Game Design chapter reflection

Wesley Larlarb

The part of Artful Design chapter 6 which really spoke to me had to do with the idea of “flow.” I feel like so much of my life, from learning jazz to tennis to video games and even school, has been in pursuit of flow, and when I think back to the times I felt most successful and also the times I felt most frustrated, I think these can be well understood in terms of the presence or absence of flow. So many times when I was playing piano or drums, it was honestly just to pass the time, just something to do while I wasn’t doing something else. I remember I would drum on my teeth or my body all through elementary school, and when I got to middle and high school I would take breaks from my schoolwork and go noodle around on the piano. That time was so crucial both for improving my skills so that later I could achieve something with them, but also just for its own sake as an expression of my own being. If I didn’t have access to a piano/digital keyboard, I honestly wonder what I would have been doing during those times when I didn’t have anything else in particular to do. Probably playing video games… 

Which can also be great! That being said, I’ve had a troubled relationship with video games over the years. As silly as it sounds, I feel like I’ve often felt myself playing video games for external rewards, especially skill ratings like MMR/Rank in Starcraft, Dota, and League of Legends. I love all these games because of their deep mechanical complexities, the incredible degree of strategic self-expression available for players, and their investment into world-building. But there are limits to the times I feel like I can really flow in these games, limits which come from my motivations, but also just my time and energy available for playing such a complex game. In Dota for instance, I’ve spent well over a thousand hours, but I honestly feel like I spent only a small fraction of that time really flowing in the game; the rest felt like a frantic scramble of me getting frustrated with teammates, rushing to have a higher rating by doing overthought risky and flawed strategies, and generally using the games as a way to escape from other parts of my life rather than as an opportunity to express myself.