Games that achieve FLOW

wannabe sciencefags that want to knock on psychology as a practice without understanding that observational study is kind of hard using fucking humans as a test subject

it means the player's skill

God Hand, obviously.

This seems like it, some of my friends talk shit about psychology but they are exaclty like pic related.

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How can any game achieve this then, when all they affect is the difficulty?

Cred Forums sure is dumb

Real life.

Resident Evil 4

mother fucking serious sam 3

shut up Chris

You train the player to attain a higher level skill at the same time you increase the dificulty of the game.
That is FLOW.

Skill = How good you are at doing the thing
Difficulty = How much skill doing the thing requires
When your skill = game's difficulty, you get into flow.
OP is looking for games which allow you to perform at your best and can become as hard as you want them too, where the difficulty equaling your skills is very likely.

metal gear rising

Crysis
Quake

no, no, no, this is what OP meant

quintessential answer. subtle dynamic difficulty.

That's not really the case for DaS3.

>games that follow the function f(x)=x

>muh stop completely to shoot

Its a fucking awful mechanic that literally makes the game shit and clumsy

>oh this enemy is getting too close, i cant walk backwards and shoot at the same time though

Inb4 git gud, its not hard, it just feels wrong as fuck

>understanding that observational study is kind of hard using fucking humans as a test subject
and it's what makes the entirety of psychology a fucking joke
>lets take something that has literally millions of independent variables and pretend we can make any conclusions about it

F-Zero GX. Love this game.

bruh

>Souls games having flow
Hahahahahaha
Most of the other answers are correct

>Two SS left to unlock difficults
>Know I'll just struggle further once I get there
I'm not good enough at this game.

I wouldn't say that is true at all. If you find the end easy you shouldn't find the beginning hard.

I dont think anxiety belongs on the opposite end of boredom like that.

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So if a game has tight controls that let a player do crazy shit if they're good, but also gets very hard, is that flow? Or would it be a game that introduces concepts in a way that allows the player to easily build on previous knowledge, while steadily getting more difficult by adding those concepts into levels as you go? How do you factor in players who are above/below average?

I don't really understand this idea

God Hand, Mikami, director of RE4, used the logical conclusion to RE4's dynamic difficulty and put the more fully featured concept into God Hand.

Plus God Hand has godlike controls that always give you a way to out-skill any trouble if you react fast enough.

Animal crossing

What part of animal crossing provides any kind of challenge
It's designed to be completely stress-free

Exactly, it never leaves the bottom left point.

I think it implies you are really bad at video games. But, on the other hand, I don't really know how you could be good at AC.

God Hand didn't do it right to achieve that flow, though. There's nothing subtle about it, it repeatedly, visibly, and intentionally builds until you fuck up, manufacturing anxiety. God Hand's difficulty system wasn't bad, but it gets a lot more praise than it should.

there's a short difficult learning curve then once you get the flow of the game it's retard easy and extremely boring

Melee is the game I play, and I feel like it achieves great flow through all levels of the game. (speaking from a competitive perspective)

Melee, and smash in general, is the king of fighting games for beginners. The controls are easy enough for 8 year olds to understand, and the gameplay is really easy to understand: Knock your opponent off the stage and defeat all of their lives. It has a simple "HP" system that can be explained with "the higher your percent, the farther you fly when hit."

The best part is that the better you get at the game, the harder it gets. This is inherently true and can probably be said about other fighting games as well, due to it's multiplayer 1 on 1 gameplay. You can never master this game, as there will always be another opponent to fight, someone who you either beat or learn something new from. Because of the numerous techs, and strategies that are present in high level Melee, there's so much room and resources for anyone to to improve and continue to improve for a long time. Melee has a skill floor at sea level and a skill ceiling that goes to the moon, making the journey from total-scrub, to coming first in local tournaments is a clean flow with seemingly has no end. Other smash games exists, but personally I don't believe that they offer the great balance and gameplay that melee offers at a competitive level.

>inb4 smash is not a real fighting game, with smug anime pic
If you want to know if someone is shit at a game, their opinions are usually this shallow.

smash is not a fighting game

Wipeout HD

I love you, user.
>mfw zone 100

Mónaco
Hammerwatch
Bamham
Pic related

Well I don't think there's a very high skill ceiling for animal crossing. Anything that might be "hard" just really takes pretty much nothing but patience like stalks and getting seasonal items.

