The Flow Experience

On the surface, The Flow Experience is a zen-like twist on classic 2D arcade games about evading and blocking enemy attacks. This immediately creates an interesting UX conflict between stress and relaxation and a playground to research affective reactions emerging from this conflict: Enjoyment, anger, frustration, and everything that comes with it. Given that emotional reactions are very personal, different between individuals, and dependent on the situational context, the aim for this project was not only to create a game that could achieve a "flow" effect (which can be seen as a state of pure focus and enjoyment), but achieve it for every player and every situation. In psychology, flow is a key experience for productivity and enjoyment and integrated in our current affective state. So to create a game that could overcome situational and individual differences, it needed to (a) measure user affect; (b) model these affects statistically; and (c) adapt to the own model. I developed a theoretical concept and process model to achieve this, applied linear regression models, and succesfully evaluated the resulting game in a large-scale user study. Overall, this project demonstrated the potential for affect-adaptation, and provided a blueprint of how to approach an adaptation task from a theoretical and methodological perspective. The non-experimental version of the game was then made commercially available, as it proved to be by itself quite fun and rewarding.