Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Buried at the far end of yesterday’s post was a tiny little mention of one of the top books recommended by many game designers. The book, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is something you’ll hear referenced by many of us. Sometimes we’ll just talk about the “flow state” or “flow,” but it’s this book and this researcher that kicked the whole thing off.

Flow is what happens when you’ve submerged yourself into something – a game, a book, a movie or any kind of experience, really. People enter flow states at work, particularly programmers who are juggling whole chunks of code in their heads.

To make sure the book wasn’t missed, I decided to give it its own entry.