Comparing Player Experience and Empirical Aesthetic Models...

Flow

The concept of flow was pioneered by Csíkszentmihályi in 1975 [3]. Today it is grouped under Positive Psychology although it precedes the official term.

Flow describes a state people may enter while performing a task. Said state is characterized by total involvement leading to the person in the flow state losing track of time, exhaustion level, hunger or similar. While this process involves hard work/play/performance, it is also a period of great control which leads to people looking back on a flow experience very fondly. To get into a flow state a task has to be balanced between the perceived challenge and the perceived skill [3].

Figure 1: The original flow model and a later rework. In general, the former seems more widely used. (Figure 7.1, p.248, [3])

Csíkszentmihályi himself said one of the most common experience of flow can be found during play [3] and unsurprisingly it has been adopted in PX research. The general understanding being that a game is good, when it induces flow.

The thing about flow, however, is that it is a rather extreme state, dependent on both the game and the player being in sync with each other. Traditionally flow was ascribed to situation in which a highly skilled person needed total focus on the task in order to succeed. Surely this happens in video games and potentially quite often. Imagine a clutch victory in a competitive game, an especially demanding puzzle with a tight time limit or even the “one more round” phenomenon at 4 a.m in CIV. However, for flow to happen, a lot of dynamic factors in the player (mood, fitness, alertness) have to match the dynamic nature of the game. While it has been argued that games are especially potent when it comes to inducing flow [2] a lot of game experiences do not result in a flow experience. It can even be argued, that with many mobile games a flow experience is not even a desirable goal. After all, missing the bus stop on my commute because I was in a flow state will potentially lead me to rethink it’s spot on my phone.

Obviously, flow in games is not studied as a purely binary concept. For example, the GameFlow [13] theory proposes eight factors which, should an experience score high in all of them result in flow, while lower scores will still result in enjoyment.

Still this frameworks focus lies on a players experience of an extreme state and how to induce it. Using this perspective, researchers see the complete absorption into a game as it’s implicit goal, with enjoyment increasing, the closer a player gets.

On the flip site, this perspective is not really concerned why people may play the game in the first place. For this, the next theory might be advantageous.

Self-Determination Theory

The Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a rather influential theories in PX research [14]. Like flow it is generally grouped with positive psychology and it is a motivational theory. It is a rather complex framework with several sub-theories. The ones most pertinent here are the idea of Intrinsic Motivation and Need Satisfaction:

SDT assumes different types of motivation with the most sought after one being Intrinsic [4]. SDT differentiates between:

• Amotivation: The absence of motivation, the lacking intention to act.
• Extrinsic Motivation: Motivation dependent on outside rewards such as rewards, punishments but also deeming a task as important. There are several types of extrinsic motivation which differ in level of personal importance.
• Intrinsic Motivation: Motivation dependent on a task being perceived as being inherently satisfactory, enjoyable and interesting.

Subsequently, while Amotivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be of less interest in research, Intrinsic Motivation is often used as a measurement of enjoyment [8]. The logic behind this is rather clear: If a player is motivated to pick up a game over and over again, without any external force coercing them to, the game obviously does something right. Therefore, measuring the intrinsic motivation players experience towards a specific games gives us an indicator on how good it may be. Interestingly, looking at modern live service games, that shower players with rewards for playing (or punishing them when not logging in frequently) it seems like game designers (in part) favor extrinsic motivation over intrinsic motivation².

So if a game is good, when it creates intrinsic motivation (as this means players enjoy playing the game and do not feel force to play it) it is advantageous to know how intrinsic motivation is generated.

According to SDT, intrinsic motivation results from the satisfaction of three needs: Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness [4]. Are these needs met, players experience intrinsic motivation and therefore enjoyment, if players are hindered to satisfy them, they experience need frustration.

