A Look at Interest Curves, and Why I'm Not a Dark Souls Fan
Pac-Man: CE DX is a game that generated flow for me very well. The following diagram is an interest curve representing its gameplay:
Likewise, Kingsman was a film that also did well at generating flow for me. The following diagram is an interest curve representing the major points of the movie:
At first glance, these two interest curves appear to have nothing in common. But upon further inspection, I have found several similarities between them. Both interest curves are very cyclical, building up to spikes in interest before calming down for a while. Pac-Man gradually becomes faster as a player’s score increases, and each cycle in its interest curve increases as a result. Similarly, the overall tension of each cycle in Kingsmen gets higher as the movie progresses.
Over time, Pac-Man introduces more normal ghosts to the mix. These cause spikes in interest, correlating to a similar spike when Kingsmen introduces the main characters. Additionally, both interest curves see a slight drop after a death, and is even supplemented with a reduction to speed in Pac-Man. This period of calm provides a moment for people to process what just happened. I think the cyclical highs and lows of these two interest curves is what helps them to generate flow so well.
But then there’s Dark Souls. Though this may be an unpopular opinion, this game did a poor job at generating flow for me. Here’s my interest curve for it’s gameplay:
Much like the first two interest curves, Dark Souls’ is also very cyclical. It contains periods of highs followed by periods of lows. And each high point does get progressively higher as you overcome the challenges you failed previously. However, where the lows trended upwards in the other curves, I felt that Dark Souls’ lows trended downwards. Having to repeatedly work your way through the same areas so many times became a chore, especially when you had already mastered those areas. I believe that additional bonfires (checkpoints) would have alleviated this, and could have improved the flow of the game for me.
I don’t have gameplay of myself playing this, but gameplay by the people who work on the YouTube channel Extra Credits can be found here.
As a little bonus extra to this post, I found the score charts in Pac-Man CE DX to be very interesting, especially with regards to interest curves. You can actually see at what times the spikes would occur based on the spikes in score. Check them out:
