Jackie Lee
7/31/2012 11:01:00 AM
After reading PV's article on “the fire and the zone” and its comments, it occurred to me that there is quite a bit of misunderstanding about the psychology of gaming.

Most people seem to regard phenomena like “the zone” as voodoo mysticism. (Apologies to the voodoo expert in the audience, for whom this metaphor failed.) We overhear stories about how some dude was “in the zone” as he won a tournament, then speak about it in hushed tones.

“He said it was like time stopped, and he could see molecules! It got all 'Dune' up in there; the plays lined up like syzygy. Then, when he singled out one line and executed, it tore a hole in the fabric of Twitch.tv!”

In place of “Dune,” feel free to substitute to your liking: “The Matrix,” “Max Payne,” “Daredevil,” or any other popular media which has described hyper-awareness.

Clearly, when it's portrayed as a super-power, we'd all like to “get in the zone.” Although, in an intriguing twist, the next-leveling Kanye West once said, “Don't let me get in my zone.” (Actually, I think he repeated it multiple times for emphasis.)

The point is, though there is a general consensus that being “in the zone” is desirable, there's a lot of dissent about what, exactly, that means. Naysayers like Eric Froehlich don't even acknowledge “the zone” as a real thing.

Well, I'm here to change that.

With science.


Flow of Ideas

In 1975, Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi first proposed a hypothesis of the mental state in which people are the happiest: flow.

If Max Tietze can't get his name pronounced correctly for a Top 8, then for Csíkszentmihályi, things must have been… severe. Perhaps a need to remain positive spurred his work in the Burgeoning field of positive psychology. Regardless of the reason, his findings are especially relevant to gamers.

Paulo describes “the zone” as the ability to “automatically see all the connections, sort of like in a web. Most things in Magic have a reason—why did my opponent attack? Why did my opponent keep this hand? Why did he leave the Mountain untapped and not the Swamp? When you're in the zone, then all those answers come to you, without you even asking the questions.”

Compare this to Csíkszentmihályi's own description, from an interview with Wired magazine:

“…being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.”

Being in a state of flow means that you're entirely focused on what you're doing. You are so, utterly absorbed in your task that you forget about worldly concerns like hunger and time. As Magic players, we can probably all remember a tournament where we were so absorbed in what we were doing, that we were legitimately surprised when we saw that it was 8:00pm and we hadn't eaten all day.

On the other hand, we can also remember tournaments in which we struggled with our focus. “This is only round 4?” we'd groan. “Almost halfway done… almost.” Counting the rounds is a sure indicator that you are not in a flow state. See also: counting down to lunch at the last job you really hated.

So what's the difference, and more importantly, how can we achieve flow? Not even PV believes that his techniques will work for everyone, or that much is known about the topic. For someone not about to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, trying to achieve this near-mythic state can feel like stabbing into the dark with a plastic butter knife.

That's because the appropriate weapon for this task is knowledge.



Csíkszentmihályi believes that flow is a function of challenge versus skill. When you aren't being challenged, and the task requires no skill, you're apathetic to it.

On the Magic Cruise this year, Richard Garfield described one of the “toy games” he invented only to illustrate a point. It's called Pickanumber, and here are the rules: you and your opponent each pick a number, then hold up that many fingers on one hand. The player with the higher number wins.

This game is not actually fun. You just hold up all your fingers, and the game is always a draw (except when playing against that ringer with polydactyly).

I'm sorry to inform you: There will never be a Pickanumber tournament circuit. Even if you wanted to create a tournament circuit for the sole purpose of spiting me, you can't do it. If you somehow manage to assess that it's worth your time, there's no way you'll get more than a couple participants to waste their time along with you. You're all too apathetic—and that's exactly what happens when neither challenge nor skill are present.

At this point, a task becomes pure work, requiring a finite amount of time to complete. No wonder you're so vividly aware of the clock.

