Exploring Novel Game Spaces with Fluidic Games
This addresses the problem of enhancing creative expression for mobile game users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing mobile gaming trends.
The paper tackles the limited creativity in mobile gaming by introducing fluidic games, a new app type that integrates design space exploration into gameplay to enrich user experience, and presents a specific commercial example.
With the growing integration of smartphones into our daily lives, and their increased ease of use, mobile games have become highly popular across all demographics. People listen to music, play games or read the news while in transit or bridging gap times. While mobile gaming is gaining popularity, mobile expression of creativity is still in its early stages. We present here a new type of mobile app -- fluidic games -- and illustrate our iterative approach to their design. This new type of app seamlessly integrates exploration of the design space into the actual user experience of playing the game, and aims to enrich the user experience. To better illustrate the game domain and our approach, we discuss one specific fluidic game, which is available as a commercial product. We also briefly discuss open challenges such as player support and how generative techniques can aid the exploration of the game space further.