Psychedelia of Flow: A Closer Look at Psychedelia in First-Person-Shooter Games
Vu, Hoang Hung (2025)
2025
Master's Programme in Game Studies
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2025-11-24
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-2025112410844
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-2025112410844
Tiivistelmä
Flow is a prominent topic in video games as the center of design, although there is no definitive formula to flow, there is still predictability to how this optimal state works. On the other hand, “psychedelic” as a term is becoming more relevant throughout each year, witnessing a trend in this type of genre in video games. Often time, psychedelic games are considered to be strange and novelty, there is no concrete definition of the term “psychedelic”. At the moment, “psychedelic” is behaving more like a buzzword to make games more appealing and often use a variety depiction to capture psychedelia. While flow as a concept is frequently studied, psychedelic on the contrary is less talked about.
First-Person-Shooter is a popular and straightforward video games genre that emphasize on gameplay experience, thus, it also revolve around accommodating flow but to combine with the unpredictable characteristics of psychedelia, it’s interesting to see how these seemingly opposite concepts interact with each other to create an optimal experience. This has led to the research question to speculate the depiction of psychedelia in FPS games and the influence of it to the flow state.
To explore this, I selected six FPS games categorized into traditional and psychedelic FPS and use game analysis as the main approach for this study. Every game session is recorded through a game recording application in addition to the diary note after playing to examine flow in each game along with the psychedelia impact.
Later findings show that psychedelia is depicted in a number of ways, depending on the theme of each game. The impact is noticeable and can impact gameplay if the psychedelic elements outweigh the core mechanic of the game. By using the criteria of altered state of consciousness or ASCs, time altering is the most common feature to evoke psychedelic experience with the complementary from audio-visual aspect. This has provided opportunities to perceive psychedelia as a new pathway to achieve flow state and expand the theory of psychedelia in video games and serve as a groundwork for future studies.
First-Person-Shooter is a popular and straightforward video games genre that emphasize on gameplay experience, thus, it also revolve around accommodating flow but to combine with the unpredictable characteristics of psychedelia, it’s interesting to see how these seemingly opposite concepts interact with each other to create an optimal experience. This has led to the research question to speculate the depiction of psychedelia in FPS games and the influence of it to the flow state.
To explore this, I selected six FPS games categorized into traditional and psychedelic FPS and use game analysis as the main approach for this study. Every game session is recorded through a game recording application in addition to the diary note after playing to examine flow in each game along with the psychedelia impact.
Later findings show that psychedelia is depicted in a number of ways, depending on the theme of each game. The impact is noticeable and can impact gameplay if the psychedelic elements outweigh the core mechanic of the game. By using the criteria of altered state of consciousness or ASCs, time altering is the most common feature to evoke psychedelic experience with the complementary from audio-visual aspect. This has provided opportunities to perceive psychedelia as a new pathway to achieve flow state and expand the theory of psychedelia in video games and serve as a groundwork for future studies.