Now, take a game which has a lot of skill involved, like… Magic: the Gathering. Someone playing Magic will be able to achieve a flow state by combining a high degree of expertise with a great challenge. That's the reason we like to feature two pros on camera; they likely have a high degree of skill, and by facing them against a worthy opponent, we hope to witness a caliber of play as tight as a hipster's pants.

There are three prerequisites for flow. First, the activity must have a clear set of goals. Magic clearly has this. Second, it must provide immediate feedback. Magic also has this, as you can see the results of your plays instantly. Third, you must be confident in your abilities. It's possible to achieve a flow state between two players who are not masters, but who are evenly matched. The important part is that they believe this to be true.


Seeing is Perceiving (More Profound Observations to Follow)

Note that most of the time you'll fall into one of the other categories. For example, you never hear a high-profile player talk excitedly about being “in the zone” against a very new player. In this case, the player's skill would be high, but the degree of challenge would be below average. She'd probably either feel in control, or relaxed with no pressure. Things you wouldn't hear her say include (but are not limited to), “I totally soul-read my opponent's intention to play up to one creature per turn!”

On the other hand, if a player is not experienced enough, either with the deck or compared to her opponent, she'll fall into more threatening territory. At FNM, a new player might sink into the worry category when facing a more seasoned player, though not an expert. He'd know that victory was possible, but not at all guaranteed.

Against a much more skilled player, he might experience straight-up anxiety. In his writings on competitive gaming, theorist David Sirlin calls this the “fear aura.” If your opponent believes he doesn't stand a chance, odds are he won't even try. At GP Seattle, before I had my third bye for the season, I entered in a grinder. My second-round opponent rolled his eyes and grumbled at being paired against me. As soon as he started playing, it was obvious that he'd already given up.

And this is the really tricky part: The skill versus challenge graph doesn't have much to do with actual skill and challenge, especially in a game with as much variance as Magic. It mostly charts perceived skill and challenge.

In other words, if you don't have confidence in your own skill, you can never achieve flow. If you are even a little hesitant, you'll be barred from seeing “the weave.” Worse, if you believe from the outset that your opponent is going to destroy you, your anxiety might ensure that it happens.

Perceived skill has a lot to do with learned helplessness, and it has a lot to do with tilt. If you experience many losses in a row, especially against one particular player, you might start to believe that you're legitimately outclassed. This belief is far more important than any metric for skill, especially since there aren't really any good ones for Magic. (There are Planeswalker Points, but beyond being correlated with the amount that you play, a number that increases limitlessly doesn't mean anything except in comparison to others. Fortunately, that's a problem that rests solidly in the hands of Organized Play; while we might worry about getting enough points for a bye in one season, they're tasked with the much more challenging job of drawing the line.)

Believing that you're not as good of a player as your opponent might not seem too harmful, but even if it does nothing worse than preventing you from entering “mental bullet-time,” it's probably worth reconsidering. This is why one of Reid Duke's beliefs is that it doesn't matter how good you are. Even if you could “prove” that you were strictly better or worse than your opponent, thinking this way would only serve to harm you.

High Mid Low

Wasteland

$59.99

$50.00

$46.07

Store QTY Price   Ron's Comic World 6 $46.07 Just Games 1 $46.54 Top Deck Gamers 1 $46.87 Pastimes 5 $46.99 Alter Reality Games 5 $47.48 TJ Collectibles 10 $47.49 Gamescape 3 $47.50 CCGHouse 1 $47.98 Comic Asylum 2 $47.99 >> View all Prices for Wasteland << Store.TCGplayer.com allows you to buy cards from any of our vendors, all at the same time! Shop, Compare & Save with TCGplayer.com! - [Store FAQ]

Entering the Zone

Now that we know when flow can or cannot happen, how can we go to further lengths to achieve it?

Paulo writes, “For me, there is only one thing that correlated to being in the zone more often—playtesting.”