Figure 2: Diagram of the Cognitive Evaluation Theory. Need satisfaction results in intrinsic motivation, while the importance of each need is governed by the individual and context. (Figure 1, p.3, [14])

As SDT is a motivational theory, it seeks to answer why people engage in certain behavior. I.e.: Why do players play a game (or why aren’t they). In this specific case and with the concepts discussed here, the theory is useful when focusing on how to get players to play a game: Which aspects should a game have to satisfy needs? Why do people decide to play a game over other enjoyable pastimes? This in turn may make research using SDT quite valuable for game designers, that seek to make a potentially enjoyable, but definitely motivating experience.

Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory is a host of theories about emotion generation and differentiation. The core sentiment is: People perceive a situation, they appraise it, and depending on this appraisal, they will experience a specific emotion, informing their behavior. The for art experience important version of this theory, the aptly named Appraisal Theory of Aesthetic Emotions coined by Silvia [12], goes back to the multi-level sequential check concept by Scherer [11]. For the rest of this blog post, this is the version I will be referring to when writing Appraisal Theory.

In Appraisal Theory, emotions are the results of appraisals: these types of appraisals are usually unconscious and include checks like goal relevancy, resource availability and novelty. Each emotion has a unique appraisal structure, i.e. is the results of a different set of outcomes of these appraisals [12]. For example, the for art experience very important, interest emotion has an appraisal structure of (1) a positive novelty check (“This is surprising”) and (2) a positive copying potential check (“I can make sense of this”).

It is important to note, that these appraisals are highly subjective. Each person appraises any situation/stimulus from their own perspective, leading to different emotional reactions.

So what would it mean, if we apply this framework to games (As far as I know, it has not been explicitly done yet)? Unlike with the SDT above, which asks why people play videogames, we now have a perspective that is more interested in the emotions a player experiences. This theory is aimed to explain emotion generation, i.e., why does a situation makes us feel as it does. This differs from the discussions above in that we no longer focus on enjoyment and frustration, but at as many emotions as we want. Further the subjectivity of appraisal pushes individual differences in the experience into the forefront: We may optimize a game to be appealing to many people as possible, but we will still get widely different experiences on an individual basis as every play session, every player is different. This focus on individual experiences increases with the next model.

The VIMAP

The VIMAP, or to give it it’s full name, the Vienna Integrated Model of (top-down and bottom-up processes in) Art Perception is a comprehensive model for the visual art experience, synthesizing several other approaches from empirical aesthetics [10].

The model proposes several, more or less distinct, modules people go through while experiencing art. These are the bottom-up modules, which describe how a visual stimulus is perceived and the following top-down modules which then interpret, contextualize and judge the artwork [10]. At it’s core. the VIMAP follows an appraisal approach as described above. It puts heavy emphasis on the context the art is viewed in and what kind of experience the viewer has had with art prior to the experience in question. One of the arguably most prevalent factor modulating the art experience is the expertise of the viewer, but other factors like experiencing the art in a museum or how the museum itself looks, have to be taken into account when studying the art experience [9].

Another central point of the VIMAP is it’s proposed outcomes. These outcomes range from the Facile or Default outcome, which is a general “It’s fine” or “shrug” reaction, to the profound, potentially live-changing, transformative outcome. The range of outcomes are, again, based on appraisals that check if the artwork in question challenges the viewers self-image or their preconceptions of art. Depending on if an artwork is congruent to the viewers self, is relevant to them, and finally if they need to cope with the artwork, different art experiences can come to pass.

Compared to the other theories discussed here, our perspective has moved away from the games, and more towards the internal processes of the player: This is a perceiver oriented approach.

While the model can be used to discuss which factors of an artwork might facilitate certain outcomes (for example symmetry of an artwork may impact it’s perceived beauty [7]), it’s main focus lies on what changes artworks may elicit in the individual perceiver and why. After playing a game, according to the VIMAP, the player will have had experienced certain emotions during play, have thought about them and will have synthesized them into an aesthetic judgement of the artwork, and potentially a change in their self-image.

While this model does not naturally lend itself to studying factors of the game, as it focuses on the individual factors that influenced the experience and the subsequent individual outcome of it, more than the experience itself, it does facilitate an understanding how thoughts and feeling towards a game may inform the opinion people have towards a game after they played it.