What Game Designers Don’t Know About Flow

Every year in my game design class at Northeastern, I teach Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow. It’s a standard part of the curriculum, featured prominently in Tracy Fullerton’s “Game Design Workshop” that we use as our text.

My students always get excited about it. I can tell by the energy in the room — it’s like they’ve discovered some secret cheat code for designing fun. But then an interesting thing happens: all their questions focus on just one aspect: balancing challenge against player skill. They fixate on that elegant diagonal “flow channel” diagram showing the sweet spot between anxiety and boredom.

It’s not just students, either. Virtually 100% of discourse around Flow in professional contexts is *also* about the challenge/skill relationship.

I get it. The diagram is compelling, and the idea is intuitive. But in our obsession with this single aspect of flow, we’re missing the richness of what makes games truly engrossing.

The real power of flow theory lies in the elements game designers rarely discuss (because they’re harder to implement):

🎯 Clear Goals and Immediate Feedback

Flow requires knowing exactly what you’re trying to achieve and getting instant information about how well you’re doing. Most failed games have murky objectives or delayed feedback loops.

Exemplar: Tetris. Could goals be any clearer? Complete lines to clear them. Every action produces immediate visual and audio feedback. Each piece placement feels consequential. The simplicity of this feedback loop is why people are still playing it decades later, despite (or perhaps because of) its minimal design.

🧠 Concentration on the Task

Flow demands uninterrupted focus. Every notification, UI popup, or feature competing for attention actively works against this state.

Exemplar: Vampire Survivors. This game understands concentration brilliantly. Once a run begins, there are almost no interruptions. No tutorials, no dialogue boxes, no achievement popups during active gameplay. Just continuous, absorbing action. The only decisions (leveling up) are quick, meaningful, and then you’re immediately back to the core loop. Its success despite ultra-simple graphics demonstrates the power of unbroken concentration.

🤸 Merger of Action and Awareness

This is the “zone” where play becomes automatic and effortless. Your intentions translate to actions without conscious thought. It’s the feeling of being one with the controls.

Exemplar: Hades. The fluid combat system in Hades exemplifies this principle perfectly. After a few runs, attacking, dashing, and using abilities becomes second nature. The controls fade from consciousness, and you’re simply expressing your intentions directly through the character. When you’re deep in a chamber clearing enemies, there’s no separation between thought and action — you’re simply flowing through the combat.

🥷 Loss of Self-Consciousness

Flow involves forgetting yourself entirely. Your ego and concerns about how you look or perform temporarily vanish as you merge with the activity.

Exemplar: Civilization. The famous “one more turn” phenomenon in Civ games demonstrates this principle perfectly. Players become so absorbed in managing their empire that their self-awareness dissolves completely. You’re not thinking about yourself anymore; you’re simply embodying the role of a leader guiding a civilization through history. Hours disappear because you’ve stopped being conscious of yourself as separate from the experience.

⏱️ Transformation of Time

When was the last time you designed explicitly for time distortion? Yet this is one of flow’s most distinctive features.

Exemplar: Any casino game. Casino designers are masters of time distortion, though for arguably exploitative purposes. Slot machines eliminate all external time cues: no clocks, no windows, no day/night cycles. They create rhythmic, hypnotic patterns of play with occasional variable rewards. The carefully calculated timing between spins — not too fast to drain players quickly, not too slow to break the trance — represents a deliberate manipulation of time perception.

These same principles appear in more ethical contexts too. Games like Tetris distort time through escalating tempos and the “just one more piece” compulsion loop. They’re designed specifically to make minutes feel like seconds.

Beyond Difficulty Curves

I’m not saying we should abandon challenge balancing. But focusing exclusively on it is like trying to bake a cake with just flour and ignoring all other ingredients.

The next time you’re designing a game, ask yourself:

• Are my goals and feedback loops crystal clear?
• Am I respecting the player’s attention and concentration?
• Do controls and systems become invisible during play?
• Can players forget themselves while playing?
• Does my game’s structure allow time to fall away?

These elements of flow are harder to implement and measure than simple difficulty adjustments. They require a holistic approach to design that considers the player’s psychological experience above all else.

But when you nail them all simultaneously, that’s when the magic happens. That’s when you create the kind of experiences players remember for a lifetime.

When I ask my students to analyze their favorite flow experiences, they gradually realize just how multidimensional the concept really is.

Dark Souls doesn’t put them into the Flow State because it’s difficult; it’s all the other things the game is doing right with it’s UI, exacting controls, and coherent atmosphere.

Challenge balancing might get them in the door, but these other elements are what keep them playing far past bedtime.

Sam Liberty is a gamification expert, applied game designer, and consultant. His clients include The World Bank, Click Therapeutics, and DARPA. He teaches game design at Northeastern University. He is the former Lead Game Designer at Sidekick Health.