Students Blog

I experience a great deal of flow while playing Half Life 2: Deathmatch. However, I don’t necessarily get a sense of the flow each individual time I play, it is more of a drawn out process over several months.

When I first began playing Half Life 2 Deathmatch, I was pretty terrible (as can be expected of any new players). I joined some random server and figured out how everything works. I had beaten the single player mode of Half-Life 2, but learning how all the guns are balanced, the new maps, and the effective strategies for online play took some time. I certainly experienced a great deal of anxiety as I struggled to compete with the more experienced players. Rarely do I experience boredom. Even though everytime I play I have the same goal, kill as many people as I can and die as few times as I can, no two games are the same. I never know what the other players are going to do. It is difficult to get bored when each game, each player, each situation is always different. Because I rarely get bored, I’ve spent a good chunk of my time playing and increasing my skill level. Before long, I ascended into one of the elite players online. I became a merciless killing machine, pumping my enemies full of shotgun shells, sniping from afar with the crossbow, and hurling toilets left and right using the gravity gun. I came to dominate pretty much every game I joined.

Soon after, I discovered a certain server where all the most skilled players play. Just as I was starting to get bored and search for new challenges, I discovered that I was not the greatest play of all. It was almost as if I was starting over relearning the game. My kill/death ratio plummeted, which left me feeling, just as Czikszentmehiya writes, “anxious and frustrated by [my] relatively low skill level.” My options were now to increase my skill level or to stop playing altogether. From that point on this server was the only place that I played. I learned the maps forward and backwards, I created a number of strategies for myself, including lurking in the massive projectile-filled room with the gravity gun, and keeping to the area where there are a lot of health and shields and relying on my trusty crossbow to pick enemies off from near and far.

At the moment I am among the elite players on the server. The name “meaty” is known and feared by many other players who play there. In the race to 50 frags, I managed to win about half of the rounds I play, a tremendous feat given the number of other highly skilled players that play there. However, getting to 50 frags first is only my secondary goal. I am most concerned with my efficiency, which I believe is the true measure of a player’s skill level. For example, I would much rather end with a score of 40 frags, 12 deaths, than be the first to 50 frags but have 20 deaths. I should point out that this server has a program that tracks the stats of players who play on the server. At anytime I can type “/stats” and see my total kills, total deaths, and my overall ratio. The level of challenge I experience keeps on rising as I raise my goals. When I first began to concentrate on my efficiency, I set a goal of 3 frags per death. This proved to be quite a challenge at first, but in order to stay in the “flow channel” of the game, I had to increase my skill level and adapt new strategies to meet the new challenge. Once I began to score at this level regularly, I again raised the bar to 3.25 : 1 and eventually to 3.5 : 1. As soon as began to reach my goal regularly, I had to set a new goal to avoid getting bored. 3.5 is challenging to me right now, but I have already raised the bar. I am currently ranked 11th on the server out of over 400. The 10th ranked player has a ratio of 3.71. I’m sitting close behind, currently at 3.63, and I really want achieve my most ambitious goal yet, to ascend into the server top 10.

The experience I receive from this game is almost entirely under the category of Agon, because I feel extremely competitive while playing. I challenged myself with my lofty ratio-related goals, but when I discovered the new server other players provided great challenges too. I have come to recognize a number of players that play on that server as very high threats, I do my best to avoid them because even though I may be able to kill them 60% of the times, that is not the ratio I’m looking for. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to avoid me as well. Playing with such skilled players certainly requires me to be on top of my game and play to my full potential.

I also experience ilinx (vertigo) to a certain degree. As soon as I start playing, I feel physically different. I need to focus more. Everytime I get a kill, or narrowly escape death I feel really good. Everytime I make a poor play, miss and easy shot, or get killed unfairly I feel a lot of anxiety. Sometimes when it’s a really close game (perhaps I’m tied with another play at 47 frags in a race to 50) I get really tense. When the round ends I can feel my heart beating quickly and blood pumping. No other game has been able to give me a rush like Half-Life 2 Deathmatch.

My experiences with Half-Life 2 Deathmatch are a perfect example of flow. Over and over, I experience more difficult challenges, either from more skilled players or my own ratio goals, a strategy which requires me to become a better player and to stay within the “flow” of the game.