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Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject
A critical discussion of the experience and theory of flow (as conceptualized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) in video games.
Flow--as conceptualized by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi--describes an experience of "being in the zone," of intense absorption in an activity. It is a central concept in the study of video games, although often applied somewhat uncritically. In Against Flow, Braxton Soderman takes a step back and offers a critical assessment of flow's historical, theoretical, political, and ideological contexts in relation to video games. With close readings of games that implement and represent flow, Soderman not only evaluates the concept of flow in terms of video games but also presents a general critique of flow and its sibling, play.
Flow--as conceptualized by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi--describes an experience of "being in the zone," of intense absorption in an activity. It is a central concept in the study of video games, although often applied somewhat uncritically. In Against Flow, Braxton Soderman takes a step back and offers a critical assessment of flow's historical, theoretical, political, and ideological contexts in relation to video games. With close readings of games that implement and represent flow, Soderman not only evaluates the concept of flow in terms of video games but also presents a general critique of flow and its sibling, play.
- GenresNonfiction
328 pages, Hardcover
Published April 13, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 30, 2021
I remember eagerly anticipating this book a few years ago, only find myself rolling my eyes within the first ten pages of it. This is as much a condemnation of the work as it is a reminder of how much I've grown to hate this type of anti-theory.
The work begins with a clear explanation of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow. The next 50 pages act as a painfully obvious reexplanation of what was already stated, as is quite typical of academia of this sort. Soderman goes over Csikszentmihalyi's justifications and belief systems, and in the next paragraph Soderman glibly asks "but is that really tru tho?", clearly very aware that the likes of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Owen Shafer are total no-names within the modern field of media studies and that the tidy, individualistically-focused theories of the post-Freudian play theorists haven't been a relevant to academia for nearly half a century (as anything except a novelty, anyway).
Soderman clearly knows he's speaking to a crowd of sympathizers (if the countercultural-cliché "Against [Thing]" title wasn't enough to tip you off) and it's probably a good thing that he states his biases so clearly, because the next 100 pages or so are filled with some of the most tortured and blatantly incorrect attempts at media analysis I've seen outside of NeoGAF.
Soderman has some...interesting thoughts on the games with which he has tasked the burden of exemplifying flow, which include Psychonauts, Diner Dash, and Celeste. Soderman bludgeons these three titles with the same exact hammer, condemning their conformity to a flowing subject and denying their narratives any form of legitimacy because of their purported tendency to deflect, rather than solve societal alienation.
For some strange reason, Soderman also takes Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It to task, despite the fact that it is explicitly stated by Bennett Foddy to be an anti-flow game. In one of the most comically stupid paragraphs of the book, Soderman suggests that "Although the game alludes to the challenges of disability, the muscled male avatar suggests that attaining the high levels of performance required by flow is the domain of masculinity." Yes, you read that right, this explicitly anti-flow and anti-"good design" game is somehow perverted by the unnatural essence of flow because the dude in the pot has a muscular bod. And definitely not because Soderman repeatedly mentions his frustrations towards the game, and clearly just felt like taking a literal potshot at a game that had literally nothing to do with his actual argument.
Quite suspiciously, Soderman clearly allows much more good faith towards Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice than any other game he mentions during this section of the book. In a stereotypically post-structuralist fashion, Soderman uses gender as a bludgeoning tool with which to dismantle the likes of Celeste, Getting Over It and Diner Dash (somehow correctly acknowledging Diner Dash as the gamification of "third shift" of emotional labor taken on by women to ease the burdens of their previous hours of labor, and then condemning this as yet another deflection of societal alienation, despite the blatantly praxis-driven ending) while conveniently ignoring the mountains of feminist criticism written both in favor of and against Hellblade in order to write a synopsis straight off of IGN. One of the most narratively polarizing games released within the past 5 years reduced to a cliffnote: Senua directly acknowledges flow as being part of her suffering, therefore game good. Or at least, the only game he bothers to critique in a positive light within this section.
The book gets increasingly disorganized from this point on, with Soderman applying similarly wretched argumentation to apply the flow state/flowing subjects to television. Soderman's golden boy during this chapter seems to be...Little Inferno. Yes, Little Inferno. I guess Molleindustria's Banksy-tier semiotics didn't quite make the cut, so he had to grab a game from the one studio in existence with games just as asinine.
I could go on with the messy, messy particulars, but my main issues with Soderman's polemic can be directed towards to the same counterpoints I give to any sort of argument driven by pure disparagement of a wildly recognized theory or tool (i.e, "Against Thing"):
1. This heavily utilized Thing cannot be purely bad, right? (Obviously no author would admit to this, even if they clearly believe it) If so...
2. Do you truly believe that this Thing, which can be utilized in many different ways, is employed completely uncritically by the legions of professionals within this field? If so, and if we generously accept this to be the case...(even while you clearly display no attempt to actually discuss this matter with professionals)
3. What next? What do we do after we tear down this outdated, authoritarian model of play? What do we build as it's replacement?
