Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject

319 Pages·2021·4.933 MB·English

by  Braxton Soderman

Acknowledgments
The idea for this book was formed when I was a PhD student at Brown
University and studied with an extraordinary community of scholars. I
would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and
Mary Ann Doane, who have never ceased to support my work and schol-
arship. They taught me to perceive the world critically and to interpret
the deep complexities of media cultures. I would also like to thank Philip
Rosen and John Cayley, whose scholarly and creative ideas have shaped my
perception of media studies. My friends and colleagues at Brown fostered
a passionate community of critical inquiry and never ceased to inspire me
with their thoughts and insights. Thank you to Erika Balsom, David Bering-
Porter, Eugenie Brinkema, Gill Frank, Yuriko Furuhata, Josh Guilford, Dan-
iel Howe, Justin Katko, Linda Liu, Cynthia Lugo, Julie Levin Russo, Pooja
Rangan, Paige Sarlin, Michael Siegel, and Marc Steinberg.
I also had the pleasure to begin my academic career at Miami University
in Oxford, Ohio. Thank you to Ron Becker, Richard Campbell, cris cheek,
Shira Chess, Sean Duncan, Lindsay Grace, Mack Hagood, Jennifer Mal-
kowski, Glenn Platt, Bob De Schutter, Nicole Starosielski, and Jacob Tonski.
I cannot thank my colleagues at UC Irvine, in the Department of Film
and Media Studies, enough for their generous support and guidance. I am
indebted to those who generously donated time to provide feedback on
chapters of this book, including Lucas Hilderbrand, Peter Krapp, Bliss Cua
Lim, Catherine Liu, and Allison Perlman. I also received wonderful advice
and support as I navigated both the anxiety and boredom of the publishing
process, including from Tom Boellstorff, Kristen Hatch, Victoria Johnson,
and Fatimah Tobing Rony.
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x Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Tom in particular for his support. While working
on this book, Tom and I have been writing another book about Intellivi-
sion (the video game system that was better than the Atari VCS). I would
not have completed my first book without Tom’s patience, friendship, and
mentorship. Thank you, Tom, for teaching me the passion and persistence
that animates academic research.
I also would like to express my gratitude to Bo Ruberg, Tess Tanenbaum,
and Aaron Trammell, colleagues at UC Irvine who have been wonderful
collaborators and friends. I thank Bo as well for inviting me to present ideas
from this book at the USC PlayThink series in 2016. In addition, thank you
to Matt Knutson and Justin Keever, two graduate students with whom I
have worked closely during my time at UC Irvine and who have shaped the
thoughts in this book through our conversations about the strange beauty
of video games. Since my arrival at UC Irvine, the Institute for Virtual Envi-
ronments and Computer Games and the UCI Humanities Center have pro-
vided support for my research. Thank you to the UCI Humanities Center for
a grant to support the publication of this book.
Thank you to Mady Schutzman, an inspirational mentor during my time
studying writing at CalArts. Mady graciously published a short piece on
“flow” in her book Radical Doubt: The Joker System, after Boal (2018). Thank
you as well to Russel Swensen, who always had my back. Finally, I would
never have become an academic without the encouragement and support
of Michael Joyce at Vassar College, who taught me to see the possibilities
and poetics within the digital.
This book would not have been completed without the unceasing assis-
tance of Amy Mulligan and Emily Walton. I met these scholars in the Fac-
ulty Success Program through the National Center for Faculty Development
and Diversity. They offered endless advice, support, accountability, and
inspiration. While the Faculty Success Program taught methods for effective
academic productivity—p rofessional self-h elp for the academic laborer— in
truth, Amy and Emily taught me the value of academic friendship and the
selfless help of others. I also thank the ADVANCE Program for Equity and
Diversity at UC Irvine for a grant to join the Faculty Success Program.
I would also like to thank the editors who helped with this project. With-
out the incredible editorial assistance from Laura Portwood-S tacer, Heath
Sledge, and Meghan Drury, I would still be spinning my wheels wondering
how to write a book. Moreover, thank you to Virginia Crossman, Doug
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Acknowledgments xi
Sery, Noah Springer, and the entire editorial team at the MIT Press for their
wonderful advice, assistance, and guidance.