The game is all about it.

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No. That's an implementation. A game that adjusts it's difficulty, preferably invisibly to the player's skill level can also generate the exact same effect.

There's not a single SP-game that is actually difficult

>Finally getting good at Phantom
>Beating Zico
>Trying to master the Zone
No matter how much I improve I feel the need to get better and go faster.

>anxiety

what are you a woman or a fag or something?

RE4 does that

Zone is such a great mode. Everytime you play you get a little further. I wonder when it stops? If it even has an end. If PS3 TASing ever becomes a thing, I'd be very curious to see how far you can take it before the game crashes or something.

I have real issues playing stealth games like Deus Ex or Dishonored, I'm always torn between doing the "ghost" method or being a killing machine because whereas the former is the intention I always feel like I'm missing out on all the cool combat options, I have serious anxiety about this when I play these games

I've been to tournaments for melee and even I don't think its a fighting game

Melee is just it's own special type of game

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Digimon World.
Darkest Dungeon.
Salt and Sanctuary.

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It's called "replaying"
Whenever you play a game that has several ways to play, don't try to do it all at once, save for later replays, that way you can get the most out of the game

Subtle

Fucking kids I swear

Underage fag get out

Fucking love this game so much

This is a completely subjective question.

Faggot

Fuck off.

Gonna try to pick some I think folks on here haven't seen.
RIVE
DeadCore
Bleed

And then Distance which is decently well-known but nails that feeling, anyway.

So is almost everything that can be said about a video game in terms of analyzing its quality. We can still discuss these things, though.

>they said on a board that praises overwatch as the next goty

If a game wants to keep players in the "flow" state, they need to match difficulty with the players skill. You likely know this already from the idea of a difficulty curve.

>tfw your whole life takes place in the grey areas of this graph

In all honesty, the line of "flow" is going to be different for everybody, but every single Platinum game nails it for me.

Cred Forums inst one person

Got to you that hard?

I'm not super casual but i think games like zelda, mario, and metroid all have amazing flow to them. if I die it's only once or twice but there are some though bits every now and then.

>skill
>videogames

That is before the Inverted Castle, where it kinda goes to shit.

I don't think you understand. SotN doesn't really have any difficulty curve to speak of. It's all over the place and depends on your stats and rarely your skill.

This is a fantastic example because of the zone mode. For those that don't know, it's basically going around a track over and over but you get faster and faster, so it becomes more difficult. But it absolutely gets you "in the zone" (which is why the gamemode is called that) and being "in the zone" is basically analogous to "flow".

Another good example I can think of is Geometry Wars. If you get a good run going and then die, restarting it painfully boring because you're used to the harder difficulty around where you died. Easily plottable on the chart in OP.

Dragon Age Origins on Nightmare mode.

You could still break it pretty easily with certain mage spells though. But I found it to be a fairly challenging game that ramped up pretty much in sync with the plot progression and my understanding of the game mechanics.

I would 100% call it a fighting game, but in the same way I'd call Call of Duty and Team Fortress 2 Multiplayer First Person Shooter games.

Each game's idea is generally the same (team 1 vs team 2) and they play relatively the same, movement wise. Mouse moves your aim, wasd moves your character around the 3d game world, the game is played from the first person perspective, etc. At the very barebones, they are both First person shooters. They are also multiplayer, separating themselves from a first person shooter games that aren't.

Of course each game has there own rules like what the playable character can and can't do, how the objective is played, and stuff like that. For smash bros, I feel it's the same way..sort of..

Street fighter Is made and based around 1v1. It's a "traditional" fighting game, as to say it's 2d, has combos, etc. This is how the game is designed. However, smash bros was designed differently. It was created mainly with 4 player free for all and more party oriented modes for multiple players on the same TV. But Smash Bros also offers the same experience as Street Fighter. One vs one battles, where each player controls a character and tries to defeat the opponents. That's what a fighting game is too me. Video game classifications should be a simple as possible. Subclasses can be whatever tho. Street Fighter I'd say is a [Traditional] [Fighting Game], as it offers little outside it's designed 1v1 fighting mode. Smash Bros would be a [Party] [Fighting Game], as it was designed to be a game to be played with multiple people in a variety of ways, but it also has the potential (and design) to be played how "fighting games" are traditionally recognized.

