Zen gaming

Those games which are quite simple but demand such a level of concentration that one becomes one with the game. E.g. Wipeout zone mode, Geometry Wars pacifism mode. Any others? Also is the zen state helpful or harmful? E.g in GW sometimes I catch myself calmly heading straight for the orange end of a gate, seemingly aware yet unconcerned of the impending doom. And when mid-game I snap out of the state, I feel like i actually play better out of it - but that could be misleading 'cause in the state I don't actually feel like I'm playing at all.

sometimes when i play dr. mario i reach this state, i'm killing it and a high level and/or high speed and i feel like my eyes aren't even focused on the screen.

or with street fighter II, sometimes it's better not to think at all and just feel the force

i love this

what's pacifism mode, can't shoot?

yup, blue diamonds only, can only destroy by going through gates.

i totally get this w/civ and other turn-based strategy games where your whole body and conciousness enter some weird time-delay state and everythign outside the game fades away

separate but similar playing platform/action games i'll get a sense of movement similar to being in a fast moving elevator, i used to get this much stronger as a kid but i still feel it sometimes (lol prince of persia)

def. get this when i play shmups.

Music and rhythm games, of course! Audiosurf being really fun with this, especially since to get high scores you have to try to keep chained matches going for the entire song, it's one of those games where when it clicks you really going into the "zone".

i get in this state with zuma sometimes.
has anybody played zenses?

can you really get this with strategy games? maybe it's a different but similar thing; the kind of concentration i was thinking of would be hard to sustain for longer than a few minutes, if that.

can see it with music games fo sho. in fact thinking about dance dance revolution, it's definitely easier when you're in the zone - you snap out of it and suddenly there's a million arrows on the screen that you can't make head or tail of.

what circa1916 said, all good shmups should get you into this state

the worst is when you start thinking about it in mid zen, then things just go rotten.

driving games mostly

i used to have this with CS. No longer felt like I was aiming. Just became automated.

The art of pwning without pwning.

I get this way with Ninja Gaiden (NES) and Marble Madness (NES). I'm not sure if they qualify as examples of Zen gaming, though, because I'm not so much concentrating as just...making it to the end, over and over. It's kind of like when repeat a 15-minute drive home for the millionth time, and you step out of the car and realize that you don't remember anything about the ride home. Which is kind of scary, really.

Oh yeah the car thing is classic. It's so zen you don't even realise how zen it is.

man i was totally thinking about this while playing mega man 9 last night. there are so many jumps that depend on tricky timing, and any tension or anticipation just makes me fuck up and die. i had tried to get through this one stage like 20 times with no luck, and then when i was on the phone with my mom i distractedly beat it, almost without noticing.

<img src="http://www.puolenkuunpelit.com/kauppa/images/ds_zenses_rainforest.jpg";>

http://www.digitallard.com/Images/Nintendo%20DS%20Review/Content882/zendoku.jpg

playing games while on the phone to your mum? u bad kid.

I was reading about this the other day, and playing some Geometry Wars 2 last night, and really, there are a lot of parallels there. I'm starting to wonder whether the types of game we're talking about here are ones which manage to be literally hypnotic.

When you finished playing, were you stuck to your chair?

guitar hero/rock band type games seem to really operate on this principle.

Yeah, I was getting it hugely with GH the other day - there was a specific little run of hammer-ons and pull-offs which came swarming down the screen towards me, and I didn't even have time to read them, let alone process them. Yet after they passed, my streak was still there, unbroken. As if my fingers had played it for me, while my brain was busy going "waaaargh".

yeah with lengthy rhythm game runs i've found it happens when i just relax, breathe, and let my body-mind connection do the work without any effort on my part

i think it might be expanding the idea of 'hypnotic' a bit too far. i dunno. apparently brain scanning jazz musicians while they improvise shows they demonstrably are operating at a different threshold of conscious thought; i kind of think something similar happens with videogames, except that you need to put a lot less work in to come to the point, and a lot less comes out of it

last year i was going to start a videogame blog with an essay-length post tying together 'improvisation' in games and procedural content generation in left 4 dead and adorno on jazz and a buncha second-hand psychology like the above

:(

GH/RB basically functions as another form of musical sight reading tho, just different notation and a simplified instrument - the zen thing in like space giraffe or geometry wars feels different to me xposts maybe kind of

i like in old mario games where the faster u go and the less careful u r the better you end up playing

i really wish someone had answered ledge's post 'no, but i had predicted last week's lottery numbers'

i wonder if anyone's done a study comparing brain response in improvisation with brain response sight-reading. maybe we can compare them to do the same thing with guitar hero and team fortress

'convince them'. i have entered a zen state where i am not aware of what i am typing.

Ha, that's a neat idea - my sight reading music education/practice surely helped my video game skills and vice versa. Though I'm not sure it's quite as useful in TF2!