Finally, thank you to my sisters and aunt who always were there to take
my call and offer their support and love. I reserve my deepest gratitude
for my wife and children. Thank you, Roxi, for your ceaseless support and
endless patience. Unfortunately, this book was not written in a state of
euphoric flow, but you always inspired me to see the fact that aspirational
desire pales in comparison to the everyday love of those closest to the heart.
I cannot thank you enough. Finally, while this book is critical of flow and
play, my children, Orryn and Oona, always remind me to stop being so
grumpy and to just come along with them and play. Thanks kids! Ready or
not, here I come!
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Introduction
I grew up playing games like Space Invaders (1978) and Centipede (1980) in
the arcades, feeding quarters into the hungry game cabinets, desperately
trying to improve my skills so I could play longer and longer. Despite my
best efforts, I would quickly succumb to the ever- faster, ever- more- deadly
descending aliens or twisting centipede. The games’ quick ratcheting up of
difficulty grew out of the economics of the arcade: when players lost their
coveted and expensive lives, they spent more coins to keep playing. The
introduction of home game systems like the Atari VCS and Intellivision
from Mattel Electronics changed this dynamic. Owners of these systems
could play games repeatedly in the comfort of their living rooms, with-
out a handful of quarters dwindling in their pockets. Without the worry
about money, how did these console games keep their players riveted? One
answer is that they set up the conditions for players to experience what we
call flow.
The conditions that generate flow are visible in one of my favorite games
from this period, Astrosmash (1981), programmed by John Sohl for the
Intellivision system (figure 0.1). Astrosmash is similar to Space Invaders and
Asteroids (1979). Players shoot falling meteors, spinning bombs, and attack-
ing UFOs to earn points. The goal is clear— stay alive and achieve a high
score. Like arcade games in the early 1980s, Astrosmash’s challenges increase
as the player’s score goes up: at certain point thresholds, everything speeds
up and the difficulty increases. But the game provides an extra life at every
1,000 points, and unlike most arcade games, Astrosmash adapts when the
game’s challenges outstrip the player’s skill level: it decreases the score
when the player dies or when falling rocks hit the ground, and if a player’s
score drops below a preprogrammed threshold, the game becomes slightly
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2 Introduction
Figure 0.1
Astrosmash, from Mattel Electronics
easier by slowing the enemies’ speed. But when players are on their game,
when their skills are honed, they can play for a long time, precisely match-
ing the game’s level of challenge. All this means that when players are off
their game or new to Astrosmash, they can still play for extended periods of
time because of the steady accumulation of extra lives and the subtle dif-
ficulty adjustments. Astrosmash remains satisfying despite the player’s level
of skill, allowing players to lose themselves within the groove of the game
and become immersed in flow.
In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, a best-s elling and influen-
tial book on the topic of flow published in 1990, psychologist Mihaly Csik-
szentmihalyi (pronounced “me- HIGH chick- sent- me- HIGH- ee”) explains
the adaptive play that creates flow by describing a simple game of “escape
and pursuit” that he played with his hunting dog, Hussar.1 When they
were out for a walk, Hussar would pounce around, happily running circles
around his companion, nipping at him and leaping away, enticing him to
chase, to tag, to play. When Csikszentmihalyi was fatigued, uninterested,
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Introduction 3
or out of shape, Hussar would sense it, tightening his circles and making
himself an easier target. On the other hand, when his master was ener-
getic and eager, Hussar would expand his circling and speed up, making the
game more challenging. Hussar continuously adjusted the difficulty of the
game depending on his partner’s physical and emotional state. The point
of this subtle adjustment was to “make sure that the game would yield the
maximum of enjoyment,” allowing Csikszentmihalyi to balance his skills
with challenges and enter an absorbing state that he called flow (1990, 53).
In flow—m ost easily reached through play, whether playing a game with a
dog or a solo video game like Astrosmash— one is in the zone and immersed
in a completely absorbing activity.
