Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (don't even try to pronounce it) has brought these ideas together in a coherent model of optimal experience which he calls Flow. Flow is the experience that one has when engaging in an actvitiy that produces happiness in the moment and enduring happiness. A short introduction to Flow can be found in the Flow article in Wikipedia.

I won't replicate the book or the article here, but will say that a Flow activity has clear and worthy goals, it is challenging but achievable, it provides feedback reflecting progress, it is intrinsically satisfying, and one tends to loose a sense of external things when pursuing a flow activity.

Flow activities take your mind off of what Russell called 'detractors' and allow you to engage in meaningful contributors. They also support Wittgenstein's requirement that you have a sense of purpose in that they contain clear and worthy goals. The notion that they are challenging but achievable while being intrinsically satisfying seems to support Aristotle's view of virtues.

Different activities might produce flow experiences in different people. Some people, for example, find that playing music is a flow experience. I, who am tone deaf, do not find it to be so. However, I do find other things to be flow experiences.

Bringing the conversation back to video games, it is easy to see why video games are so addicting. For many people, they are flow experiences. The have clear goals that are worthy in the mind of the players. More sophisticated games such as World of Warcraft actually have quite complicated goal structures with short and long term goals, conflicting goals, and both implicit and explicit goals. The goals are challenging but achievable. There is feedback in the form of leveling and the accumulation of resources and achievement awards. Players tend to find video games intrinsically satisfying. And they tend to loose a sense of external things when engaged in playing them.

People are often critical of video games for precisely this reason. They feel that gamers are much to involved in there games. However, I would turn it around and ask why are the other activities in life so much less compelling. Why are work and education more like video games? Is work, somehow, supposed to be unpleasant? Is education inherently difficult. What if work and education could be designed using the same principles as video games? Instead of being disdainful and suspicious, maybe there is something here that we can take advantage of.

Contributor and Detractors

There is a lame old joke which says that the nice thing about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is that it feels so good when you stop. Certainly the presence of adversity in your life can make you unhappy. But does removing it make you happy? There are numerous things in life that can make you unhappy. These include shortage of money, criticisms from people whose opinion matters to you, feelings of inadequacy, boredom, and fearing for your physical well being, just to name a few. While these things make you unhappy, their removal does not make you happy. It will only make you less unhappy. It seems that there is an equilibrium state between happiness and unhappiness where you are neither happy nor unhappy.

There are things that make us happy and things that make us unhappy. Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness, referred to these as contributors and detractors, respectively. Some of the detractors are mentioned above. According to Russell a contributor to happiness is zeal. That is, you have to have positive energy exerted towards something worth pursuing in order to be happy. Russell's student Wittgenstein added the notion that a sense of purpose was essential to happiness.

We are beginning to see a pattern emerging here. In order to be happy, you have to remove the things that make you unhappy and purse things that are somehow worthy of pursuing. In addition, these things that you pursue have to be things that you are good enough at to make progress. Next time, I will bring this all together in a coherent psychological theory.