Team Members:
Md. Rafie bin Matassan
Awang Muhammad Muizzuddin Asyur bin Awang Mat Japar

This task required us to play a PS4 game in a group of two and explain the performance and flow experienced using the Yerkes-Dodson Law and Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Model.

According to the Yerkes-Dodson Law, performance and arousal are directly related (Shrestha, 2017). On the other hand, is the Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Model. Flow is when we are completely absorbed in a challenging but doable task (PositivePsychology.com, 2016). 

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).

In other words, we achieve flow when the challenge matches with our skill set. To measure our performance, we benchmarked ourselves with Csikszentmihalyi's eight characteristics of flow:

1. Complete concentration on the task;
2. Clarity of goals and reward in mind and immediate feedback;
3. Transformation of time (speeding up/slowing down);
4. The experience is intrinsically rewarding;
5. Effortlessness and ease;
6. There is a balance between challenge and skills;
7. Actions and awareness are merged, losing self-conscious rumination;
8. There is a feeling of control over the task.

The game that we choose to play for this task is Spyro Reignited Trilogy. The game is basically about a purple young dragon named Spyro and his dragonfly companion, Sparx, embarks their journey across the dragon kingdom in order to defeat an orc named Gnasty Gnorc who has conquered 5 of the dragon homeland by trapping the other dragons into crystal and we play as Spyro to release the dragons that are trapped in it and restore the order of the kingdom.

Upon starting the game, the player is immersed in a colourful vivid world and introduced to the story which set Spyro, the player character, on his journey. However, there were no pop-up control tutorials for new players. We had a mini difficulty in terms of what do to, what button perform what actions, so we had to explore the settings menu to look up for the controls manually. As the early game calls for adaptation, we had to pause and check the control settings several times. Fortunately, mastering the controls were rewarding and easy.

However, further into the game, our flow began to deteriorate. As we were immersed in the gameplay, the nauseating camera motion and its field of view, complemented by repetitive in-game conversations ultimately lead to the downfall of our flow as there is not much of a big and new challenge along the way when we play the game because even we move to the next world in the game with new enemies encountered, how to defeat them is basically the same.