Curious Users of Casual Creators

Casual creators are a type of design tool identified by Compton & Mateas, characterised by an orientation towards enjoyable, intrinsically motivated creative exploration, rather than task-oriented designer productivity. In our experiments holding rapid game jams with Wevva, a casual creator for mobile game design, we have noticed, however, that users seem to vary considerably even within the context of using a casual creator. Some people focus on designing specific games, while others explore the design space extensively, or even focus exclusively on prodding the edges of the design space looking for its possibilities and limits. We hypothesise that the latter group of users is driven primarily by curiosity about a casual creator and its design space. This results in different patterns of behaviour to the former group (of design-oriented users), which may worth characterising and perhaps explicitly designing for

The Scholar's Dashboard: Creating a multidisciplinary tool via design and build workshops (OhioLINK)

The Scholar's Dashboard project is a series of three two-day design and build workshops, teaming humanities scholars, librarians, and technologists in innovative application development to optimize use of humanities collections from the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons (DRC). The DRC is a 500,000 item open access collection from Ohio academic and cultural heritage organizations. Dashboard users will select and combine collections, add descriptions and metadata, and re-visualize and re-present information. DRC collections with relevant information (oral histories, narratives, records, documents, images, e.g.) will form the design base. Design and build workshops allow researchers and scholars to specify features needed to rapidly expand DRC functionality. This model will then be used as a magnet for further digital humanities collections, as scholars, librarians, and archivists contribute collections in order to benefit from the Scholar's Dashboard design and capabilities

Oliver\u27s Rumination: A Short Video Game About Failure

Studying and working in a creative field requires designers and artists to produce consistently high-level, novel work. In some cases, taking risks to pursue new concepts, methods, or products is highly valued. At the same time, not all companies, students, or individual artists have the resources to risk should their exploration fail. What remains is a crossroad: creative professionals and students are rewarded for taking risks, but are often unable to do so because the possibility of failure carries too much weight. Changing the way creators see failure could revolutionize the way they work. By accepting and incorporating failure into the beginning stages of a creative project, designers and artists can free themselves to think beyond the expected and create stronger work. They stand to lose less time, money, and quality than if that failure happens in the later design or production stages. For some designers, even this early failure is still daunting, because the way some creators view failure is purely negative. In order to avoid negative feedback and pain, failure is avoided altogether by pursuing weaker concepts, simpler methods of execution, or it can result in a project being abandoned altogether. What remains is a situation where many artists and designers would benefit greatly from a change in the way they view their own personal creative failures, in order to improve their working process and overall performance. Currently, the video game industry is expanding to include more experimental titles which allow for contemplative gameplay and emergent gameplay. These new games often tackle complicated themes, and can offer players a space in which to experience trauma, struggle, or moral dilemmas without real-world consequences. In doing so, these games introduce coping mechanisms to players in a low-stress way, and there is research which suggests this experience can translate to real-world skill development. This thesis project aims to combine visual design principles and simple gameplay into an interactive experience which provides players an environment to experience failure without real-world consequences. The goal of this experience is to provide a cathartic experience for the player, with the game acting as a reminder that failure and iteration are common, and that they can be used strategically for creating stronger end results

Autopia: An AI Collaborator for Live Coding Music Performances

Live coding is “the activity of writing (parts of) a program while it runs” (Ward et al., 2004). One significant application of live coding is in algorithmic music, where the performer modifies the code generating the music in a live context. Utopia is a software tool for collaborative live coding performances, allowing several performers (each with their own laptop producing its own sound) to communicate and share code during a performance. We have made an AI bot, Autopia, which can participate in such performances, communicating with human performers through Utopia. This form of human-AI collaboration allows us to explore the implications of computational creativity from the perspective of live coding

Filtering, Piracy Surveillance and Disobedience

There has always been a cyclical relationship between the prevention of piracy and the protection of civil liberties. While civil liberties advocates previously warned about the aggressive nature of copyright protection initiatives, more recently, a number of major players in the music industry have eventually ceded to less direct forms of control over consumer behavior. As more aggressive forms of consumer control, like litigation, have receded, we have also seen a rise in more passive forms of consumer surveillance. Moreover, even as technology has developed more perfect means for filtering and surveillance over online piracy, a number of major players have opted in favor of “tolerated use,” a term coined by Professor Tim Wu to denote the allowance of uses that may be otherwise infringing, but that are allowed to exist for public use and enjoyment. Thus, while the eventual specter of copyright enforcement and monitoring remains a pervasive digital reality, the market may fuel a broad degree of consumer freedom through the toleration or taxation of certain kinds of activities. This Article is meant largely to address and to evaluate these shifts by drawing attention to the unique confluence of these two important moments: the growth of tolerated uses, coupled with an increasing trend towards more passive forms of piracy surveillance in light of the balance between copyright enforcement and civil liberties. The content industries may draw upon a broad definition of disobedience in their campaigns to educate the public about copyright law, but the market’s allowance of DRM-free content suggests an altogether different definition. The divide in turn between copyright enforcement and civil liberties results in a perfect storm of uncertainty, suggesting the development of an even further division between the role of the law and the role of the marketplace in copyright enforcement and innovation, respectively