To understand why this is true, we must learn how flow works. Humans have a bandwidth limited to about 126 bits per second, as Csíkszentmihályi discovered in a study from 1956. According to Wikipedia, a conversation takes up about one third of that bandwidth. Puzzling through the multitude of plays you and your opponent can both make likely takes up much more.

When Conley Woods wrote that cutting down on witty banter helped him actualize a higher level of play, this is why. With a limited amount of focus we can devote, we'll get the best results by pointing the entirety of it at the game.

During flow, we have focused all of our available attention at the task at hand. We lose sight of hunger, time, and distractions because we simply don't have any more attention to give. We're completely devoted to using our skills to their fullest.

When you playtest, as PV suggests, you're reducing the amount of information your brain must process during a match. He cites pattern recognition as one of the tools your brain will use to “do a lot of the thinking on its own.” That sounds like a perk, but when we look at it in the context of our limited bandwidth for processing information, it's actually essential. The majority of boneheaded plays we make are caused by having focused all of our attention on some other aspect of the game.

In fact, positive psychology has already discussed playtesting as something that can help you achieve a flow state. Only, it calls the process “overlearning.” When we playtest, we're feeling out the same card interactions over and over, running into the same choices again and again. Psychologists suggest that it's not enough to merely learn a skill; if you want to achieve excellence at it, you must keep doing it until it's automatic. Only by reducing the amount of bandwidth the task requires can you perform it at the highest levels. In the words of PV, the task becomes “sort of an intuition.”

Since February, I've posted up respectable finishes in GP after GP, with a few exceptions. The most notable ones, during which I failed to even make Day 2, are Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Columbus. Two of the formats were Legacy, and the other Modern.

Although I felt frustrated at the time (a symptom of low skill with high challenge), these results should have been expected. I've never played any eternal format before, so it only serves to reason that I won't be able to make the best plays until after I've learned not to run my cards in to Wasteland, Daze, and Spell Snare. Lack of playtesting for these events, compared to the vast experience I had with Innistrad Limited and Standard, made certain that I was locked into the wrong side of the spectrum. It's an error I intend to correct for Pro Tour Seattle.

Besides improving your confidence and playtesting, there are two more things that can help. One is to practice mindfulness, meditation, or martial arts. These practices are all about perfecting your focus and freeing your mind from the fetters of unnecessary thoughts. Their description could encompass another entire article at least; suffice it to say that these practices have been scrutinized by scientists, who have concluded that meditation is linked to improved perception, academic performance, concentration, and memory, among other health benefits. And remember, while confidence is a plus, having too much of an ego is an obstacle to flow.

Finally, having “the fire” can help you achieve flow.

The fire is simply passion. If you find an activity fulfilling on its own, you'll be motivated to keep practicing and overlearning it. That's why Paulo says it's more important to experience during playtesting than during the match itself. No matter how much you want to win, it's not going to happen out of nowhere. However, if you live and breathe Magic, it's a fair bet that you'll be on top of your game. If one player's idea of a break is to watch a movie, but his opponent would rather jam Ajani vs. Nicol Bolas, I know who I'd peg for the winner most of the time.

You can't force yourself to be passionate, but being too results-oriented is certainly a fine way to kill the flame. Flow is all about being engrossed in an activity that you find intrinsically rewarding, so if Magic has become work to you, you need to step back and reevaluate how you look at it. Not even the highest level players look at the game this way, and when they do, it's frequently accompanied by a Lull in performance. A short break or a fresh perspective can make a world of difference, as I discussed in my article on boredom.

———————

I hope that I've shed some light on flow, and how it can help you achieve excellence. You can't make it happen, but you can put yourself in a position where it's more likely to occur.

And remember, in the multiverse, most things get to experience flow at some point: cups, stone, even maggots. The majority of these things aren't even alive, so if you keep at it, I'm sure you'll do fine.


Love and battle,
Jackie Lee——

@JackieL33 on Twitter
www.twitch.tv/jackiel33 – Sorry about the hiatus. I hope to start streaming some M13 drafts next week!