GameFlow 2020: 15 Years of a Model of Player Enjoyment

Abstract

The original GameFlow model was first published in 2005 and in the last 15 years it has seen thousands of citations and hundreds of applications to designing and evaluating games and gameful experiences. Previous work has sought to test and validate the model by applying it to different game experiences to further understand those experiences and to expose any weaknesses of the model. In this paper, we survey over 200 applications of GameFlow over the last 15 years, to understand how, where, and why the model has been applied. We found that the model has been applied to a diverse set of experiences, domains, platforms, audiences, and used in a variety of ways. This work lays the foundations for targeting the next version of the GameFlow model towards the most valuable and appropriate applications and to define how it fits within the broader landscape of player experience tools.