u201d \u2014 a condition of absolute presence and happiness.<\/p>\n

\u201cFlow,\u201d writes Csikszentmihalyi, \u201cis the kind of feeling after which one nostalgically says: \u2018that was fun,\u2019 or \u2018that was enjoyable.\u2019\u201d Put another way, it\u2019s when the rest of the world simply falls away. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is mostly likely to occur during play, whether it\u2019s a gambling bout, a chess match, or a hike in the mountains. Attaining it requires a good match between someone\u2019s skills and the challenges that she faces, an environment where personal identity becomes subsumed in the game and the player attains a strong feeling of control. Flow eventually becomes self-reinforcing: the feeling itself inspires you to keep returning to the activity that caused it.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, first-person shooters create precisely this type of absorbing experience. \u201cVideo games are essentially about decision-making,\u201d Lennart Nacke, the director of the Games and Media Entertainment Research Laboratory at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, told me. \u201cFirst-person shooters put these tasks on speed. What might be a very simple decision if you have all the time in the world becomes much more attractive and complex when you have to do it split second.\u201d The more realistic the game becomes \u2014 technological advances have made the original Doom<\/em> seem quaint compared with newer war simulators, like the Call of Duty<\/em> and the Battlefield<\/em> series \u2014 the easier it is to lose your own identity in it. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova examines the psychology of first-person shooter games: By August, 1996, Doom had sold two million copies, prompting Wired to name it \u201cthe most popular computer game of all time,\u201d and it had spawned a new sub-genre of video game, the so-called \u201cDoom clone.\u201d Though Doom itself was not the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,16],"tags":[49,139],"class_list":["post-23101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming","category-science","tag-guns","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-60B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23102,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23101\/revisions\/23102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}