Zen in Osmos

I got around to playing Osmos today and I'm very glad I did. Ever since my Alien Blood Bath hack I've been thinking about flow in games. Osmos might practice flow better than ThatGameCompany's fl0w itself.

If you want to know what is Osmos or why it's awesome you can just read what I read on IndieGames.com's post. The gist of what I'm interested in Osmos is this: it's a game about getting bigger by consuming things smaller than you, becoming big enough to consume the things that were bigger than you, and avoid the things that are at the moment bigger than you ... because they'll consume you. You can become big enough to consume the whole map though that is not your objective and probably not worth your time. You should become big enough to complete the actual map objective , for instance, to chase down a pretty big green thing in this field of huge other things as that thing you're chasing frantically runs from you. As you move you slowly become smaller. The smaller you are, the more susceptible you are to being consumed. So before starting your objective you need to go out and consume enough stuff, which itself is a dangerous activity, until you think you're ready to complete the objective. When you're ready to move from one activity to the other is totally up to you and how ready you think you personally are to complete the objective. If you think you're hot shit you'll spend a small amount of time developing your guy before flying toward the green thing. Otherwise you might take your time and pick smaller things than you to eat until you feel safe and ready to tackle the challenge.

That's how you create flow in a game. Eddy Boxerman, director of Osmos, calls it Zen Gaming. You leave it up to the player to choose the difficulty of the challenges. But you bake this choice into the game itself. These flow ideas are an intrinsic part of Osmos -- it's not just a feature.