Games

flOw is a Flash-based game created by Jenova Chen, the lead designer of Cloud and member of the IMD MFA class of '06. It uses an elegant and simple interface to allow the player to find their own perfect level of challenge… their own personal state of “Flow”.

Chen created flOw as part of his thesis on Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment. In the game, you control a hungry microbe, swimming through dark waters in search of food. As you eat other microorganisms, you begin to grow, taking on a unique form. If other creatures eat pieces of you, however, you will loose these new pieces of yourself and be driven back to shallower waters.

At any point you can dive deeper in search of greater challenges and rewards or rise back towards the surface to find less threatening prey. The game has no distinct beginning or end... as you play, you find your own preferred place in the food chain.

On its release as a Flash game, flOw saw immediate popularity... it was downloaded 350,000 times in the first two weeks of its web release. This game has continued to grow, however, beyond Chen's thesis; the project has been picked up by Sony Computer Entertainment, and a new version of flOw has been developed by Chen's own game development studio, That Game Company, for download on the PS3.

Jenova Chen's thesis is available on his own website. You can access it by clicking here .