Design Methods for Democratising Mobile Game Design Mark J. Nelson Abstract Swen E. Gaudl Playing mobile games is popular among a large and Simon Colton diverse set of players, contrasting sharply with the lim- Rob Saunders ited set of companies and people who design them. We Edward J. Powley would like to democratise mobile game design by ena- Peter Ivey bling players to design games on the same devices they Blanca Pérez Ferrer play them on, without needing to program. Our concept Michael Cook of fluidic games aims to realise this vision by drawing on three design methodologies. The interaction style of The MetaMakers Institute fluidic games is that of casual creators; their end-user Falmouth University design philosophy is adapted from metadesign; and Cornwall, UK their technical implementation is based on parametric metamakersinstitute.com design. In this short article, we discuss how we’ve adapted these three methods to mobile game design, and some open questions that remain in order to em- power end user game design on mobile phones in a way that rises beyond the level of typical user- generated content. Author Keywords Mobile games; casual creators; metadesign; parametric design; end-user creativity; mixed-initiative interfaces. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation: Miscel- laneous Introduction Fluidic Games Our starting point is the observation that mobile games To support on-device casual design, we are developing have attracted a large and diverse set of players, but a what we call fluidic games [5-7]. These blur the line smaller and less diverse set of designers. Mobile devel- between game play and game design, to the extent opment requires programming on computers using de- that games we ship with the app are simply examples velopment environments such as Apple’s XCode or of what can be created, with even key mechanics pos- Google’s Android Studio. Furthermore, even skilled sible for players to tweak or completely replace. This programmers familiar with these tools rarely treat mo- allows players to not only provide content for a fixed bile game design as a casual activity to engage in on a game, but to make new ones, either by designing novel bus ride, the way they treat mobile game playing. game mechanics directly, or by experimentation where they notice and exploit emergent mechanics [1]. A way to bring game design into the same contexts as game playing is to allow end-users to change designs We have built two fluidic game prototypes thus far, at runtime. In videogames that we could call maker- Wevva (Figs. 1-2) and No Second Chance (Fig. 3), and games, some of the appeal comes from creating new experimented with them in several cultural contexts, content. One successful mobile-game example is Big such as rapid game jams and game-design curricula. Bang Racing (Traplight, 2016) where players have cre- That experimentation, and an overview of these two ated and shared millions of tracks for a driving game. fluidic games’ designs, is explained in [7]. In this paper for brevity we focus only on the design thinking behind Options for customising such games can be extensive, fluidic games, and how this approach can (we argue) but are usually limited to the player providing or modi- meaningfully democratise mobile game design. fying what is considered “content”: art assets, levels, etc. These are important design elements, but leave Design Methods much of the game design still reserved to the designer. We draw on three existing design methods, each of Game elements such as scoring, spawning, and pro- which speaks to an aspect of the overall problem. The gress mechanisms; or aspects of the underlying physics interaction style of fluidic games is that of casual crea- simulations such as collisions and forces, aren’t “con- tors, design tools that aim for fun interfaces supporting tent” and not normally exposed for players to modify. autotelic exploration. The design philosophy is metadesign, leaving design decisions open to post- Figure 1: Wevva. The game (top) We are interested in maker-games that empower crea- release adaptation by end users. And the technical im- is modifiable in the design over- tion of casual games with genuinely new game me- plementation is parametric design, posing design as view panel (bottom). Modifiable chanics, but which require no programming, and can be navigation of explicitly parameterised design spaces. parameters include scoring, carried out directly on the target device (i.e., a mobile win/loss conditions, character phone or tablet). Our motivation here is to lower the Casual Creators icons, music, spawning, physics forces, collision responses, etc. barrier to entry to levels enjoyed by other creative do- A casual creator is “an interactive system that encour- mains, such as drawing, painting or writing stories. ages the fast, confident, and pleasurable exploration of a possibility space”, aimed at supporting autotelic crea- poses, this orientation is key to designing maker-games tivity rather than supporting task completion [2]. Key that empower users to really design their own games to a casual creator for games is that it should be enjoy- with as much creative freedom as possible, rather than able to explore the design space, just as it's enjoyable being limited to supplying content for existing games. to play games within that space, with easy switching between those modes. Parametric Design The metadesign approach is more of a design philoso- Of the casual-creator design patterns Compton and phy than a specific implementation method. In order to Mateas identify in [2], we focus most on limiting actions build fluidic games, we realise it within the framework to encourage exploration and saving and sharing. We of parametric design [12]. give players the ability to change anything within a lim- ited parametric design space, and save and share the In parametric design, possible solutions to design prob- results. In addition, they can modify games shared by lems are defined as points in a parameterised design others, rapidly switching between creating, playing, space, i.e., a multi-dimensional space defined by a sharing, receiving and modifying games. number of separate design choices or axes. This ap- proach is commonly used in fields such as architecture, Metadesign where parametric design methods are incorporated into Since fluidic games are a designed space of games, but standard CAD tools and are common enough that “par- also intended to enable end users themselves to design ametricism” has been called the dominant contempo- games, they fall into the category of metadesign [4] or rary architectural practice [10]. designing for design-after-design [3,9]. This is a catchy, if unwieldy, name for a broad class of ap- For our purposes, the parametric design approach has proaches that focus on designing open-ended, even two advantages. It gives rise to natural metaphors for “unfinished” systems that enable the systems’ users to exploring design spaces that we believe are suitable for themselves continue the design process after the initial mobile interfaces, such as navigation, where one can design of the product is ostensibly finished and the travel from design to design by moving through a de- product shipped. sign space. Parametric design representations are also amenable to automated search for designs, which pro- This approach arose out of participatory design, but vides an underlying framework to support mixed- Figure 2: Examples of two of rather than focusing on involving users in the design initiative design, i.e. the combination of user design Wevva’s design screens through process up front, as in classic participatory design, de- with automated or semi-automated approaches [6,8]. which specific parameters can be sign-after-design focuses on building systems where set. These open when players tap the design process is not closed when the system is Open Questions and Future Work the respective box in the design done from the initial designer's point of view – instead There is some tension between the three design meth- overview panel (Fig. 1, bottom). the system is designed so that “there is design (in use) ods we draw on. The enjoyable, playful user-interaction after design (in the design project)” [3]. For our pur- style of casual creators is often gained by radically lim- iting the design space. The metadesign approach, by References contrast, argues for users being able to reconfigure 1. S. Colton, M.J. Nelson, R. Saunders, et al. 2016. designs in very open-ended ways. For fluidic games to Towards a computational reading of emergence in experimental game design. In Proc. CCGW 2016. be enjoyable to design and democratise game design by empowering end users, these goals need to be real- 2. K. Compton and M. Mateas. 2015. Casual creators. In Proc. ICCC 2015, 228-235. ised simultaneously. In a parametric design setting, the concrete challenge is to identify parametric spaces that 3. P. Ehn. 2008. Participation in design things. In can be made fluid and fun to explore, but large enough Proc. PDC 2008, 92-101. to contain surprising designs that are qualitatively dif- 4. G. Fischer, E. Giaccardi, Y. Ye, A.G. Sutcliffe, N. ferent from the games we design as examples. Mehandjiev. 2004. Meta-design: A manifesto for end-user development. CACM 47(9): 33-37. Also an open question is what people want to do (and 5. S.E. Gaudl, M.J. Nelson, S. Colton, et al. 2017. Ex- actually do) in fluidic games, and how we can support ploring novel game spaces with fluidic games. In Proc. AISB 2017. those activities. Questions here include both concrete UI design and high-level design-thinking decisions. We 6. M.J. Nelson, S. Colton, E.J.