Developing a Face-to-Face Highly Creative Play Experience

Benjamin Miller

Abstract

Through the development and extensive playtesting of Move It!, a mobile game that encourages face-to-face social interaction and highly creative gameplay, my team has created a game that highlights the potential for meaningful play found in videogames that support these forms of interactions. Within the context of this paper I define "meaningful play" as play that improves the lives of the participants outside the context of the videogame experience. "Highly creative" is defined as creative activities that involve the act of creation or innovation in open systems. The first half of the paper describes the declining state of face-to-face interactions and creativity exhibited in US society, how videogames, specifically street games, currently support face-to-face interactions, and I define the lack of meaningful creative play found in many current videogames using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking. This provides context for an in-depth discussion of the unique characteristics and successful aspects of Move It!. The paper concludes with a review of the major lessons my team and I have learned through the development of Move It! and a brief description of future work. I hope the paper will encourage others to create videogames that focus on supporting face-to-face, highly creative interactions between players.