So I'd call it a Fighting Game. What would it be called if it's not a fighting game? A party game? What kind of party game is it? Mario Party is a Party video boardgame, Double Dash could be considered a Party Racing Game.

pic unrelated

The Shield Rod makes the first castle a joke, the inverted castle has enough of a difficulty spike to make things interesting again until you get the Crissaegrim, which is the point where the game completely falls apart.

it has to be consistently challenging for the player, enough to be interesting but not so much that you're getting overly frustrated. Most developers factor in skilled/shitty players via difficulty levels

That's not me

I really don't agree with that all, the mass number of rooms where you slowly eliminate the same enemy multiple times with no variation or increase in complexity make this fucker drag like a prone 80-year-old woman's breasts

This. Unless and until you reach the skill level required to not feel anxious at level DIE

When you get in that zone and just play with your mind while your fingers do everything you want.

Which book is it?

How many hours have you put into this game?

this and 1

The soothing music and artstyle does wonders to keep this game from getting frustrating.

Let me guess: hideout and backup shift.

Close. Hideout and Abyss. Abyss is pretty damn close. Hideout I can barely get through half without fucking up.

174. It took me 120 or so to complete every level in the Nexus when I was playing through my backlog. Got back into it a few weeks ago to try and SS some of the gold ones. Had to fucking build my thumb callouses back up.

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>Make a game with simple but great gameplay
>Ruin everything by adding a dumbass minigame at the end that determine if you get a good score or not

Because it's uncomfortable to face the fact that you're just a really complicated machine responding to external stimuli and all of the meaningful and profound things about being human are completely mundane. Psychology is uncomfortable but once neurology develops a bit more and the machine is understood the fucking horrific implications of just how meaningless our existence in will get more well known. I expect suicide rates to skyrocket at that point but that's just me projecting

This really applied well to BB. After Rom there wasn't a single boss I had trouble with outside chalice dungeons, but before that was fucking brutal. Seems like DS2 suffered from this too except it wasn't nearly as difficult as BB.

DS3 was a joke, I beat every boss in that game in my first or second try. So disappointing.

yes this chart is bullshit

How so?

Battletoads do this, some times per level
>That Turbo tunnel

>someone actually posted the greatest game ever made

Not all hope is lost

It's not hard to get down the timing and nail it every time
It is still dumb though

The real bullshit was retro bonus stages from the first game

What? No. It's designed to fuck the player over. Unless you've replayed the level over and over, memorised all patterns, you're going to game over. That's not flow. That's frustration.
You can not react to the things this game throws at you and anyone who says they beat Turbo Tunnel on their first try is lying.

Game is completely designed around not being able to move and shoot at the same time, it's not a problem. Not like anyone would ever move and shoot at the same time for real anyway, unless it's supressive fire.

Also learn2quickturn.

Literally any infinite-wave survival game. If each wave is +X% harder than the last, then the highest wave you are able to beat will always be +/-X% within your skill level.

The target is not always at the same distance from the cannon and makes it a pain.
Didn't play long enough to get used to it though, there's only so many times I'm willing to replay a level perfectly and fail at the mini game

>He thinks Flow is about beating things on first try
>And not that feeling when you get a new challenge, and you keep reaching the point where its alright

Also those final levels

That doesn't mean you're in the "flow" zone, most games with waves of enemies start off painfully slow and boring, and overwhelm you with too many tough enemies.

What's really happening is meandering around the graph, and being in the "flow zone" for a short time

That graph wasn't made for video games specifically, it was made to explain your mental state during any kind of task, probably work.

So to understand the concept, try first thinking about it in relation to a different task. I would use art as an example because it's something I do very often. When I have to work on something beyond my skill level, like a large detailed scene with multiple characters and complex perspective, I get anxious and frustrated. When I have to work on something far below my skill level, like drawing a simple cartoon character many times, it's very boring.
But when I'm working on something that is just at my skill level, something that isn't frustratingly difficult or way too easy, I get sucked in and experience a deep and satisfying sense of focus. And at this level I will be improving my skill without realizing, incorporating that newfound skill smoothly by attempting more difficult techniques.

