Real Games Have Curves: Welcome to the Competence Zone

A problem with this theory: Flow isn't "I'm passing this level." If you flailed through the whole thing, succeeding more on luck than skill, you probably didn't achieve flow. Flow requires a combination of a tight feedback loop and succeeding at getting positive output from it. So while Bit.Trip.Runner _requires_ flow for any degree of success, lenient music games like Guitar Hero let you use a resource-hoarding strategy(retaining star power for hard parts) to pass songs at a pre-flow skill level, and then return to them later for higher scores.

An addendum, and a game I think about quite frequently, is FlyWrench. It looks like Bit.Trip Runner has taken some lessons from it. FlyWrench is also a punishingly difficult game that appears to flow for an expert player, with instant death on any mistake. What it nails is that the amount of work you have to redo for a failure is tiny, and the restart is as close to instantaneous as you would be comfortable with.

You enter a very flow-like state perfecting a 10-20 second stretch of inputs because of this structure. The game demands perfection as you enter the later levels, but somehow you are comfortable with it because the penalty is so small. I guess VVVVV is also in this school of game and has largely succeeded.

I think, then, that Bit.Trip Runner may have failed somewhat if the restart penalty is as large as the author makes it sound. You don't need to have a large competence zone to create flow; you can alternatively have a low penalty for failure with some tangible measure of progress and keep the player (or at least this player) hooked.

This is just an aside in the article, but I had no idea that Rock Band 3 was going to feature something much closer to the real instruments. I've been wondering, ever since I played the first Guitar Hero, how long it would be before it was possible to learn a real instrument in this manner. If it actually works, this is awesome. You can transition smoothly from trying to get high scores in a fun video game to playing the songs for real.

It's interesting to contrast this with games such as WoW and Farmville, which seem to reward endurance more than skill. Interestingly, Cory Doctorow's latest book 'for the win' explores exactly this.

It's no wonder that games such as World of Warcraft have a really low competence zone and a really large amount of space left to provide rewards for both time investment and player skill.