MUSIC 256A: Week 6

Chp 6: Game Design

Principle 6.14: Induce and Harness Flow

The concept of flow state has always been so interesting to me. It’s so connected to physicality and art and passion in a way that’s almost impossible to describe precisely but is simultaneously understood by nearly anyone you talk to. It’s this everyday sublime, onset by different activities or emotions in every person.

I’m very fascinated by the way that this chapter describes the artfulness of video games. For me growing up, video games were confined to the worlds of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and Dance Dance Revolution (later Tap Tap Revolution once smartphones came out), games that my brother and I loved, but neither of which exactly gave me a sense of flow. As I grew older and stopped playing video games, the extremely gendered marketing of mass video games definitely impacted the way I interacted with them. The variety of video games in this chapter really made me rethink what a video game is and what it can mean. The ones we looked at in class felt almost like interactive movies. I think a good movie or book puts you into a sort of flow state the way art-making can, and I felt that same flow state watching Kunwoo’s video game streaming.

Going into the sequencer project and the latter half of this class, I want to learn how to better incorporate a concrete narrative into my projects while also removing myself from the confines of a linear timeline. I love the way a narrative that incorporates devices like looping and dreams and flashbacks creates an experience rather than an objective story. I would love to learn about other video games that create a sort of emotional, flow-y experience, if anyone reading this has any suggestions! I’m definitely excited to explore this new world of video game design that I’ve never encountered before.

Principle 6.5: Reflection — Games as a Mirror of our Humanness

This principle is the essence of what I took away from this chapter. I’ve never thought about game design (vs. graphics or character design or imagery) as its own art form. One challenge I feel like I’ve been having is in incorporating these ideas of flow and reflection into my game-making process. With other art forms — music, dance, writing, painting, etc. — I can feel myself hitting a flow state as I create my work. Most of those art forms are more about artistic process than a result that a user might experience. Video game design is part of a unique framework where so much of your design experience and struggle is abstracted behind this layer of what a user actually experiences. And the tough reality is that you can’t have that user experience of a game until you’ve already put a solid amount of work in. I’ve gotten used to thinking of flow state as something to be experienced individually, not to be created for an audience. These projects definitely present a challenging task, one that asks me to rethink that attitude and find artful experiences in more unconventional art making techniques.