YEAR 2 - ba2a - The Flow Channel

The lecture we had recently looked at the concept of flow and it linked to THIS blog post explaining what Jesse Schell refers to as the 'flow channel' where the challenge/skill ratio should ideally fit within.

I was thinking about how I would map 'Too May Windows' (check previous post) to the same graph and I got this.

The graph represents a single play session of the game as it's an arcade game and doesn't change particularly each time (other than a small amount of RNG).

The game has a rising slight rising challenge due to the time constraint. At 5000 points, the challenge increases drastically due to the less generous time rewards.

At a micro level, the challenge/skill graph probably looks something more like this.

The peaks being the click of a button and the rising challenge being looking for the button (with decreasing time).

The time between each peak is about 3 seconds and the extra long challenge increase being at a multiple of 1000 points where the game shakes the board, changing the current layout of windows.