The answer to those questions is never given in practical terms, much less any terms because Soderman is not just Against Flow, not just Against Play, but much more than anything, Against Gameification. He has a clear and obvious disaste for any attempts at gamifiying societal alienation that do not also make an explicitly firm stance against gamification itself, be it in the form of the flowing subject or any other explicitly play-based theory of media. He repeatedly calls for the linking of a critical mindset to the politics of play, as if this is something no one has ever attempted before (it wasn't even novel ten years ago).
The only advice he can seem to muster in service of this goal is "...coping [from alienation] should not exclude the exploration, recognition, and analysis of the causes of social and personal malaise" as if this "flowing subject" was just an ignorant, unconscious sponge eating out of the palms of these intellectually insincere games, completely hypnotized by the state of flow. The conclusion in particular is appallingly vague, useless and empty, a mere 3 pages of weak justification after 237 pages of the most repetitive argumentation I've ever encountered.
If anything, this work may be one of the best arguments I've seen in favor of flow. I found Csikszentmihalyi to be intensely problematic when I first read him, but after drudging my way through this, I might actually revisit him.
The work begins with a clear explanation of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow. The next 50 pages act as a painfully obvious reexplanation of what was already stated, as is quite typical of academia of this sort. Soderman goes over Csikszentmihalyi's justifications and belief systems, and in the next paragraph Soderman glibly asks "but is that really tru tho?", clearly very aware that the likes of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Owen Shafer are total no-names within the modern field of media studies and that the tidy, individualistically-focused theories of the post-Freudian play theorists haven't been a relevant to academia for nearly half a century (as anything except a novelty, anyway).
Soderman clearly knows he's speaking to a crowd of sympathizers (if the countercultural-cliché "Against [Thing]" title wasn't enough to tip you off) and it's probably a good thing that he states his biases so clearly, because the next 100 pages or so are filled with some of the most tortured and blatantly incorrect attempts at media analysis I've seen outside of NeoGAF.
Soderman has some...interesting thoughts on the games with which he has tasked the burden of exemplifying flow, which include Psychonauts, Diner Dash, and Celeste. Soderman bludgeons these three titles with the same exact hammer, condemning their conformity to a flowing subject and denying their narratives any form of legitimacy because of their purported tendency to deflect, rather than solve societal alienation.
For some strange reason, Soderman also takes Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It to task, despite the fact that it is explicitly stated by Bennett Foddy to be an anti-flow game. In one of the most comically stupid paragraphs of the book, Soderman suggests that "Although the game alludes to the challenges of disability, the muscled male avatar suggests that attaining the high levels of performance required by flow is the domain of masculinity." Yes, you read that right, this explicitly anti-flow and anti-"good design" game is somehow perverted by the unnatural essence of flow because the dude in the pot has a muscular bod. And definitely not because Soderman repeatedly mentions his frustrations towards the game, and clearly just felt like taking a literal potshot at a game that had literally nothing to do with his actual argument.
Quite suspiciously, Soderman clearly allows much more good faith towards Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice than any other game he mentions during this section of the book. In a stereotypically post-structuralist fashion, Soderman uses gender as a bludgeoning tool with which to dismantle the likes of Celeste, Getting Over It and Diner Dash (somehow correctly acknowledging Diner Dash as the gamification of "third shift" of emotional labor taken on by women to ease the burdens of their previous hours of labor, and then condemning this as yet another deflection of societal alienation, despite the blatantly praxis-driven ending) while conveniently ignoring the mountains of feminist criticism written both in favor of and against Hellblade in order to write a synopsis straight off of IGN. One of the most narratively polarizing games released within the past 5 years reduced to a cliffnote: Senua directly acknowledges flow as being part of her suffering, therefore game good. Or at least, the only game he bothers to critique in a positive light within this section.
The book gets increasingly disorganized from this point on, with Soderman applying similarly wretched argumentation to apply the flow state/flowing subjects to television. Soderman's golden boy during this chapter seems to be...Little Inferno. Yes, Little Inferno. I guess Molleindustria's Banksy-tier semiotics didn't quite make the cut, so he had to grab a game from the one studio in existence with games just as asinine.
I could go on with the messy, messy particulars, but my main issues with Soderman's polemic can be directed towards to the same counterpoints I give to any sort of argument driven by pure disparagement of a wildly recognized theory or tool (i.e, "Against Thing"):
1. This heavily utilized Thing cannot be purely bad, right? (Obviously no author would admit to this, even if they clearly believe it) If so...
2. Do you truly believe that this Thing, which can be utilized in many different ways, is employed completely uncritically by the legions of professionals within this field? If so, and if we generously accept this to be the case...(even while you clearly display no attempt to actually discuss this matter with professionals)
3. What next? What do we do after we tear down this outdated, authoritarian model of play? What do we build as it's replacement?
