You may have heard of the term flow. It’s something that athletes, musicians, artists and even programmers love, a golden moment where time itself seems to disappear as you are completely absorbed in the activity you’re doing. Before I made this game, I ironically was researching video game addiction and ended up reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow, which helped me grasp the idea more concretely.

What struck me most about the book wasn’t actually about how to get into flow, but it’s pitfalls. Mihaly describes how ultimately the concept of consciousness control is the most important:

When a person becomes so dependent on the ability to control an enjoyable activity that he cannot pay attention to anything else, then he loses the ultimate control: the freedom to determine the content of consciousness. Thus, enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative aspect…they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order…

In a video game, because of its (usually) self contained nature, designers can create parameters that fulfill so called “flow conditions”. But is this artificially created flow really the ideal Csikszentmihalyi was trying to get across? In fact, one of the reasons that I started my research around video games in the first place is because I felt a certain emptiness after playing video games for hours and hours on end.

As a reconciliation between the part of me that loves video games and the part of me that wants to master this so called consciousness control, I created Firefly. Firefly explores how to break flow in a medium that is traditionally used and has many affordances to create flow: a video game. By nature it’s intended to cause some internal dissonance. The design took inspiration from Jason Rohrer’s Passage, which had simplicity in controls and world building yet many meanings and metaphors behind it. For those interested, here are more in-depth details about my intentions for the design:

• The main game mechanic is quite simple - if you DON’T move/ press any of the movement keys for over 3 seconds, your visibility will increase. Therefore the amount of movement controls visibility & “heightened awareness”. If the player chooses to move the whole time, they will be operating with a limited scope of view which will make navigating the maze difficult.
• Once the stamina bar reaches half, fireflies will spawn. Although they have no purpose within the game, it’s a special treat for those who are patient enough to wait. Often, life will reward us with beautiful things the more present we are.
• The stamina bar represents our real world stamina, or inner battery. If we don’t pause or take a break, we can be operating with a handicap or in a worst care scenario, start to get sick and loose health.
• Gems represent memorable events, or treasures, found in life. Each time you experience one of these events, you’re more energized, and more motivated. Your max stamina will increase with each gem collected, and the counter on the top right shows how many you’ve gathered.
• The tree at the end signifies your return to the tree of life, and the end of your current life journey. The yellow flowers will bloom regardless on how many points you got. When you reach the end, the fireflies come back and your field of vision increases.
• At the very end, your view goes from a locked 2D top-down to 3D to represent the limited view we have as three dimensional beings.

While these are my intentions, there is no “right” way to play firefly just as there is no right way to live life. This is the first game I have ever made, and it brings me a lot of joy seeing it come into fruition. I hope playing Firefly brought about a different awareness into your day and helped you discover a bit more about yourself, as making it did for me.

• Ai