Recently there has been concern surrounding the relation between flow and the development of problematic gaming among players who game to escape noxious mood states. There is a scarcity of research examining how this relation might extend to smartphone games. Here we assessed whether gaming to escape is characterized by heightened boredom proneness and depressive symptomology in everyday life in addition to negative consequences related to smartphone gaming. We also assessed whether escape players preferentially experience flow, positive affect and effectively less boredom than non-escape players. We also measured whether escape players had enhanced arousal and urge during actual gameplay. To compare the in-game experiences between escape and non-escape players, we characterized gaming to escape as the upper tercile of all escape scores in our sample (n = 20), and non-escape players as the lower tercile of escape scores (n = 20). As expected we showed that gaming to escape was associated with boredom proneness in everyday life, which was in itself correlated with depressive symptomology. During gameplay, those who game to escape boredom demonstrated heightened flow and positive affect compared to non-escape players. State boredom scores however were comparable between the two groups. Importantly, those who game to escape demonstrated greater arousal and urge-to-play following gameplay than non-escape players – but only for optimally challenging games. Findings converge to suggest that bored escape players may seek flow and its consequent positive affect for relief from states of hypo-arousal and monotony through optimally challenging games.

近来，在逃避有害情绪状态的玩家之间，围绕着流量与问题游戏的发展之间的关系已引起关注。缺乏研究来研究这种关系如何扩展到智能手机游戏。在这里，我们评估了逃避游戏是否具有与智能手机游戏相关的负面后果以及日常生活中无聊倾向和抑郁症状增强的特征。我们还评估了逃脱玩家是否比非逃脱玩家优先体验流动感，积极影响和有效地减少无聊感。我们还测量了逃生玩家在实际游戏过程中是否增强了唤醒和冲动。为了比较逃生玩家和非逃生玩家的游戏体验，我们将游戏中逃脱的特征定义为样本中所有逃脱得分的较高分数（n = 20），将非逃脱游戏的特征描述为逃脱得分的较低阈值（n = 20）。正如预期的那样，我们发现逃避游戏与日常生活中的无聊倾向相关，而无聊本身与抑郁症状相关。在游戏过程中，那些逃避无聊的人与非逃避游戏的人相比，表现出更大的流量和积极的影响。然而，两组的州无聊得分是可比的。重要的是，那些逃脱游戏的人在游戏玩法上比非逃脱游戏者表现出更大的唤醒感和冲动性，但这仅适用于具有挑战性的最佳游戏。