Another good example might be reading. Assuming you're an average or above average reader, if you were forced to read and be tested on childrens books, you'd probably be very bored. But if you were forced to read and be tested on something like a textbook on something very advanced that you haven't studied, you would be anxious about it.

That's what "flow" is about. It's meant to describe real world tasks, but it still holds value in explaining good game design.

Who /RocketLeague/ here?

Fixed your chart, user-kun,

Are you dumb?

Good wave-based games give you bonuses in later rounds for outskilling earlier rounds, meaning you still have an incentive to perform good in the earlier rounds.

Psychology is great for the average person to study normally, or do a minor in

but most people who major in are insufferable sorority girls or people too stupid for STEM who thought Psych would be easy but still just barely scrape by. Invariably they believe they can predict what other people are thinking and are masters of the human mind

Devil May Cry 1 on normal

I think this is the best designed game. There have to be hurdles that force you to practice until your skills improve enough to get past them after which you should be rewarded with a "Woah so this is what the game is like at a higher level. I understand now." feel of control that lasts a good while but then the next hurdle appears. Ultimately you should reach a level where you feel like you are in control and nothing feels unfair but the game never becomes so easy that you get bored.

Competitive fighting game player here

Smash
Is
Not
A
Fighting
Game

I like smash
but
it's
not
a
fighting
game

SF is a [Fighting Game]
Smash is a [Different Game].

>me and two buddies take a course together
>psych: Special topic- Drugs and Behavior
>this will be great
>yeah dude weed man
>mfw it's fucking neuro science and shit
>also prof pronounces axion buttons as boo-tawns, dunno what the fuck that was about
Man that shit was difficult.

Define fighting game.

I just realized my own chart doesn't really make sense since there's no time axis but if you assume the difficulty of the game increases over time then it makes sense. The skill axis portrays what happens to the player skill (assuming he's a competent player who is not gonna give up) as the difficulty keeps increasing.

>guaranteed replies
game's bad

Thief 2, for sure.

what you just described would mean the line stays in the white the whole time, bouncing between the upper and lower level. I understand what you're saying but the whole point is that if it dips into the grey then it DOES feel unfair and like you're not in control. Flow doesn't mean no hurdles, it means that you feel like the hurdles ARE beatable, even if you're not quite good enough yet you feel like you understand what you have to do to get better and beat it. Dipping outside the white means that you're frustrated and unhappy with the game itself, while the white can still have difficulty and even failure, it's not frustrating and unsatisfying.

Yes

you are a clown and not a competitive fighting game player

please return to r/kappa

There's 2D (SF, Anime, MKX/Injustice/KI) and 3D (Tekken, SC, VT) fighting games.
They're a genre because they share strong similarities and it's easy to see why they're grouped together.

Adding Smash to that list would be pointless. Yes you could do that if you wanted to but the similarities are not enough to add smash to 2D or 3D fighters and creating an entire subgenre with ONLY ONE GAME IN THERE would be pointless too.

>I won't read what is posted but I'll assert my opinion anyways

By definition, Smash is a fighting game. It just has different general design from traditional fighting games.

flOw

Rez

Tetris

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No one read the Tao Te Ching?

I've gotten top 8 at a major and I have CPT points and prize money from locals to my name.

I think that's enough to qualify tbqhfam

See I would argue that it's by definition NOT and you can't do anything to say otherwise.
I won't stop bullying you faggots when I go to tourneys

I know this is bait, but it still hurts to read

>ctrl-f ".flow"
>0 of 0

C'mon Cred Forums.

Doesn't really achieve flow but it's about the idea at least.

That looks glitchy and weird, sure, but it's not like it isn't what shouldn't have happened when you run up right in front of something like that and try to rely on a relatively small shield.

Depends on country and work situation.
If physch is a nationalized institution, you get the situation where people go for it, because it sounds really cool.
>Have friend whos cool dude
>Ask him if i he want to do anything in Uni if he goes for it(he has trade job in marketing)
>He tells me he wants to EXPLORE THE WONDERS OF THE MIND
>Also talks to insane people

Don't confuse yourself. It is safe to assume with the current game culture that difficulty and time are positive transitive variables, i.e. difficulty = x + time

osu! follows that chart fairly well, except maybe replace anxiety with frustration?

