HTML5 Canvas, User Illusions, and Game Flow

HTML5 is significant for game pedagogy for many reasons, but the most significant is Canvas, a 2d graphics API that supports apps from word processors to space adventures. Canvas enables interactive dynamic bitmapping, drawing, animation, and simulations such as 3d-scrolling backgrounds with parallax. Alan Kay’s concept user illusion names the “simplified myth” we employ when we use icons, scroll bars, folders and trash cans to use a computer. In Alan Kay’s terms, Canvas creates the user illusion of fully computable animation on many different devices. That is, Canvas enables unlimited development of user illusions. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s venerable concept of “flow” gets new life if we view it through the lens of user illusions articulated in Canvas. Flow ensues when the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but fully aligned with the cognitive faculties to engage a user illusion in a compelling task. Games, in fact, are best understood as immersive user illusions designed to induce flow. As a result, more than any other recent technology, HTML5 Canvas makes immersion in game flow—and the user illusion that most enables learning--fully computable on any device that can display web pages, anywhere.