Csikszentmihalyi developed his concept of flow in the course of his
research on the foundations of creativity and enjoyment in the 1960s and
1970s. Flow was a “native category” experienced by many subjects inter-
viewed by Csikszentmihalyi and his students (1975a, 36). Chess players, art-
ists, dancers, surgeons, and basketball players used the word flow to describe
an experience of getting into the zone, of being swept away in their chosen
activity. Csikszentmihalyi wanted to understand this absorption and why
people would ignore hunger, danger, and life’s many problems to continue
doing an activity that they loved. It is this sense of complete absorption
that links flow with play; as philosopher Johan Huizinga wrote in his classic
work on play, Homo Ludens, “in this intensity, this absorption, this power
of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play” ([1950]
1955, 2–3 ). The experience of flow captures the sense of deep absorption
that often characterizes play and helps to explicate one of the key proper-
ties and features of play.2 While play is an extremely broad subject—l inked
to childhood development, leisure and frivolous activity, mimicry and act-
ing, creativity and imagination, and so on—f low is a subset of play that
focuses on players’ experience of intense involvement.
Csikszentmihalyi studied flow in an effort to better understand human
enjoyment. For Csikszentmihalyi, the term flow describes a complex form
of sustained enjoyment— one that is distinct from both pleasure and imme-
diate gratification. The word itself evokes a sense of continuous absorption,
with its connotations of fluid movement, smooth and steady continu-
ity, and a stream unhampered by impediments or jagged interruptions.
His early research described the general properties of flow. Typically, a
flow- producing activity balances an individual’s skills with the activity’s
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4 Introduction
challenges, presents clear goals and feedback toward achieving these goals,
and allows a feeling of control when awareness merges with action. In this
state, self-c onsciousness disappears and one’s awareness of time and its
passing melts away. For Csikszentmihalyi, flow experiences allow humans
to develop skills and grow more complex as individuals, an enjoyable pro-
cess (like learning to play piano) that travels beyond mere pleasure. Play-
ing piano or a video game might be difficult and unpleasant at points, but
Csikszentmihalyi argued that in hindsight, we view these experiences as
fun and enjoyable (1990, 46). Yet his work on flow extended beyond sim-
ply understanding enjoyment. He saw flow as a principle around which
to redesign all of life’s activities, even those seen as laborious, unpleasant,
and devoid of fun. What was he hoping? Life itself could become more like
Hussar’s game.
In the half- century since Csikszentmihalyi first started studying flow,
the theory has overflowed its academic origins and spilled into many areas
of contemporary culture. As game scholar and philosopher Ian Bogost has
said, “flow theory has also been applied to just about everything else, from
workplace satisfaction to education to spirituality” (2016, 103). Flow theory
has helped to establish the growing field of positive psychology.3 It has
become a talking point in the aspirational worlds of self-h elp, self- care, and
wellness, and a staple in the psychological makeup of professional sports
figures, trainers, and those seeking to understand and catalyze high levels
of human potential and performance. It has blossomed into a powerful
ideal for business managers who hope to tap flow in order to nourish the
happiness, creativity, and productivity of their workers. It has addicted the
self- optimization gurus who ride the tide of motivational talks and corpo-
rate workshops, flow accelerators, flow fests, and flow dojos pushing New
Age enlightenment through self-o ptimization techniques and flow hack-
ing.4 It has inspired digital services that promise the creation of flow states
to increase productivity and has even been used in an advertising campaign
for Dropbox, a major digital media company.5 Indeed, articles about flow
and productivity, fitness, creativity, and innovation appear throughout the
mainstream press.6
The field that has been most influenced by the quest for flow is the study
and design of video games, which is the focus of this book. Some years
ago, game scholar Torill Mortensen wrote that Csikszentmihalyi’s prolific
theories had already attained “a position of almost paradigmatic power in
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Introduction 5
game studies” (2004, 1).7 Since then, the influence of flow has only grown,
and it is now as important to the field of game studies as other concepts
such as immersion, game mechanics, rules, and even the notion of play
itself, from which flow derives. Flow theory significantly influences mul-
tiple areas of research in the field: game design, the analysis of player expe-
riences, mainstream versus alternative game aesthetics, the study of play,
and gamification. Flow is seen as an obvious and natural way to discuss the
fun and enjoyment of games, their formal properties (goals, feedback, and
balancing skills and challenges), and player experiences (feelings of control,
immersion, intense concentration, enjoyment, and fun).
