Thaindian News

Washington, Nov 25 (IANS) Rock Band, a video game, has helped psychologists unravel the secret of flow at work or while doing skilled tasks.
Flow refers to a state of concentration so focussed that it amounts to absolute absorption in whatever one is doing.

The types of work that lead people to achieve flow have some common traits, including being goal directed, providing feedback and giving a sense of meaning to the worker. Flow occurs only when the person feels in control of the process.

Clive Fullagar and Patrick Knight, professor and associate professor, respectively, at Kansas State University (KSU), found that most people achieve flow at work that is neither too easy nor too hard but just right.

“For those students who have a moderate level of skill at Rock Band, the song has to be moderately challenging and match his or her skill level for optimal enjoyment to occur,” Fullagar said.

“That has broad implications for teaching. It means that if we want students to enjoy or get a lot of satisfaction out of classes, we need to assign them challenging tasks but make sure that they have the skills necessary to meet the challenges of those tasks.”

In a psychology lab, students played guitar in the game. In an adjacent room, the researchers watched a monitor with the same screen shot that the subjects saw. The researchers could control what songs students played and how much of the feedback they saw.

This isn’t the first time that a video game has been used to study flow. Others have used Tetris, but Fullagar and Knight said that the nature of the game wouldn’t have allowed them adequate control for this study.

To make Tetris meet a player’s ability level, researchers slowed down the rate at which the blocks fell onto the screen. This also limited performance because players couldn’t finish as many lines, said a KSU release.

“With Rock Band, it’s the same speed and the same notes no matter what your ability level is,” Knight said. “We can control that and look at differences in performance in a more objective way.”

In another study that tracked architecture students over the course of a semester, Fullagar found that achieving flow was likely to result in a good mood and have a positive impact on psychological health.

The findings appeared in the September issue of the Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology.