作者：Nick Statt

最近大热游戏《Flappy Bird》等极具成瘾性的游戏实现成功的因素就在于其禅宗式的独特流状态。

当智能手机热门游戏《Flappy Bird》不久前开始走红时，似乎你周围的人都开始突然嗑药了一般，对这款游戏欲罢不能。Facebook和Instragram充斥着大量高分游戏截图，以及由于对游戏上瘾所造成的罪行，Twitter也不乏大量关于该游戏的新闻，以及全球用户与此相关的讨论。

在我其他熟人突破50分大关之前，我就有一名好友突破了100分，他半开玩笑地说，“快结束时，我觉得自己几乎灵魂出窍，向下俯视着自己玩游戏……”

Flappy_Bird(from cnet.com)

尽管这是一个有意自我嘲讽的Facebook状态，却也是一种在一款高难度手机游戏中获得罪恶高分的超越感——它包含一个值得注意的真相。这是我们大家都曾经历过的一种感觉。例如在执行一项任务的时候，将自己从自我意识中释放出来时，以及在“专心致志”或自动驾驶状态下的巡航过程中。

事实上，这是《Flappy Bird》诸多现象当中的暗流之一，它推动这款手机游戏获得巨大的人气。虽然它因为极高的难度而得名，但它对我们大脑的作用（即玩家发现自己成功时的感觉）也是重要的成功因素，这是一

种深植于我们心灵的瞬间兴奋感，并且促使我们要得更多的感觉。无论你对《Flappy Bird》有何看法，都不可否认其开发者Dong Nguyen创造了真正特殊，甚至堪称天才之作的操纵性手机游戏，或者说是无意识重复性的美感。

游戏设计元老及纽约大学游戏中心主任Frank Lantz表示，“有些游戏能够做到。但并非所有游戏都能如此，但它们一旦做到了就会很棒。”在2009年，Lantz的游戏工作室Area/Code开发出了手机游戏《Drop 7》，这款益智游戏也为玩家创造出了一种稍纵即逝的禅宗式宁静感。

Lantz补充表示，“这是一种我们可从毒品、深思，以及精神洗礼中获得的感觉。我最近发现玩《Flappy Bird》也有这种感觉。对我来说，它的有趣特点之一就在于，它是这种体验的极端例子。”

游戏设计中的流

Lantz所指的这种感觉就是所谓的流状态。这是一个心理学术语，早在数十年前就出现在学术界中。但关于流状态的研究则可追溯到数千年前对于人类为何会长时间高度专注于特定任务——以及让他们持续重返其中的因素的这一哲学反思。

由于媒体的出现，它开始成为游戏设计中的一个普遍层面——例如《俄罗斯方块》、《吃豆人》、《大金刚》，也成了过去几年中行业中某此最意外成功之作的指导原则，例如thtagamecompany的《Journey》和《Flowr》，以及Markus “Notch” Persson的《Minecraft》。现在像Asher Vollmer的《Threes》，Lantz的《Drop 7》，以及其他令我们进入了前所未有的专注，以及单一性操作，令我们对其成瘾的热门手机游戏。

GiGi Games创始人及Alion科学技术中心的技术总监Curtiss Murphy（游戏邦注：他为美国海军开发了教育类模拟游戏《Damage Control Trainer》）表示，“《Minecraft》和《Flappy Bird》，《The Sims》和《魔兽世界》之间并无相似之处。它们基本上是完全不同的体验，但其原理却极为相似。它们都含有流和简单性特点。”

流这种心理概念是由匈牙利心理专家Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi于70年代提出，原先是描述艺术家投身于自我创作中的痴迷状态。在之后的数十年中，Csikszentmihalyi出版了一系列关于流状态的书，最早的是1975年问世的《Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play》，之后在90年代则出现了大量关于流的著作，成为解读更加高效的教育，获得快乐，以及解密动机和创造性的渠道。

他发现不但是艺术家，运动员和象棋手，还有学生也要依靠流状态。现在众所周知，其他所有领域也出现了这一概念，即使是我们甚少去思考的日常生活任务，例如割草坪、烹饪还有熨衣服也同样存在这一状态。几乎每个执行任务并达到一定标准的人都可以进入专注的流状态，正如Csikszentmihalyi于1996年在《Wired》杂志中所言，“（在其中）自我流失，时间消逝，每个动作、移动，以及思考都不可避免地相互衔接，就好像在玩爵士乐一样。你全身心融入其中，你将自己的技能发挥到了极限。”

Csikszentmihalyi分析了进入这一状态的条件：任务必须清晰而简单，这一任务必须能够提供即时反馈，没有其他任何干扰打断你的注意力或者让你意识到清楚自己的行为，对于玩游戏来说尤其如此，它必须是一个任务难度与你的技能相当，拥有恰当平衡的挑战。

Flow(from cnet.com)

作为《Why Games Work and the Science of Learning》的作者，Murphy致力于了解关键流如何同时在游戏开发和玩家层面诞生，他表示“游戏设计师想让玩家进入流状态，他们想让玩家进入一种失去时间观念的状态”。

“这些状态如此具有刺激性和吸引性，这些产品只需持续为玩家大脑提供这种化学反应。”

《Flappy Bird》中的流状态

《Flappy Bird》正是这种例子之一，但Lantz也承认它是一个更为极端的例子，这部分要归结于其表象与真实难度之间的鲜明对比。

Murphy表示，“如果你看看像《Flappy Bird》这种游戏，就会发现它真的很有趣。其任务很清晰，反馈也很即时和明确，你会手忙脚乱，在3秒内就挂掉。剩下的就是平衡。最终它会创造一种矛盾——你原来觉得‘它应该非常简单’但却发现‘它太难了，因为它的要求如此精确’”。刚接触《Flappy Bird》时没有人会料到它是如此残酷的游戏。更棒的是，游戏会在数分钟内就让每个玩家都知道，持续拍打游戏中的角色究竟有多困难，创造了一种几乎明确的难度平衡，无论你在游戏中有多厉害。

Murphy指出，“你会进入‘我想这么想，我想完成这个目标’这种状态，所以你就不断为之努力。”人们在《Flappy Bird》游戏过程中，就会一而再，再而三地努力尝试，不仅仅是为了享受最终的胜利感，还是为了执行这种实现胜利的操作。这是一种短时间内的体验，让玩家进入物我两忘的境界，用我那位高分好友的话来说，就是仿佛灵魂出窍，向下俯视正在玩游戏的自己。

但我们还不Nguyen是否就是以流状态理念来设计《Flappy Bird》，他也并没有对此相关的评论作出回应。更重要的是，我们尚无法中关于《Flappy Bird》的海量信息中找到Nguyen的游戏设计哲学，只知道其采用了复古美术风格，以及他对简洁性的青睐。他确实认为游戏需要合适的精神状态这种理念是《Flappy Bird》登了App Store和Google Play榜单之首的重要因素。

这名年仅29岁的越南开发者在最近的福布斯采访中表示，“《Flappy Bird》的设计是让玩家在放松时消遣片刻。但结果却成了一个令人上瘾的产品。我认为这是一个问题。”这意味着他至少还是理解放松而非紧张感的重要性。

在《Flappy Bird》热潮来袭期间登陆iOS游戏的手机谜题游戏《Threes》，则是一个有意在设计和机制中采用了相似的流状态理论的例子。其开发者Asher Vollmer使用了流状态原理将自己的游戏变成了另一款人们无法抗拒的手机谜题游戏。

《Threes》含有好玩的插图和主题音乐，它是一款你必须整合3的倍数以创造最大倍数的数字型谜题游戏：1加2等于3，而3则可成为6，6可生成12，以此类推。但因为《Threes》的难度与玩家能力增长步伐一致，它完美地履行了流状态的第4条标准——实现难度与技能的平衡，而鲜有其他谜题游戏能够实现这一点。

THREES(from cnet.com)

Murphy表示，“《Threes》非常非常简单。其任务很明确，反馈很即时。《Threes》几乎没有界面，没有复杂的行动。其结果就是，‘这是否实现了难度平衡？’它相当简单，但你深入体验，就会发现自己所玩的层次。《愤怒的小鸟》亦是如此。”

通过设计容易即时掌握和具有出人意料深度的游戏，Vollmer创造了一种尤其有利于将玩家引进流状态的体验。这种清除面板的体验感觉就像自动反映自己的想法，而其中的数字贴图就好像你无需多虑就能够自动合并一样。

直到游戏难度进入更高阶段时，你的流状态才会被打断。但正是那些早期助你进入流状态的因素，令你再三重返游戏。

“无意识的全神贯注”：分心的作用

正如Csikszentmihalyi针对实现流状态的条件所述，切除分心之物，在游戏中发挥极其有趣的作用，因为它很容易让你过于了解自己的行为，令你无法实现越努力越成功的目标。《Flapp Bird》如此疯狂的部分原因就在于，它很易于让人们沉迷于完善其简单机制的状态，实际上这会让你自己分心，无法进入流状态，并让你未来的努力付之东流，越努力反而越焦虑和慌张。

为了避免自己跌入这个陷阱，采用体贴的干扰物——例如在玩游戏时听音乐，与好友谈话，就可以创造Lantz所谓的“无意识的全神贯注”。他称“这几乎就好像我们的额皮质是一个唠叨不絮的老板，而员工则是这些潜意识模块，人们实际上正在完成艰难的任务。如果你能够转移这个唠叨的老板，其他模块就会发挥作用。”

这就是有些人在玩游戏过程中进入流状态的一个关键因素。甚至是Vollmer都发现过于专注自己的游戏，会成为阻碍成功的心理牵绊。他通过Twitter表示，“我所有的高分都来自自己在Netflix放松时刻。《Threes》有点自我区分的意味”。Lantz自称他的某些《Flappy Bird》最高分则发生于自己同他人交谈的时候。

Murphy表示，“有许多人会戴上耳机。他们并不是戴耳机听音乐。如果你播放的是自己从未听过的音乐，那就是一种干扰。如果你播放的已经听过100遍的音乐，你就会知道自己正在做的就是，使用那种自己认为会增加困难的体验来移除干扰物。”

让你的大脑分神的操作，实际上其本身就是能够积极影响流状态的数个方法之一，其重要性超越了游戏领域。它正是我们如何在干扰性的工作环境下，保持潜意识的专注，以及我们如何在紧张情况下（例如在体育竞赛的前几秒）中保持压力或紧张感的方法。

Murphy指出，“作为人类，我们尝试并让自己进入流状态。我们知道自己是在关上门还是喧闹环境下可以更好地工作。有时候噪音可以增加难度，影响第4个平衡要求，而有时候噪音又正是你能够排除的干扰元素。”

最重要的是，将流视为与游戏设计相关的元素，以及我们同这些成瘾、高度反馈性的机制间的复杂关系，而不仅仅是我们在失败中坚持的一种大脑状态，它还是游戏元素，其局限制对玩法本质更为重要。

Lantz最后表示，“我认为游戏在许多方面涉及我们是否专注于自己的操作行为。游戏几乎就像是一种我们应该研究的人类神经科学。这不一定要像伟大的艺术那样，因为它更为实用主义，但我为之骄傲。这种研究极具价值。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Be one with Flappy Bird: The science of ‘flow’ in game design

A core reason why recent hits like Flappy Bird and Threes found success — and are massively addictive — lies in the way they put us in a unique zen-like state known as flow.

by Nick Statt

When the smartphone phenomenon Flappy Bird took off not so long ago — and before it morphed into something uncontrollable and became its own hard-to-swallow lesson for the game industry — it was as if everyone you’d ever known had suddenly stumbled on mobile gaming’s most brilliantly manufactured drug. Facebook and Instragram were awash in high score screenshots and admissions of addiction-fueled guilt while all of Twitter might as well have been Flappy Bird references with some news and global chatter sandwiched in between.

One particularly interesting boast from a friend of mine, who had hit a score of 100 long before anyone else I knew had even broken the 50-point mark, included a clearly tongue-in-cheek observation, “Towards the end, I felt like I was hovering above myself, watching myself play…”
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Despite it being a purposefully self-deprecating Facebook status — a feeling of transcendence attached to, of all things, an unholy high score in a miserably difficult mobile game — it contains a remarkable truth. That feeling described is something everyone one of us has experienced at one point or another: To see through the act of performing a task, release yourself from self-conscious awareness, and be “in the zone” or cruising on autopilot so to speak.

It is in fact one of the central undercurrents, among many in the Flappy Bird saga, that drove the mobile game to massive popularity. While it became well-known for its infuriating difficulty, equally important to its success was what it did to our brains as we found ourselves succeeding at it, a feeling of momentary elation that nestled deep inside our psyches and sent us back for more. Whatever your opinion of Flappy Bird, there’s no denying that creator Dong Nguyen had crafted something truly special, worthy even of being called a genius feat, be it one in the realm of manipulative mobile games or the beauty of mindless repetition.

“Some games can do that. Not all games can do that, but when they do it’s wonderful,” said Frank Lantz, a game design veteran and director of New York University’s Game Center. In 2009, Lantz’s game studio Area/Code developed the mobile title Drop7, a puzzle game that also created in its players a fleeting sense of zen-like serenity that Lantz acutely recognized.

“It’s the kind of thing we get from drugs, from meditation, from spiritual rituals,” he added. “I found it recently in playing Flappy Bird. For me, one of things that makes it interesting is that it is an extreme example of this experience.”

Flow in game design

That kind of thing Lantz is referring to is a well known phenomenon called flow. It’s a psychology term that goes back decades in academia. But the study of flow can be traced back thousands of years in the history of spirituality and the philosophical ruminating around how and why humans perform certain tasks for great lengths of time and with incredible focus — and precisely what they feel that keeps bringing them back to it.

It also happens to be a common aspect in game design since the advent of the medium — think Tetris, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong — and has in the last few years been a guiding principle for some of the industry’s most surprising success, from thatgamecompany’s Journey and Flower to Markus “Notch” Persson’s Minecraft. And now mobile breakouts like Asher Vollmer’s Threes, Lantz’s own Drop7, and scores of other games usher us towards a state of unprecedented focus and oneness with our actions, driving our addiction to those games as a result.

“There’s nothing the same between Minecraft and Flappy Bird, The Sims and WoW [World of Warcraft]. These are fundamentally different experiences and yet the science of them is very much the same,” said Curtiss Murphy, founder of GiGi Games and technical director at Alion Science and Technology where he used the aspects of flow to develop the educational simulation game Damage Control Trainer for the US Navy. “They all embody the characteristics of flow and leverage simplicity,” Murphy added.
There’s nothing the same between Minecraft and Flappy Bird, The Sims and WoW [World of Warcraft]. These are fundamentally different experiences and yet the science of them is very much the same.” –Curtiss Murphy, founder of GiGi Games

Flow as a concept in psychology was coined by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s, when artists would describe in interviews the experience of getting lost in their work as like being carried along by water. Throughout the following decades, Csikszentmihalyi published a number of books on flow, starting with “Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play” in 1975 and later, throughout the ’90s, numerous publications on flow as a means to a more effective education, achieving happiness, and unlocking the secrets of motivation and creativity.

What he discovered was that it wasn’t just artists, but athletes and chess players and students that relied on flow too. It’s now understood to be found within all sorts of other tasks, even everyday ones we barely think about as we do them, from mowing the lawn and shaving to cooking and ironing shirts. Basically anyone who is performing a task that met a certain distinct criteria could achieve a state of flow where your focus and sense of self reach a unique fluidity and, as Csikszentmihalyi put it in Wired magazine in 1996, “The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Csikszentmihalyi broke down the conditions for achieving such a state: There must be a clear and simple task; that task must provide instant feedback; there must be no distractions that either disrupt your concentration or make you ultra-aware of your own actions; and, key to the act of game playing especially, it must be a challenge with appropriate balance with regards to your own skill and the task’s difficulty.

The sweet spot between the skill one has and the intrinsic difficulty of the task — falling between boredom and anxiety — is where Csikszentmihalyi said the state of flow can be found.

“If you look at Flow, game designers want to get players into flow, they want them to get into that state where they lose track of time,” Murphy explained. As the author of “Why Games Work and the Science of Learning,” Murphy sought to understand how pivotal flow was both from a game development and player perspective.

“These states are so stimulating and so engaging, the products just keeps giving them [players] these chemical reactions in their brain,” he added.

Finding flow in Flappy Bird and beyond

Flappy Bird was capable of exactly that. Though, as Lantz admitted, it was a more extreme case due in part to the contrast between the appearance and reality of its difficulty.

“If you look at a game like Flappy Bird, it’s really interesting. The task is clear, the feedback is immediate and clear; you mess up and die in three seconds,” Murphy said. “The rest is balance. In the end it created this conflict where you say, ‘This should be very easy. I should be able to do this.’ It’s hard because it’s so precise.” No one went into Flappy Bird expecting it to be as brutal as it was. Even better, the game signaled to every person that kept flapping the titular character just how hard the task really was in only a matter of minutes, creating a near-unequivocal difficulty balance no matter how good at games you were.

Flappy Bird’s simple pick-up-and-play mechanics created a deceit from the beginning, tricking players into thinking the task was easier than it really was and driving a desire to keep playing.

“You get into this state where you say, ‘I want to do this, I want to accomplish this goal,’” Murphy said. “And you strive for it.” In the case of Flappy Bird, people strived for it again, and again, and again in search for not only the feeling of triumph at the end of a good run, but also the very act of achieving that triumph. It’s an experience marked by the brief amount of time when the world appears to melt away and you, in the words of my high-score-achieving friend, appear to be hovering over yourself, watching yourself play.

It’s unclear whether Nguyen was cognizant of the idea of flow when designing Flappy Bird, and he did not reply to requests for comment on the matter. Furthermore, nothing from the now-extensive amount of information we have about the origin of Flappy Bird helps us understand more about Nguyen’s game design philosophy outside of his art style’s retro influences and his love of simplicity. He does however believe in the idea of games requiring an appropriate mental state as the world’s collective addiction became the apparent driving factor in his pulling of Flappy Bird from the App Store and Google Play.

“Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed. But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem,” the 29-year-old Vietnamese resident told Forbes in a recent interview, meaning he at the very least understood the importance of feeling relaxed, and not anxious, when it came to achieving a higher score in his game.

Threes — a mobile number-based puzzler released for iOS amidst the height of the Flappy Bird craze last week — on the other hand is a prime example of a polar opposite game that incorporates the very same ideas of flow into its design and mechanics on purpose. The creator, Asher Vollmer, used the principles of flow to turn his title into the next mobile puzzler people can’t put down.

@nickstatt @jbruin Good because flow’s what I was going for

– Asher Vollmer (@AsherVo) February 11, 2014

Threes, beyond its playful illustrations and theme music, is a numbers-based puzzle in which you must merge multiples of three to create the highest multiple: one’s and two’s become three’s, while three’s make six’s, six’s make twelve’s, and so on. But because Threes’ level of difficulty increases in lockstep with your ability to overcome the present challenge of creating the next highest multiple, it beautifully fulfills the fourth criteria of flow — achieving a difficulty-to-skill balance — in a way few other puzzle games have ever accomplished.

