Students Blog

When I first started playing, I did not set any goals for myself other than being able to shoot and move around. As the game progressed, I died in longer intervals and tried watching other people’s strategies while playing. Finally, I was able to kill on person who refused to shoot back and kept dodging. It wasn’t until he died that I realized he was my own teammate. At that point, the player voiced his opinions on my idiocy and left the room. Throughout the rounds of the game, players only spoke to highlight achievements and failures, such as when someone was killed or was able to kill. I also noticed that asking any questions or starting conversations was beyond the focused attentions of the other players. I thought that this might have been due to flow.

Csikszentmihalyi’s flow is described as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." Unlike the other players, I was a beginner that had no skill and therefore small goals to accomplish. Since these goals were fairly easy, I soon became bored because the main goal in the game, killing the other team, was too difficult. I almost always died first and I soon ran out of money for buying new guns. I was definitely not experiencing flow, and by Csikszentmihalyi’s flow diagram, I was within the “little skill” and “frustration” areas. The main reason why I did not experience flow was because I was not skilled enough to face the advanced players in the game.

There was one brief period where I did experience flow however. After my teammates booted me out of the room, I joined a room that had several other beginning players. We had low standards for each other so we decided to change the goals to suit our skill. We changed the conditions of the game to knives only, and had fun killing each other, since the only skill you needed was to run up while constantly jabbing the other players. Very soon however, we became bored and the struggle for flow continued. I think that Csikszentmihalyi’s flow diagram is quite practical since I felt in and out of flow in a matter of minutes. If I had been much more skilled at the game I certainly would have been completely absorbed and felt time pass by without me.