The answer to those questions is never given in practical terms, much less any terms because Soderman is not just Against Flow, not just Against Play, but much more than anything, Against Gameification. He has a clear and obvious disaste for any attempts at gamifiying societal alienation that do not also make an explicitly firm stance against gamification itself, be it in the form of the flowing subject or any other explicitly play-based theory of media. He repeatedly calls for the linking of a critical mindset to the politics of play, as if this is something no one has ever attempted before (it wasn't even novel ten years ago).
The only advice he can seem to muster in service of this goal is "...coping [from alienation] should not exclude the exploration, recognition, and analysis of the causes of social and personal malaise" as if this "flowing subject" was just an ignorant, unconscious sponge eating out of the palms of these intellectually insincere games, completely hypnotized by the state of flow. The conclusion in particular is appallingly vague, useless and empty, a mere 3 pages of weak justification after 237 pages of the most repetitive argumentation I've ever encountered.
If anything, this work may be one of the best arguments I've seen in favor of flow. I found Csikszentmihalyi to be intensely problematic when I first read him, but after drudging my way through this, I might actually revisit him.
November 17, 2024
This one starts off from a genuinely interesting place, but gradually veers of into a well-read, verbose but ultimately dim-witted and unanalytical work that managed to contribute nothing to the discourse of flow. (I frankly couldn't bear to read far enough to get to the bits about game design, but from other reviews I read I expect more of the same, if not much worse.)
Most surprising was how much this book managed to offend me by being blatantly wrong and/or reductive about so many issues: Boiling flow down to "a postindustrial response to Marxism and Freudianism" and thus positioning it as a sinister tool of the almighty status quo, the tragicomical claim that flow "might" lead to psychosis, waving off Carl Jung as "racist", the constant barely-related left-field references to race/gender/queer theory that distract more often than they contribute, the casual and idiotic way in which the author discounts the real-life experiences of concentration camp victims in an uncalled-for and backwards attempt to impart them with a more pitiable perspective... I could barely get through Chapter 1 without rolling my eyes into blindness.
Add to all that the final endictment: Despite setting out to analyze flow's application in real games, this book doesn't even refer to Dark Souls, a game which relies heavily on eliciting the flow experience in players, uses other aesthetic and play-driven elements in its structure to great effect, and has produced countless accounts from players of inproving individual experience right down to helping players with their depression; this single game's existence (especially having come out 10 years before this book) is enough proof that this book is nothing but mental masturbation that doesn't touch on anything substantially real.
Most surprising was how much this book managed to offend me by being blatantly wrong and/or reductive about so many issues: Boiling flow down to "a postindustrial response to Marxism and Freudianism" and thus positioning it as a sinister tool of the almighty status quo, the tragicomical claim that flow "might" lead to psychosis, waving off Carl Jung as "racist", the constant barely-related left-field references to race/gender/queer theory that distract more often than they contribute, the casual and idiotic way in which the author discounts the real-life experiences of concentration camp victims in an uncalled-for and backwards attempt to impart them with a more pitiable perspective... I could barely get through Chapter 1 without rolling my eyes into blindness.
Add to all that the final endictment: Despite setting out to analyze flow's application in real games, this book doesn't even refer to Dark Souls, a game which relies heavily on eliciting the flow experience in players, uses other aesthetic and play-driven elements in its structure to great effect, and has produced countless accounts from players of inproving individual experience right down to helping players with their depression; this single game's existence (especially having come out 10 years before this book) is enough proof that this book is nothing but mental masturbation that doesn't touch on anything substantially real.
February 28, 2025
If Csikszentmihalyi created a theory of ankles, would the author write a book titled "Against Ankles" because ankles are the body parts for fetters?
And would the author go from criticizing Csikszentmihalyi's theory to denying the existence of ankles?
And would the author also say Csikszentmihalyi's motivation was based on his hatred toward Marxist Hungary's fetters?
And would the author argue that people should cut off their ankles because ankles are contradictory to Marxism?
And would the author think that the past people, like yogis, Zenists, Taoists, Sufiists, and the Hesychasm practitioners, never knew that they had ankles, because ankles were post-industrial things?
And would the author think that Marxists have no ankles when they do their praxis?
And would the author go from criticizing Csikszentmihalyi's theory to denying the existence of ankles?
And would the author also say Csikszentmihalyi's motivation was based on his hatred toward Marxist Hungary's fetters?
And would the author argue that people should cut off their ankles because ankles are contradictory to Marxism?
And would the author think that the past people, like yogis, Zenists, Taoists, Sufiists, and the Hesychasm practitioners, never knew that they had ankles, because ankles were post-industrial things?
And would the author think that Marxists have no ankles when they do their praxis?
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