A game in a genre doing something outside of usual genre conventions doesn't mean that it isn't within that genre. I don't like Smash all that much but you're just retarded my man.

>every other game in this genre follows the same ruleset and theory of game design
>but this one doesn't
>but it's still part of that genre

???

The TF2 vs. CoD argument only works because shooters are so varied. Fighting games are not all the varied at all, and at the core are all generally the same.

I prefer games that keep me clawing for a way out of the anxiety area

Because we use words like progress, pacing, difficulty, measure or skill.
Flow isn't that well defined, but its neat

By the way, if modern mario games wasn't so extremely padded, they would almost do Flow well.

The problem is that this is a game, and games are notorious for having strict rules in which they operate. Teaching the player these rules, and then making sure you (the dev) don't break them is the golden rule, otherwise you're commit the greatest sin against the player: breaking the sense of illusion. That's what the problem with that webm is. Especially in a game like dark souls, where the atmosphere and ambiance is one of the main attractions, breaking that rule, intentionally or not, is devastating.

Okay faggots. It doesn't matter if smash is a fighting game or not. Do you know why? It's because smash isn't played at tournaments. Smash has items. Smash has lots of levels. Smash has more than 2 players. You guys are playing sma.

Project IGI.

eSports with a ranking system and fighting games.
>smash isn't played at tournaments

That's right it isn't. Maybe half of smash is played at tourneys. Smash has all those things I listed. They're part of the game. Tourney fags don't play smash, they play something else.

Mount and blade? Dark souls solo? Dwarf fortress? Any game before 2001? Are you stupid or trolling?

There's only one game to date which allows for progression to the top right of the chart.

youtube.com/watch?v=l-q_PW-SzAU

I was talking about the game .flow

Bayonetta 1

>Those fucking Jeanne fights on hard + climax difficulty
If you don't know how to parry or bat within, you are going to get your shit kicked in, EVERY TIME. She will sit there and combo you for your healthbar, slap you out of witch time, parry you mid-air.

and many tournaments host only one game per series. fuck off. Smash actually had two fucking games at evo, more than any other series there

Every horror game should dip into anxiety a bit.

Are you being willfully obtuse? Smash had zero games at evo, because smash is a game with items that many people play at the same time. It doesn't matter if smash is a fighting game because what is played competitively is a bastardized version of the game that is smash.

>It's not Smash because I said so!
Is Super Mario 64 also not Super Mario 64 if you complete it without getting every star? Better tell all the speedrunners they've been running something else entirely! Who knows what, though.

Where would this go?

youtube.com/watch?v=zFv6KAdQ5SE&list=PLc38fcMFcV_s7Lf6xbeRfWYRt7-Vmi_X9&index=30

>observational study is kind of hard

Yeah and that's why psychology is still centuries away from being a science. You're also forgetting one other reason why they're despised by scientists, it's because they have no sense of statistics whatsoever. Every fucking pointless government funded study that comes out which uses a survey of 5 people in the same group of friends that makes its way into the media as a "brain fact" is just one more nail in the coffin of the most pointless (and lowest paid) discipline at university.

You're not playing a neutered version of Mario 64 if you skip a star or go fast.

Kill yourself immediately

But there are entire mechanics you're not using, you won't even see an eighth of the game's content.

You're not meant to when speedrunning. When you play a fighting game you're meant to play the game.

They are playing the game, sorry that your irredeemable lack of intelligence makes it hard to understand games that don't look and feel like Street Fighter or Tekken

In the trash where it belongs

I prefer this chart myself.

Mad Max
>underrated

Etrian Odyssey

>tfw battlefields are literally BATTLEFIELDS
>achieve flow while reking tons of enemy troops

No they're not. Once again, they're playing a game that's like smash but isn't actually smash. If I watch pros play tekken, they're playing the same game I play with my friends. If I watch faggots play smash, i'm watching a different game than I play with my friends.

What the fuck, this makes no sense

but smash is in 2D, and its a game where you fight. Are you saying that's not a fighting game? Also Rivals of Aether would be included in that subgenre