Assessing the Flow State in a Classic Video Game through Simulation

This work assesses a lock-and-key type game's ability to maintain a player in the flow state by properly increasing the game's difficulty to keep pace with the player's increase in skill as it relates to equipping items. We create a simulation that resembles The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), in a tailored game engine for the nine dungeons of the first quest. Our simulations model differences in player growth and how this relates to difficulty of the game. This is in order to determine if the game is able to maintain the flow state for the player by avoiding points where the difficulty outweighs the skill, or the opposite where the skill of the player outweighs the difficulty of the game leading to boredom. We found that generally, the player stays within the flow channel, however, there are dungeons that are outliers in the simulations.