Assessment of co-creativity in the process of game design

We consider game design as a sociocultural and knowledge modelling activity, engaging participants in the design of a scenario and a game universe based on a real or imaginary socio-historical context, where characters can introduce life narratives and interaction that display either known social realities or entirely new ones. In this research, participants of the co-creation activity are Malaysian students who were working in groups to design game-based learning resources for rural school children. After the co-creativity activity, the students were invited to answer the co-creativity scale, an adapted version of the Assessment Scale of Creative Collaboration (ASCC), combining both the co-creativity factors and learners’ experiences on their interests, and difficulties they faced during the co-creativity process. The preliminary results showed a high diversity on the participants’ attitudes towards collaboration, especially related to their preferences towards individual or collaborative work.</p

Co-creativity through play and game design thinking

This article discusses the application of game design thinking as a learning process for scaffolding co-creativity in Higher Education based on the GameChangers initiative (gamify.org.uk) part-funded by the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE). Taking into account the relationship between play, technology and learning, the game design thinking approach fully embraces and accommodates for the creation and development of games of any typology (board games, card games, digital games, etc.) and playful solutions (gamified products) as freely chosen by the learners, aligning with the importance of autonomy, relatedness and purpose in motivating learners to be deeply engaged in the process. Through this process, learners are expected to gain valuable knowledge in creative and collaborative problem solving and experience game design and development process towards addressing real challenges and opportunities in their communities. The focus of the process is on the creative process rather than the end products/solutions produced by the learners. The paper will specifically discuss the methodology and findings from an experimental module developed based on the approach involving four cohorts of Level two undergraduate students (n=122, 2017-2019). The students came from the different schools and faculties at Coventry University, UK. Based on the qualitative feedback and reflections collected through the Module Evaluation Questionnaire (MEQ) and the final reflection pieces, the co-creative process inspired by play and games demonstrates that through the process, students discover the importance of elements such as empathy, purpose, meaning, art, creativity and teamwork in their learning regardless of the specific disciplines they are pursuing.</p

Learning the Designer's Preferences to Drive Evolution

This paper presents the Designer Preference Model, a data-driven solution that pursues to learn from user generated data in a Quality-Diversity Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity (QD MI-CC) tool, with the aims of modelling the user's design style to better assess the tool's procedurally generated content with respect to that user's preferences. Through this approach, we aim for increasing the user's agency over the generated content in a way that neither stalls the user-tool reciprocal stimuli loop nor fatigues the user with periodical suggestion handpicking. We describe the details of this novel solution, as well as its implementation in the MI-CC tool the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer. We present and discuss our findings out of the initial tests carried out, spotting the open challenges for this combined line of research that integrates MI-CC with Procedural Content Generation through Machine Learning.Comment: 16 pages, Accepted and to appear in proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary and bio-inspired Computation, EvoApplications 202

Can computers foster human users' creativity? Theory and praxis of mixed-initiative co-creativity

This article discusses the impact of artificially intelligent computers to the process of design, play and educational activities. A computational process which has the necessary intelligence and creativity to take a proactive role in such activities can not only support human creativity but also foster it and prompt lateral thinking. The argument is made both from the perspective of human creativity, where the computational input is treated as an external stimulus which triggers re-framing of humans’ routines and mental associations, but also from the perspective of computational creativity where human input and initiative constrains the search space of the algorithm, enabling it to focus on specific possible solutions to a problem rather than globally search for the optimal. The article reviews four mixed-initiative tools (for design and educational play) based on how they contribute to human-machine co-creativity. These paradigms serve different purposes, afford different human interaction methods and incorporate different computationally creative processes. Assessing how co-creativity is facilitated on a per-paradigm basis strengthens the theoretical argument and provides an initial seed for future work in the burgeoning domain of mixed-initiative interaction.peer-reviewe

A participatory co-creation model to drive community engagement in rural indigenous schools:A case study in Sarawak

This paper presents the formulated ‘play-to-engage’ model for indigenous community engagement that incorporates factors in cultural protocols and game design thinking. The hybrid model of the participatory co-creation model was formulated in the study that had been rolled out in two rural primary schools in West Borneo. These schools are located in remote villages, away from urban amenities, and technological affordances and resources are limited. There are more than twenty culturally-diversed indigenous tribes in Borneo. Although it is a known fact that indigenous cultures, including those in Borneo, have many cultural protocols and distinctive custom practices, it is still a challenge for researchers who work with such communities to understand, adhere to and follow the cultural protocols. The model looks at incorporating gameplay and culture protocols to drive community engagement. Since play is universal, the creation of a trustworthy partnership between the community and researchers was established through the use of play during the engagement process. Narratives captured in the study represented reflection, problem solving and creativity in the interactions with the indigenous communities, based on the developed indicators of the ‘play-to-engage’ model.</p