Written by: Edward Teoh
Minute upon minute, and hour upon hour, the undiscerning video gamer lost track of all sense of time, hunger, thirst and fatigue. It is already midnight, his face lit only by the morphing screen in a dark room, yet nothing else in the world seemed to matter to him.
Fascinated by the way artists lose themselves at work– their singular focus at producing art, how both brushstroke and painter merge as one, and how they lose the perception of time; Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term ‘Flow’ in 1975. Flow is often described as a state of hyper-focus, when one is fully immersed in performing a task at hand. The Flow state is achieved when both the ‘skill level’ and ‘challenge level’ of a task is matched (at a high level).
Source: The Experience Fluctuation Model by Massimini, Csíkszentmihályi and Carli (1987)
Games are a powerful medium through which the flow state has been induced successfully without fail, for millennia. The sweet-spot of converging the ‘challenge level’ of the game with the player’s ‘skill level’ is continually achieved through the “scaffolding” phase– where the game difficulty is ever-marginally increased to match the player’s improved skill levels. The neurochemistry at work in our brain’s hardwiring makes us indefensible towards the highly addictive elements of operating under game-like environments.
We have come a long way in our ability to create fun and addictive games, helping people tap into the Flow state. This led to the intuition and realisation that we could harness the power of games, and “gamify” other areas that matter to us as a society. Gamification has in recent years experienced an exponential rate of adoption in various areas, as people can now be self-motivated (in the Flow state) to perform certain actions to achieve desired outcomes– an ‘autotelic’ response.
One area of gamification that has gained traction can be found in the corporate training and the learning & development area. Various gamified learning solutions were designed to simulate the real workplace and business situations, to allow both business leaders and team members to learn experientially through gamification. These gamified learning solutions temporarily extract workers from their day-to-day work environments, and allow the participants to play, test out ideas and put into practice newly learnt theories. This playground of sorts allows participants to play without fear or restrain, as the simulation mitigates the risks incurred by making mistakes and nullifies the opportunity cost of making wrong decisions.
By gamifying learning and development in business, the participants/learners can continually improve on their soft skills and technical skills. Gamified learning solutions serve as a medium that allows them to tap into the Flow state by arriving at the sweet-spot– by converging the ‘challenge level’ of the game with the participants’ prevailing ‘skill level’. The solutions can also be designed to simulate a marginally tougher and more challenging business environment, causing the participants to progressively learn and pick up more sophisticated skills.
Source: The Experience Fluctuation Model by Massimini, Csíkszentmihályi and Carli (1987)
Participants usually begin with an emotional state of ‘Worry’ when they are introduced to the gameplay in a learning simulation. At this stage, guidance is required to teach participants how to play through a series of demo rounds. Throughout the gameplay, participants will increase their level of mastery through course correction and iteration. The simulation difficulty can then be increased in tandem, so that participants move on to higher experiences of ‘Anxiety’, ‘Arousal’, and lastly, ‘Flow’.
Under the Flow state, participants will be hyper-focused to learn and tackle challenges in various areas of business, such as strategic thinking, problem-solving, sales and marketing, culture and others. This is a highly valuable state where learners become self-motivated to learn. With each successive round comes the opportunity for participants who are “in the zone” will reiterate, tweak and perform ideal business practices and make decisions. This warrants the transferability of learnings from within the simulation, into the real workplace.
After all, what is the point of putting valuable people through endless training and wasting countless manhours, without seeing actual and measurable business results? As the business mogul, Mary Kay Ash once said “A company is only as good as the people it keeps”, the following may also be true– “A company is only as good as its investment in people is”.