Induction and Transferral of Flow in the Game Tetris

Kevin O’Neill · CORE Scholar (Wright State University) · 2020

We looked at the facilitation and transfer of a flow state in a cognitive context. Subjects played a manipulated version of the game Tetris, and we gathered data on their gameplay performance on pre- and post-tasks, as well as a set of questionnaires which measure flow and perceived task effort. The altered version of Tetris includes an artificial intelligence agent that continually assesses the participant’s skill and adapts the challenge level of the game to match the participant’s skill. An adaptive condition characterized by challenge-skill balance was hypothesized to induce flow, reduce perception of effort, and improve performance. We found differences in reported flow state between conditions, with the easy condition inducing greater flow than adaptive condition, which induced greater flow than the hard condition. We did not find significant differences for performance measures.

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