But many game scholars, designers, and players uncritically apply the
idea of flow to games. Flow is “an almost unquestioned reference” in game
studies, explains Riccardo Fassone (2017, 117), and it is in the guise of the
natural and obvious that ideology travels. Until now, game scholars and
designers have not investigated flow’s historical, theoretical, and ideologi-
cal contexts, which some game scholars have found shocking.8 This book
fills this gap. It complicates the application of flow theory to video games,
urging scholars, designers, and players to become more critically aware of
flow’s political, economic, and cultural implications.
Although many assume that flow is an unqualified good, it is far from
a neutral or benign concept. For example, Csikszentmihalyi was a Hungar-
ian émigré who grew up in Italy during World War II and whose family
was personally affected by the war and the postwar Soviet occupation of
Hungary; his theory of flow should be understood in this context: it was a
response to Marxism, an attempt to create a Western democratic solution
to alienation (a feeling of estrangement from the products of one’s labor,
from other people, and from life itself, which is produced by the stratified
conditions of capitalist production). Flow offered an alternative to Marxist
modes of social change. Unlike Marx, who argued that alienation would be
solved only by collective revolution that overturned capitalist structures
and created radical political change, Csikszentmihalyi imagined that flow
experiences could reimmerse people in their own lives without the need
for revolution, removing alienation by allowing them to experience the
absorbing effects of play.
However, flow is not an uncomplicated, straightforward solution to
the problem of alienation. It is not simply a natural psychological state or
experience; flow theory uses the concept as an ideology, one that privileges
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6 Introduction
individuality over social collectivities, growth and accumulation over equi-
librium and sustainability, self-d etermination over the idea that external
forces shape human consciousness, and action over critical examination.
These qualities infuse many video games, which promote what I call flowing
subjects. Flowing subjects are not simply game players experiencing the psy-
chological state of flow; they are being positioned as media consumers in a
way that promotes flow’s ideologies. Game designer Eric Zimmerman said
that the twenty- first century is the “ludic century”— the century of games
and play (2014, 20). If this is so, then we need a deeper, critical assessment
of play itself, and particularly of the theory and effects of flow, the subset
of play. This assessment will help us understand how video games are influ-
encing players and the mass culture that they permeate.
Complicating Flow and Play: The Dog, the Cat, the Mouse, and the Lizard
In the 1970s, when Csikszentmihalyi first wrote about flow, it seemed pos-
sible for flow and play to heal alienation and transform society in an altru-
istic fashion. Today, however, they are packaged and delivered through
video games and have become dominant ways of interfacing with culture
and capitalism. Originally conceived to transform and rejuvenate society,
play and flow now fuel the problems that they originally aimed to over-
come. This is what this book is about. Because play is a broad subject, with
roots reaching into many disciplines and economic areas, I focus on the
theory of flow as a kind of case study of play, examining how flow theory
emerges from play, imbues it with ideology, and facilitates its channeling
toward intensified consumption. But like play, flow under capitalism has
become a broad subject, reaching far outside game studies. I specifically
examine flow in relation to video games and play, but I hope that the criti-
cal approach to flow that I offer here can be applied to the culture beyond
games, unlocking a critical discussion of play and its transformations in
contemporary culture.
If we are to become more critical of play and flow in this ludic century,
we need to begin by dispelling their allure and purity. Csikszentmihalyi’s
description of playing escape and pursuit with his dog, Hussar, is pasto-
ral, disarming, and innocent. It offers us a glimpse into an idyllic moment
of carefree play, an ode to enjoyment; it invokes an escape from a tech-
nological and alienating environment into nature, into the playfulness of
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