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Mastery of the skateboard and mastery of the twitch arcade game share a fundamental similarity: in each case the goal is to achieve flow, a removal of the friction that exists between the human mind and body. In video games, that means entering a state where you are able to weave unerringly between obstacles or threats without deliberate thought. Your will and your on-screen avatar act as one. In skateboarding, flow is where you physically move through your environment without interruption, grinding along rails, jumping over obstacles and linking tricks together, thereby transforming the contours of a park or city into a single, unbroken track along which you travel.At times, video games and skateboarding have converged, the sense of flow in the latter replicated in the former. But perhaps never more so than in OlliOlli, a PlayStation Vita game from first-time console game developer Roll7 that's crafted with a keen understanding of the parallels between flow in the physical world and in the virtual. No video game has better demonstrated the skateboarder's talent for viewing an environment's lines and shapes as a canvas for spectacular travel, and few video games have encouraged flow in their player with such breezy ease.
Viewed from a side-on perspective, each of the game's colourful stages presents a meticulously arranged sequence of obstacles, rails and surfaces, all of which can be linked together into a chain of tricks and grinds. As the combo grows in length and complexity, so the points awarded multiply. So too, however, do the stakes. High scores are won by chaining tricks and grinds together, ideally moving though a level in an unbroken sequence before the final landing. But your score won't be 'banked' until you successfully land. Each trick must be punctuated with a safe return to terra firma, else all the preceding showboating will be, quite literally, pointless.
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