In Doom Eternal, you must go with the flow

Watching an expert play Doom Eternal is mesmerizing. I’ve taken to watching YouTube clips of Michael “shroud” Grzesiek playing the game. Everything he does looks effortless; with pinpoint accuracy he’s able to snipe off the heads of floating Maykr Drones to earn back health and ammo, all while keeping an eye on the other enemies swarming in around him. I don’t think his Doom Slayer ever stops moving; he shifts from each end of the map within seconds.

I’ll never be as good at Doom Eternal (or any shooter video game, really) as Grzesiek. But the thing about Doom Eternal is that it doesn’t matter; despite my skill level or difficulty level, I feel as if I’ve mastered — or am in the process of mastering — the game. Doom Eternal is designed precisely to make the player feel this way, to help them enter what developer Hugo Martin calls “the fun zone.”

What Martin calls the fun zone is similar, in practice, to flow state: the balance between difficulty and skill, something that’s challenging you, but not too much. It’s a state of intense focus, a busy mind, where time goes fast or slow. If you’ve played Doom Eternal, or 2016’s Doom reboot, you’ve probably experienced it.

Image: id Software/Bethesda Softworks

It’s the moments where you’re flicking through your menus to change weapons, flowing from your rocket launcher to the super shotgun depending on the enemies in the area. Your muscles have memorized the movements, where to move your fingers and when to push a button. You almost don’t have to think about it — almost. You just do it, because there’s no time to think. It’s often characterized by losing yourself in a moment, and Doom Eternal is really good at that. Twenty minutes feels like five as you methodically clear rooms, working through them the way the game taught you to.

Lots of video game developers employ the theory of flow state into their creations, but that’s not where it began. Flow state is a concept named by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. He researched flow, first in relation to artists that would get “lost” in their work — with an emphasis with the positive experience it created for the artist. But that’s sort of an abstract concept, and hard to conceptualize. Nicholas Matthews, a researcher with The Ohio State University, said that flow is actually a cognitive state.

“It’s in the brain,” Matthews said. “It emerges under specific circumstances. It’s a certain pattern of neural firings or cognitive processes, and they only occur when we have this match between how difficult the action is and your skill level.”

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To make those brain processes happen, a person must meet six factors outlined by Csíkszentmihályi: intense concentration, feeling that you’re being challenged and meeting that challenge, loss of self-consciousness, distortion of time, pleasantness, and intrinsic gratification, according to Matthews. MC, from the Flow State newsletter, described it to me as getting “completely lost in something.” These things happen at once, and, of course, if you’re experiencing a flow state, you shouldn’t really be actively thinking about them. They’re just happening. You can see how video games, like Doom Eternal, meet these factors naturally — but game developers are thinking about the ways in which they can implement the theory of flow, even if it’s unnamed.

Thatgamecompany co-founder Jenova Chen, known for his work on Journey, created a game in 2006 called Flow to demonstrate and mimic the theory. Flow is essentially a survival game, where players must swim around and eat other organisms, “flowing” into either deeper or more shallow waters. The player must constantly react to the situation, which is what keeps them engaged in the flow, Chen told Polygon in an interview.

“Players choose whether they want to engage into deeper, more dangerous waters — they have to eat these red creatures to sink them into the more dangerous zones,” Chen said. “Or, they can eat a blue creature that takes them back to a safer zone. Players are constantly reacting to the situations and changing difficulties.”

Chen said that this is something many video games employ, intentionally or not. For Doom Eternal developer id Software, it’s a conscious decision. There’s certainly a way that the developer wants players to play the game — Martin said as much in our interview. The team wants players to get into the fun zone specifically by challenging themselves to use different weapons and constantly change the way they’re playing. It doesn’t want the player to just stick with, say, the Super Shotgun and blast everything away; players are nudged into finding what weapons work best on different demons. And regardless of the demon, an aggressive approach is encouraged — get up close and keep ripping away at demons to replenish your resources.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9pRBptP3i1Q%3Frel%3D0

“We want you to be tactically aggressive,” Martin said. “It’s not about being aggressive all the time because then that would go back to a single repetitive action. Knowing when to be aggressive and exactly how to be aggressive is going to lead to the most engaging experience possible. And engagement is the whole point of the fun zone.”

And yet, there are enough ways to vary gameplay within those boundaries to allow players to intuitively adjust for difficulty — a key property if you want to achieve the balance of flow state. Sometimes, that means forgoing hidden items and increased challenge or choosing to clear special rooms. In fact, the game punishes you for tunnel-visioning on one specific heavy demon, unless, perhaps, you’re a particularly high-skilled player. Focusing only on the big demon might be just the challenge you need, but methodically working through a room gives players the tools to feel the mastery of a challenge, with little wins weighing against bigger losses or tough spots.

It’s these methods that ensure a player can experience the fun zone and the flow state it induces, regardless of skill level. Small adjustments, like making the act of replenishing your ammo risky, enhances the feeling that you’re really good at the game. But not too good that it’s not a risk.

“Doom [Eternal] makes you do something that’s slightly risky,” Matthews said. “You breach the gap between you and the enemy, trying to get into their face to use a weapon that’s extremely powerful. But in doing so, you’re rewarded. Usually, you’ll do things like save your weak enemies for this — you balance it yourself.

“But the point of doing this is constantly keeping even a mundane task slightly challenging.”

Chen used Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as an example of the dynamic difficulty levels that are important in letting a player experience flow. Driving is a huge part of GTA: Vice City, but there are a variety of different challenges that are peppered throughout the story, like robbing a bank. But the player must choose to engage in the more challenging thing, intuitively making that decision when they think they’re ready — like how Chen’s Flow works.

Image: Rockstar Games

“Driving becomes the way to engage the difficulty levels,” Chen told Polygon. “They’re not really changing the game to the easiest or hardest difficulty, but they’re thinking about it. They make their choice based on their own needs.”

There is less choice in a game like Doom Eternal. It’s a linear game to GTA: Vice City’s open world. But there’s enough variety in playstyle and decision-making (“Do I go for all secrets? Find all collectibles?”) so that players can determine — sometimes unconsciously — how to play in the most immersive way.

Strategies in Doom Eternal evolve over the course of the game. And it keeps changing as the player gets better at doing the ripping and tearing that’s encouraged. The hardest part of it all isn’t necessarily inducing this state for a player, encouraging them to get into a “fun zone,” but it’s, instead, for the researchers who are studying the concept. The flow zone, at its core, is a process that goes on in your brain, but it’s based on feelings. And feelings are different for all people. It’s not like you can just ask someone playing a Doom Eternal level whether or not they feel like they’re in flow. They’ll become conscious of what they’re doing.

“It’s an emergent state,” Matthews said. “The moment you break it, it’s gone.”

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