One of the principal pleasures offered by both video games and social media is the experience of flow. Flow is an aesthetic principle for first-person shooter games, for platform games, for puzzle games. It is also the state induced by watching one YouTube video or Netflix episode after another or by monitoring Facebook feeds for hours on end. As early as the 1970s, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1991) applied the term “flow” to describe a particular state that he had identified in his subjects: “I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow—a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it”
From Catharsis to flow
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Edge of Tomorrow (2014). Despite the video game elements, the trailer emphasis that the cathartic character of this Hollywood movie.
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Enimen's Lose Yourself is an example of high intensity flow music
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Games and flow
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In this Ted talk, Jane McGonigal explains how multiplayer games are salvational: they can literally solve the world's biggest problems.
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Making an argument similar to McGonigal's, Clay Shirky believes that collective intelligence can change the world.
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The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains on his theory of flow
The popular avant-garde
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Andy Warhol's film Empire (1964) is a leisurely statement of the avant-garde version of flow. It runs 8 hours.
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Cory Arcangel's Super Mario Clouds (2002) disrupts the design ideal of flow by stripping everything out of the game except the clouds in the sky.
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Jodi's Untitled Game: Ctl-Space is another "game" that disrupts flow.
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