Flow in Pacific Assault (PA)
Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is moderately successful is balancing boredom and anxiety from level to level, but it wholly succeeds in flowing through techniques that are not easily measured. An immersive story and multiplayer AI squad interactions create a wealth of challenges and game priorities for the player to flow along their own path.
The levels in PA have a pretty linear progression in difficulty that avoids impossible missions or streaks of mind-numbing Rambo-esq cake-walks. As levels progressed, increasingly more enemies and weapons challenged me. To contend with this, I mastered the controls and rules of hiding in the terrain, my AI teammates gained experience and usefulness, and I was given more access to weapons and powerups. But this description is characteristic of the body of the game, definitely not for the first two events.
Pacific Assault has one of the deepest immersive environments that I have experienced in any game, and this is important for some of the deepest currents of flow. From the beginning, this game uses unforgiving “mimicry” to create a past reality. Before the game officially starts, the player must enter their name into a replica of a WWII era typewriter, complete with the punch and ding sounds. As a soldier, you will endure a training boot-camp that lasts nearly 20 minutes, and extensive cut-scenes and in game dialogue ensure that the player is familiar with the historical events they are re-enacting, even playing war update news broadcasts during the pre-start menus. The pace of a long boot camp, long periods of time explaining the history, and long efforts to create a bond between the player and his squadmates serve to make the progression of PA more epic in scope, rather than focused on fun. This slow pace is a hinderance on flow, but the boot-camp attempts to eliminate cognitive load anxieties from not knowing how to control your player and the squad. To account for this slow pace, the first event in PA jolts the player into combat action by placing them on an amphibious landing craft that is headed into an impossible firefight. The player gets an immediate dose of the action to come while feeling humbled by the difficulty of the firefight and learning the buttons. This primes the player to last through the intensive boot-camp training without excessive boredom and battle-lust.
Pacific Assault starts the player as a member of a squad. The player has little control over the squad, other than to follow orders to protect his teammates. As the game progresses, the player gains control of the squad and more responsibility for the mission and the squad’s health.
Pacific Assault’s AI squad mates give the player a teamwork oriented strategy, rather than the typical Rambo scenario where you have no responsibility for your allies.
Neurophysiology and flow in PA was hampered by my constant need to protect my AI squadmates. The game design wanted me to advance to targets while my priorities were to eliminate immediate threats to my team. Rather than focus on the various checkpoints, powerups, explorignt the map, and finding new enemies, I managed to achieve flow by focusing on keeping my squad from walking into ambushes or getting flanked by the enemy, “…people who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant for the moment”.
By the fourth mission of PA I began to feel alienation- “a condition in which people are constrained by the social system to act in ways that go against their goals.” While the goal of the mission was capture villages and blow up targets, my goals were to protect my team while exploring the environment and ambushing the enemy in creative and challenging ways. The problem with this is that the rules that governed the level design were very linear and did not permit me to easily flank the enemy. The game forced me to complete the mission the way the designer wanted, which was not necessarily what I wanted. The new environments kept me exploring, and bunkers & bases began to show up when the jungle started to seem old news.
The player in PA is not a space marine who is single-handedly saving himself, or even saving the world. The game spares no detail in propagandizing the player to embrace the idea that they are an American GI who needs to help out with the war effort. The squad mates have individual personalities and I soon found myself investing effort in learning about the characters in my squad; rather than seeing them as expendable drones. This is an essential step to flow because the player must have a positive attitude and willingness to accept the illusion of the game.
The mimicry of the GI is less focused on killing the enemy than helping the war effort while saving your squad-buddies. By working with my AI teammates, the missions were more about CoLiberation; helping eachother to complete the mission while taking out the enemy soldiers in fun ways. I often I felt that I needed to baby-sit my teammates so they wouldn’t get killed, and that I needed to destroy all of the secondary targets to influence the war effort. I found myself unselfishly sacrificing my own fun for the good of my computerized squad and fictionalized war for which I had no influence, but this involved my drive and focus more than any other shooter game. Czikszentmehiya might say that I had achieved an optimal experience, “…the most important trait …is a “nonself-conscious individualism”, or a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking.”
For the online, multiplayer aspect of PA’s flow, I found that I had much less invested in the story and didn’t care as much whether my teammates died. A few rounds I dedicated myself to camping out at a specific spot to be a good teammate by supplying cover fire for them to score points at tactical locations. This was not as fun, I felt team victories were below my individual needs to blow up and taunt the enemy players.