Asher Vollmer’s Threes is a numbers-based puzzle game that is especially adept at putting players in a state of flow early on thanks to the way its difficulty manifests itself and evolves over time.

“Threes is very, very simple. The task is clear. The feedback is immediate. There’s almost no interface in Threes, no complicated movements,” said Murphy. “The rest is about, ‘Does it strike a balance of difficulty?’ It’s pretty easy, yet as you play you begin to uncover layers of what you’re doing. The same is true of Angry Birds.”

By designing a game that is simultaneously simple to grasp and surprisingly deep, Vollmer created an experience that was especially good at putting players in a state of flow. The experience of clearing the board feels like an automatic reflex of your mind and the numbered tiles seem to merge themselves without you needing to think much beyond an innate awareness of your general strategy.

That is until it the game get’s really difficult at the higher stages and your flow state tends to break. But helping you achieve flow early on is precisely what brings you back to Threes again and again.

“A mindless mindfulness”: The role of distraction

Cutting out distraction, as one of Csikszentmihalyi’s requirements for achieving flow, plays an especially interesting role in games where its easy to find yourself too aware of your actions in a way that keeps you from succeeding the more you seemingly try harder. After all, part of the reason Flappy Bird was so maddening was the fact that it was so easy to become obsessed with perfecting its simply mechanics, in effect distracting yourself, breaking any chance at finding flow, and tarnishing future efforts as you only get more anxious and flustered.

To keep yourself from falling into this pit, employing thoughtful distraction — listening to music, talking with friends for instance — while playing can actually create what Lantz calls a “mindless mindfulness.” “It’s almost like we have this frontal cortex that is a nosy boss,” he said. “The workers are these subconscious modules, the people actually threading the needle of the task. If you can distract that chatterbox of this nosy bossy, the other modules can perform the function.”

This appears to be a key factor for some in entering a flow state while playing. Even Vollmer finds that concentrating too hard on his own game pulls up a mental block to success. “All my best scores are from when I was trying to relax and binged on Netflix. Threes sort of compartmentalizes itself,” he told me via Twitter. Lantz himself said some of his best Flappy Bird scores appeared to happen when he was in the middle of a conversation.

If you can distract that chatterbox of this nosy bossy, the other modules can perform the function.” –Frank Lantz, director of NYU’s Game Center

“A lot of people will put on headphones. They’re not putting their headphones on to listen to the music. If you put on a song you’ve never heard, that’s a distraction. If you put a song you’ve heard 100 times, you now what to expect,” Murphy said. “Now what you’re doing is you’re using that experience that normally you would think would add difficulty to actually remove the distractions.”

The act of distracting your mind essentially from itself is one of the few ways flow criteria can be actively influenced, and is important beyond just games. It’s how we subconsciously focus within distracting work environments and how we keep stress or nervousness at bay in intense situations like the minutes before a sporting event.

“We as humans, we look around for things to try and put ourselves in this state of flow,” Murphy said. “We know when we work better if the door is shut or it’s noisy. Sometimes the noise is adding difficulty, affecting the fourth requirement balance, and then sometimes the noise is something that you’re then able to tune out.”

Most importantly though, thinking about flow as it relates to game design and our complex relationship with these addictive, feedback-heavy mechanisms illuminates not just what may be going on in our heads as we persist through failure, but also elements of games and their limitations in a way more fundamental to the very nature of play.

“I think games in many cases are about focusing our attention in this way on these moments of what it means to be aware or not of the actions that we do. In that case, games are almost like a kind of folk neuroscience where we get to toy around,” Lantz said. “That’s not necessarily what we want from great art. It seems a little bit practical, but I’m proud of that. There is something valuable in that.”（source：cnet）