Between Flow and Presence

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about my observations in respect to the influence of flow and presence on the overall experience of a computer game.

Flow occurs when a person is completely immersed in the performance of an activity. This results in the experience of joy and can be described as „being in the zone“. Flow requires an activity that matches the person’s skill level without being too difficult or too easy. When in a state of flow, one likes to remain in the activity.

Presence describes the subjective illusion of being in a real place. Presence positively scales with the degree of sensory immersion in the virtual environment. This mostly is achieved by using visually immersive devices like head-mounted displays. Presence has an effect on the overall experience of the virtual environment and the activities performed.

While the degree of presence also indicates how much a user feels to be a part of the virtual environment, i.e., experience the feeling that own actions matter, flow indicates to fully absorb a users attention and awareness. I recently observed this phenomenon as I played Factorio, again.

Factorio

Factorio is a desktop computer game being played from a bird’s perspective. While the user can interact with the virtual environment using their avatar, presence potentially is low in contrast to fully immersive virtual reality applications. This is a result of a user’s perspective and the fact that Factorio provides no full visual immersion. Despite the low presence, Factorio induces a high degree of flow and fun when being played. It fully absorbs my attention resulting in the outcome of completely forgetting about the passage of time and blending out other changes in the real world.

Thus, although presence is highly important for a very believable experience of a virtual environment, a high flow-inducing characteristic is more important for computer games to be entertaining and fun. However, once having achieved a highly flow-inducing gameplay, increasing presence could further enhance the overall experience.

When do I feel present?

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about my personal requirements to experience presence inside of a virtual environment.

Recently, I helped two colleagues preparing their experiment by volunteering as a participant. The central goal of their study is to measure the subjective experience of presence. Presence is the subjective illusion of being inside a virtual environment despite physically being located in a completely different environment. The illusion is increased when a user is visually immersed in the virtual environment, e.g., by wearing a head-mounted display.

This experiment made me think about my personal experiences with presence. Which gameplay and design elements are needed to feel present inside a virtual environment? Personally, I feel the highest degree of presence when either the virtual world is manipulable and reacts to my actions as well as when the virtual environment is designed in a natural way, features a believable scenery and is freely explorable.

A manipulable world requires virtual objects or agents I can interact with and that show a reaction based on my actions. The effectiveness of these interactions for inducing presence is not depended on their complexity or believability. It is more about the mere possibility to actively change things inside of the virtual world with my actions. For instance, the option to grab and throw a virtual object already is enough to let me experience presence. However, simply indicating my existence with 3D assets of the game controllers or even a realistic avatar rarely induces presence. Thus, to feel presence, it is important to me that my actions matter, e.g., by changing the position of an object, and not that I am visually represented inside of the virtual world.

A freely explorable and believable scenery requires a lot of modelling and level editing. Like in the real world, I enjoy seeing new places and exploring them by changing my perspective. For a virtual environment, this requires a detailed virtual world and the possibility to freely navigate through the environment. Environments that mainly consist of nothing more than a nearly empty virtual world featuring only a few assets make it very hard for me to experience presence. Here, I immediately notice that it is nothing else than a simulation thus breaking the illusion of actually being inside of the virtual world. Thus, to feel presence, it is important that the virtual world hides the fact that it is a simulation by presenting many details making it lively and believable.

In the end, as complex virtual environments are diffcult to design, each virtual world should contain at least one interaction possibility. This interaction should enable a user to perform an action inside of the virtual environment that causes a change of it. As a result, they potentially experience presence when immersing themselves inside such a virtual environment.

Typing Commands

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about how the computer games represent effective educational tools as they embed the application of the game-knowledge in complex scenarios.

While Linux and a few Mac users might be used to type command line inputs into a console, most other computer users probably find this method quite confusing and not very intuitive. By now, most users are familiar with using windows, icons, and buttons when it comes to executing and controlling applications. These graphical user interfaces are more intuitive and less prone to false inputs. Thus, they are more comfortable to control and do not require a user to remember specific inputs to execute a certain function.

This results in the fact that only a few users can operate a terminal thus leading to the impression that this tool is for experts, programmers, and hackers only. While this might be true to some degree, having a basic knowledge about using command lines can be beneficial and helpful. Learning most relevant commands, such as „cd“, „mv“ and „rm“, however, is challenging as users have to internalize them.

Using Terminal commands in Hacknet

Like with any other learning content, learning these commands requires a high motivation for a repetitive practice. This can be achieved by embedding the learning content in computer games and turning it into a central input game mechanic which is embedded in a complex scenario, i.e., the narrative of the game.

While this is not the intention of Hacknet, the hacking simulation game represents a perfect learning environment for terminal commands. During the gameplay, a player is challenged to hack computers, to search for specific files, and even to download or to modify these files. For this purpose, Hacknet simulates a hacking terminal that requires a player to type and to execute commands of which most of them are commands used in regular terminals.

As a result of this, players subconsciously learn the basics of using a terminal in a highly motivated way during the gameplay. Also, as there is only a small visual difference between the game terminal and a regular terminal, users can directly transfer their learning outcome from the game context to a different context.

In conclusion, computer games represent powerful educational tools as they can easily embed a learning content in complex scenarios. This leads to a high degree of motivation and allows for an repetitive practice during different challenges already requiring a training transfer within the context of the game.