A Parameter-Space Design Methodology for Casual Creators

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment

Fluidic games blur the line between gameplay and game design, providing playful, non-technical, easy-to-use tools for users to design their own games. We introduce Wevva, our first fluidic game for iOS, which allows users to design and share their own games based on novel mechanics, entirely on a mobile device, with no need for programming skills. The development of such software is a significant challenge in user interface design, requiring a new design approach compared to the design of more traditional creative tools, and with much scope for mixed-initiative co-creation and other assistive AI technologies. Our aim with fluidic games is to democratise game design, allowing anyone and everyone to express themselves through the artform of digital games.

2014

This paper outlines a theoretical framework for creative technology based on two contrasting processes: divergent exploration and convergent optimisation. We claim that these two cases require different gesture-to-parameter mapping properties. Results are presented from a user experiment that motivates this theory. The experiment was conducted using a publicly available iPad app: ``Sonic Zoom''. Participants were encouraged to conduct an open ended exploration of synthesis timbre using a combination of two different interfaces. The first was a standard interface with ten sliders, hypothesised to be suited to the ``convergent'' stage of creation. The second was a mapping of the entire 10-D combinatorial space to a 2-D surface using a space filling curve. This novel interface was intended to support the ``divergent'' aspect of creativity. The paths of around 250 users through both 2-D and 10-D space were logged and analysed. Both the interaction data and questi...

2017

Playing casual games is a wildly popular activity on smartphones. However, designing casual games is done by a smaller group of people, usually on desktop com-puters, using professional development tools. Our goal is to bring these activities closer together, in terms of who does them and how they do them. Our Gamika Technology platform is a 2D physics-based mobile game design environment. It comprises a 284- dimensional parametric design space, and poses mobile game design as the problem of navigating this space. We have built three mobile apps thus far to experiment with on-device, mixed-initiative navigation of the Gamika design space and some of its subspaces. We describe these apps here in terms of the initiatives that go into making a game with them, and how these are split between people and underlying AI software. Our overall goal is to democratise game design, so that an- yone and everyone can make casual games directly on their mobile phones or tablets.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2017

Both toy and games industries are investing in hybrid play products. In these scenarios user access the system using toys as input/output, thus, they consist of playful user interfaces. Such systems are complex artifacts since they use real and virtual information. Therefore, they present new challenges to both designers and developers. We supposed both industries could benefit from hybrid design approaches since product concepts. Hence, we applied the model of hybrid gameplay as a practical tool for designing such systems. To achieve it, we included the model in a 16-week class to design hybrid games. In this paper, we detailed model usage in course schedule, and discussed how students experienced it. Besides, we presented student's six working prototypes, including design cycles, and playtesting sessions. After class, we conducted semi-structured interviews with student's representatives. Results revealed model usefulness to describe the system setup and interface elements. Furthermore, according to students, the model vocabulary facilitated communication among team members. Finally, we proposed improvements in model nomenclature based on student's feedback. In addition, we recommend a few topics for a methodological approach to design hybrid games.

This paper examines the possibilities for creative interaction with computers, in particular modes of interaction based on improvisation and spontaneous creative discovery. We consider research findings from studies in psychology that investigate how humans improvise together to see what could be useful in helping us to design systems that provide new kinds of interactive opportunities. We draw on our personal experiences both as computer scientists working across art and music, and as practicing artists and musicians, to examine what artists and musicians would want in any system designed to support creative interaction with a computer. We bring together these different findings to propose a series of working principles which form a basis for designing systems that facilitate collaboration and improvisation with computers in creative domains.

Entertainment Computing, 2011

The creation process in digital art relies often on collaborations between an artist (or group of artists) and a multidisciplinary team. This collaboration implies a multidisciplinary work involving art, science, technology, design, psychology, etc. that come together by sharing a common communicational and informational space.

Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference on - DIS '12, 2012

Game design and user experience (UX) design both centre on the design of experiences. But whereas it is par for the course for end-user perspectives to be included during early design stages in UX, there is little methodological support or research into how to incorporate player perspectives into early stages of game design. In this paper, we introduce musebased game design, an experimental empathic design approach foregrounding a dialogic artist-muse relationship between a game designer and player. Following a user research stage focused on learning about the player, the designer forms idiosyncratic design constraints inspired by and relating to the player, which are then used to inspire ideation. To understand the consequences, advantages, and disadvantages of this approach, we discuss findings from two years of application of this style of game design in a Master's-level class of game design students at the IT University of Copenhagen.

2012

This paper is a part of the game studies field from a design perspective. It investigates the computer game design process, focusing primarily on prototyping, as it is being performed in game development today. Prototyping has been studied in other design fields, (Buxton 2007; Arvola and Artman 2007; Lim 2008) but its role in computer game design is relatively unexplored. Potential users of prototypes and prototyping methods range from the designer and the design team, to beta testers and publishers. The focus in this paper is on internal use of prototypes, where the design team is the target audience. The prototype functions as a tool for getting the team on the same track and to introduce new members to the work. Prototypes and visualizations also tend to replace the game design document more and more. The work presented here is based on analysis of interviews with game designers. By applying perspectives from rhetoric, the aim is to investigate how the communication around the prototyping process within a design team can be improved. Prototyping and interaction design in Relation to Game Design It is a common understanding in relevant literature that prototyping is an important part of game design (Salen and Zimmermann 2004; Fullerton et al. 2008; Schell 2008; Fullerton et al. 2006; Glinert 2010). Digital games are a very complex piece of software to develop, where game mechanics generate emergent gameplay. Even small rule changes can result in drastic changes in gameplay. How the gameplay changes in such cases is hard to predict, even for an experienced designer (Salen and Zimmerman 2004). Games are furthermore considered by many to be a piece of art (Costikyan 2002; Smuts 2005; Tavinor 2009), although this issue has been heavily debated outside the academic field (Ebert 2010; Moriarty 2011). Games design teams need the prototypes to check how emergent gameplay and artistic design choices affect the design. Game design is often described as experience design (Schell 2008; Swink 2008). Game prototypes are generally meant to be experienced or played with, in a lean-forward sense with reference to McLuhan, i.e. by actively consuming the media (McLuhan 2004). The notion is often that the designer, or the team, need to feel the idea. This is valid in general (

1989

Computers have the potential to be creativity enhancing tools. But most of the current systems have not lived up to these expectations-they have restricted rather than enhanced creativity. Designers were forced to express their goals, ideas and (partial) solutions at levels that were too remote from the problem domains they were dealing with. To overcome these limitations, we have developed a conceptual framework and prototypical systems that allow designers to work with personal meaningful operations. Beyond providing domain-specific abstractions, our knowledge-based design environments can evaluate and criticize an evolving design and provide feedback to the designer. They integrate constructive and argumentative components. Support for end-user modifiability allows designers to extend the environments themselves. Knowledge-based design environments turn the computer into an invisible instrument and support cooperative problem solving between the human designer and the computer. Our experience with these systems demonstrates that they have the potential to serve as important stepping stones towards creativity enhancing environments.

Proceedings of the fourth conference on Creativity & cognition - C&C '02, 2002

The creative process requires experimentation, the exploration of variations, and the continual evaluation of one's progress. While these processes are frequently non-linear and iterative, modern user interfaces do not explicitly support these practices, and instead impose a linear progression through tasks that is a poor fit for creative pursuits. In this paper we use data from three case studies, and draw upon Schön's theory of reflection-in-action to illustrate specific deficiencies in current user interfaces when used in creative endeavors. We then develop a set of guidelines for user interface design and demonstrate their application in three designs intended to support tasks in the domain of image manipulation.