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Lu et al.: Is Flow Made of Difficulty, or of the Effort You Spend? — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed study by Hairong Lu and colleagues (Psychological Research, 2025) on flow and mental effort. Manipulating perceived difficulty and expected odds of success separately in a visual discrimination task, the difficulty manipulation landed hard (partial eta-squared = 0.64) while expectancy showed only a weak trial-level effect (d = 0.04); the inverted-U in flow was marginal (p = 0.053) and P300 showed no relation to flow. An exploratory study with N = 37.
Sun et al.: Why Do Players Lose Themselves in Punishingly Hard Games? — Fukai Reads
A paper by Sun et al. on difficulty design in Soulslike games. Through a qualitative analysis of 600 Steam reviews it asks why players immerse themselves in punishingly hard games, and proposes 'resilient flow' — absorption sustained by meaningfully framing frustration.