Social architecture and the emergence of power laws in online social games

This paper explores the concept of the “social architecture” of games, and tests the theory that it is possible to analyse game mechanics based on the effect they have on the social behaviour of the players. Using tools from Social Network Analysis, these studies confirm that social activity in games reliably follows a power distribution: a few players are responsible for a disproportionate amount of social interactions. Based on this, the scaling exponent is highlighted as a simple measure of sociability that is constant for a game design. This allows for the direct comparison of social activity in very different games. In addition, it can act as a powerful analytical tool for highlighting anomalies in game designs that detrimentally affect players’ ability to interact socially. Although the social architectures of games are complicated systems, SNA allows for quantitative analysis of social behaviours of players in meaningful ways, which are to the benefit of game designers

Why Are We Like This?: Exploring Writing Mechanics for an AI-Augmented Storytelling Game

Why Are We Like This? (WAWLT) is a playful, co-creative, AI-augmented, improvisational storytelling game in which one or more players explore and influence an ongoing simulation which they then glean for narrative material. It uses the recently developed simulation technology of story sifting (the recognition of microstories in a chronicle of simulation events), via the Felt library, to afford a new kind of playful, social, and creative writing experience. In this paper, we discuss our primary design goals: (1) using computation and interaction design to support casual player creativity, and (2) foregrounding character subjectivity as a driver for socially realistic interpersonal conflict. We further discuss how those design goals informed the system development. In particular, they led to the system features of subjective character reflection on past actions through character-centric sifting patterns, player-facing story sifting tools for querying storyworld state and history, and a set of writing mechanics to interface with the simulation and support playful creative writing. Examples of those writing mechanics include (1) explicit statement of system-understandable author goals, which are used to improve next action recommendations, and (2) free text editing of a malleable, textual transcript seeded by parameterized descriptions of player-selected simulation actions. We found in testing that, even in an incomplete state of development, and even among those who don’t consider themselves fiction writers, WAWLT successfully supports player creativity. We also found that WAWLT affords particularly engaging play and a unique co-creative experience with two players, as opposed to just one

The Impact of User-Generated Content on Consumer Purchase Intention

This project investigates how various forms of user-generated content impacts consumer purchasing decisions. Primary and secondary research is executed for a broader understanding of UGC implications on modern consumers. The final deliverable is a website that offers an in-depth analysis of the culture of creators and how the dynamic has shifted in recent years. Additionally, UGC cases are studied to determine the impact they have on consumers, and guides are offered to director brands on how ensure consistency and alignment with their brand identity and implement UGC into their marketing strategy

The Archigram Archive

The Archigram archival project made the works of seminal experimental architectural group Archigram available free online for an academic and general audience. It was a major archival work, and a new kind of digital academic archive, displaying material held in different places around the world and variously owned. It was aimed at a wide online design community, discovering it through Google or social media, as well as a traditional academic audience. It has been widely acclaimed in both fields. The project has three distinct but interlinked aims: firstly to assess, catalogue and present the vast range of Archigram's prolific work, of which only a small portion was previously available; secondly to provide reflective academic material on Archigram and on the wider picture of their work presented; thirdly to develop a new type of non-ownership online archive, suitable for both academic research at the highest level and for casual public browsing. The project hybridised several existing methodologies. It combined practical archival and editorial methods for the recovery, presentation and contextualisation of Archigram's work, with digital web design and with the provision of reflective academic and scholarly material. It was designed by the EXP Research Group in the Department of Architecture in collaboration with Archigram and their heirs and with the Centre for Parallel Computing, School of Electronics and Computer Science, also at the University of Westminster. It was rated 'outstanding' in the AHRC's own final report and was shortlisted for the RIBA research awards in 2010. It received 40,000 users and more than 250,000 page views in its first two weeks live, taking the site into twitter’s Top 1000 sites, and a steady flow of visitors thereafter. Further statistics are included in the accompanying portfolio. This output will also be returned to by Murray Fraser for UCL