Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject
Christian Haines, Managing Editor
I’m not a car guy, but I recently discovered the joys of racing games. Like most passionate affairs, the encounter was sudden, unexpected, strange, wonderful. I can’t really explain it, except to say that there’s something about finding the right ratio between accelerating and breaking as you whip through a turn that makes you forget about life’s worries. Of course, there’s more to the genre, not least of all the beautiful landscapes, the feel of being behind the wheels of cars I’ll never be able to afford, the thrill of a narrow victory. But if I had to sum up in a phrase why I’ve become so captivated by racing games, it would be because they generate flow in abundance –an experience so visceral that the rest of the world fades away, my mind wholly concentrated in the tips of my fingers as they nudge the controller’s analogue sticks.
Forza Horizon 4, Playground Games
Flow is one of the key benchmarks in the games industry. It’s a measure of how successfully a game absorbs player attention. It involves a balance between challenge and skill, an experience that’s difficult enough to be exciting but not so difficult that anxiety results. Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi – the psychologist responsible for conceptualizing the experience – describes flow as more than a pleasurable experience. It’s a way of life, a cure for social alienation, a means of personal growth. From an idealistic standpoint, the goal of achieving flow in games doesn’t just lead to fun, it turns games into a kind of therapy through which a person comes to realize their innermost potential.
It’s this ideology of flow that Braxton Soderman targets for critique in his book Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject. Flow is an ideology because its explanation of the world encourages specific kinds of action with social and political consequences. Soderman points out that Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow was meant as an alternative to the more critical and socially-minded perspective of socialism. Whereas the latter emphasizes the need for systemic social change, flow suggests that an individual can fix their own problems by getting absorbed in pleasurable activity. In its most grandiose visions, flow promises to turn work into play, to convert the drudgery of everyday routines into meaningful activity. Who needs revolution or reform when the world’s become a playground?
Celeste, Matt Makes Games
Soderman’s criticizes the game industry’s emphasis on flow for two main reasons. First, in offering to solve players’ problems through play, flow distracts and diverts social energies into individual pursuits. In a discussion of the indie darling Celeste, Soderman explains that the game’s emphasis on self-care and self-help reinforces the dominant belief that the suffering of an individual can always be resolved through the efforts of the individual: “Celeste suggests that players view their selves as the source of success, no matter the amount of previous failure. The game even keeps track of how many times players die, but it tells them, ‘Be proud of your death count! The more you die, the more you’re learning. Keep going!’ Learning to cope with difficulty encourages players to fail upward (as the entrepreneurs say), growing a stronger self from the ashes of defeat and buttressing the individual’s powers to attain greater heights.” Celeste may have been rightly praised for how it turned platforming challenges into an allegory for personal growth, but Soderman argues that that’s the problem: it focuses attention on the symptoms of alienation – the suffering, not the underlying injury – and suggests that the best we can do is “cope.” Coping relieves the pain, but it does so only while allowing the underlying problems to persist.
Stanley Parable, Crows Crows Crows
The other reason Soderman criticizes flow has to do with our current moment of history. Along with critics like Mackenzie Wark and Patrick Jagoda, Soderman argues that contemporary society has been gamified, meaning that capitalism has adopted elements of games in an effort to make work and consumption resemble play. Playfulness and flow have become valuable feelings or states of mind not just in our free time but also at work, especially in the so-called creative industries (not just entertainment but also tech, advertising, and the like). At the extreme, the creative destruction of entrepreneurs as they seek out new markets is itself a playful activity: “Entrepreneurs disrupt the status quo, appropriate situations in inventive ways, and salivate over new, untapped markets as playgrounds for potential profit.” In this “situation of total play,” the supposed value of play, whether it be a kind of therapeutic relief from work or the cultivation of creativity, seems to unravel. Play is just another kind of labor; it’s the work we do when we’re not getting paid to work.
Soderman’s work belongs to a rich tradition of critical theory that doesn’t hesitate to condemn capitalist society as a whole. Still, the stringency of this critique does raise the question of what’s left for games to do in a situation of total play? Can games still offer some positive value? Can they do more than reinforce or intensify the status quo? Soderman offers a tentative yes and suggests two possibilities. The first is the avant-garde method of disruption and estrangement. Soderman examines indie games like The Stanley Parable, This is The Only Level, and Phone Story that eschew the pursuit of flow in favor of calling attention to gaming’s complicity in our broken social systems. A game like Phone Story – Molleindustria’s game exposé of Apple’s exploitative labor practices – “resists flow and seeks to channel the desire for flow outside the game toward community organizing.”
Democratic Socialism Simulator, Molleindustria
The other possibility Soderman suggests is sketchier, more speculative. What would a critical version of flow look like, he wonders? It would have to involve “imagining different architectures for flow,” or different structures of game design and play offering experiences that bring together social criticism, activism, and gameplay. Critical flow would have to include an awareness of the social conditions of gaming: Who gets to be a “gamer,” and who gets excluded from or marginalized within that category? What kind of society do games allow us to imagine? How do they reckon with political problems? Critical flow would also need to energize us to change the status quo; it would need to foster hope that another world is possible without suggesting that that new world need only be virtual.
As Soderman writes in the conclusion of Against Flow: “While the hope of the politics of enjoyment is that a rewarding flow experience can catalyze a critical awareness of alienation in everyday life, demonstrating that life could be better, we need to couple this potential with a critique of flow’s role in compensating for an alienated existence by allowing us to forget fatigue, exhaustion, and external problems in reality such as racism, patriarchy, economic exploitation, and injustice. Perhaps then, both sides of the coin – the heads of enjoyment and the tails of alienation – can serve as politically motivating forces to change reality.”
For more on video games and capitalism, check out this essay on the console wars and crunch and this one on the abuse of workers at Activision-Blizzard.
