Leveraging players' goal-setting and cognitive gaming elements to create flow

Purpose Online games are widely adopted electronic applications that facilitate flow experiences, which is a highly enjoyable experience for players, thus motivating further engagement in online gameplay. During gameplay, players set gaming goals, and they must make cognitive efforts to achieve these goals. However, we do not know how goal-setting and cognitive gaming elements (game complexity and game familiarity) create flow, indicating a research gap. To fill this gap, we use the cognitive gaming elements in the literature and the theoretical elements of goal-setting theory to build a model. Design/methodology/approach Conducting a large-scale online survey, we collect 3,491 responses from online game players and use structural equation modeling for data analysis. Findings We find that challenging goals, game complexity, game familiarity and telepresence are positively linked to player-perceived flow, explaining 45% of the variance. The new finding is that challenging goals can strengthen the link between game complexity and flow. We also find that telepresence can strengthen the link between game familiarity and flow. Originality/value Our study provides the novel insight that gaming goals and cognitive gaming elements can generate player-perceived flow. This insight can help game makers design gaming elements to accommodate players' cognitive efforts to achieve in-game goals, thus creating flow and effectively increasing players' game engagement.