Get Creative: How Gaming Can Help You to Achieve Your Creative Flow State
How can you use gaming to boost your creativity? What’s a flow state and why is it important? A gameHER tells us more.
[When in a gaming flow state] the brain is better able to process data quickly and subconsciously.
By Lina Becker
Have you ever tackled a creative project and felt the rest of the world melt away? Or spent hours on a problem-solving session that only felt like a few minutes?
If this sounds familiar, what you experienced was a ‘flow state’.
This term began with Mihal Csikszentmihalyi. He’s a renowned psychologist who dedicated his career to helping the world understand and optimize peak mental states to improve their performances and overall creativity.
Dr. Chris Bertram, the director of applied neuroscience at EXOS and associate professor at the University of Fraser Valley, notes that regardless of the activity you are performing, flow experiences tend to have certain similar traits. These include an effortless sense of control, full concentration on a rewarding task, the slowing down or speeding up of time, and a flowing combination of action and thought.
Here’s how flow state can help you achieve your creative goals—and how gaming can improve your creative flow.
How the Flow State Works
The positive changes we experience during a flow state are primarily attributed to the quietening of the prefrontal cortex of your brain. This part of the brain often helps you to compare the pros and cons of decisions. But it can actually hinder your performance by encouraging you to hyper fixate on details that may or may not be critical to the project at hand.
Here’s where the flow state comes in handy.
When Charles Limb, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, studied the brains of jazz musicians with functional magnetic resonance imaging, he discovered that their prefrontal cortexes were significantly less active when they were improvising music rather than playing written songs.
When this part of the brain is deactivated, the mind is freed up to explore new possibilities and patterns. All without the brain’s messages of doubt hindering it. This means that the brain is better able to process data quickly and subconsciously.
The Key to Unlocking Your Flow
So, how can you activate this flow state and boost your creative thinking capabilities?
You could enjoy some moderate physical exercise, like a 20-minute walk, and incorporate flow triggers into your living and workspaces. Start with a clear and unwavering goal.
If you need to think creatively for a specific purpose, try to set a 90-minute timer and decide to accomplish a certain sum of work or brainstorming during this time. Once you have set these goals, you can do whatever else you need to eliminate other sources of distraction in your environment, such as your phone, your roommates or family, and any outdoor noise and stimulation.
How Gaming Can Help
Another option to pursue is gaming. Good news for gamers, right?
Ample research has shown that video games can stimulate creative thinking and problem-solving. And they help to keep your cognitive abilities sharp as well.
Gaming can also have other big benefits when it comes to creative problems and work. Some of the biggest benefits of playing video games include improved reaction times and hand-eye coordination, both of which are crucial to creativity.
Studies suggest that gamers can have reaction times up to twice as fast as their counterparts, and that playing faster games is the key to improving hand-eye coordination. Both reaction times and hand-eye coordination skills can come in handy when working on projects that require a steady hand and a quick mind.
Benefits for Pattern Recognition and Memory
Video games have also shown to benefit gamers’ memory and recognition of patterns.
Specific puzzle, and card games that rely on players identifying patterns to succeed encourage them to work on these skills. These games improve their memory and their ability to predict future occurrences based on specific outcomes.
These skills can also improve your creative flow in many ways. From helping you to remember important project details to allowing you to predict which approaches will and won’t work based on past experience.
Advantages for Creative Thinkers
In terms of sheer creativity, large sandbox-style games like Minecraft, World of Warcraft, and Stardew Valley also encourage players to think and act in creative ways.
In Minecraft, players of all ages can build massive constructions and create wild and wonderful new projects. There are plenty of YouTube videos online showing just how creative some of these players are.
Games like these can encourage you to take a fresh approach to problem-solving and to think outside of the box when tackling creative tasks. In much the same way as they promote problem-solving, these games can help you to become more creative with how you approach unfamiliar challenges and how you overcome them. Both in virtual settings and in the real world.
A study published in the Journal of Research and Innovation has further cemented this link.
Researchers studied 352 participants to compare how playing Minecraft, reading a book, and watching a television show compared when it came to improving participants’ creativity.
After 40 minutes of each activity, participants were asked to draw a humanoid, alien creature unlike any animal from Earth so that researchers could measure their levels of creativity. The less similar to humans the drawings were, the better they scored. When it came to assessing the Minecraft players’ creativity, the results were impressive. These participants were the most creative by far, while those who read books and watched TV shows were considerably less creative on average.
The study found that playing certain games like Minecraft can help to promote more creativity among players—even when compared to reading or watching television. According to Iowa State University professor Douglas Gentile, playing Minecraft can help to foster more creativity among players of all ages.
Louder For The People In The Back: Gaming Is Good For You!
The next time you feel like you’re in a creative slump you’ve got a great excuse (not that you need one!) to enjoy a solid gaming session to get your brain back on track.
Gaming has proven benefits for cognition, memory and hand-eye coordination that may boost your creative capabilities and prime you to tap into your flow state.
Just more great reasons to get your game on!
About the author:
Lina Becker started her career in education as a remedial teacher. In 2012 she became a freelance editor, working with various media outlets where she covers topics ranging from education to productivity. Lina is fascinated by how people can use their energy to grow into better versions of themselves every day - we all have so much untapped potential within us!
Love this article? Share it on social media using the icons below: