Data-driven Design: A Case for Maximalist Game Design
This work addresses design challenges for creators of data-driven games, but it is incremental as it primarily maps an underexplored area without major breakthroughs.
The paper tackles the problem of applying maximalism—combining diverse sources and embracing heterogeneity—to data-driven game design, using Data Adventures generators to explore tradeoffs like transformation vs. fidelity and legal issues, and sketches an unexplored design space.
Maximalism in art refers to drawing on and combining multiple different sources for art creation, embracing the resulting collisions and heterogeneity. This paper discusses the use of maximalism in game design and particularly in data games, which are games that are generated partly based on open data. Using Data Adventures, a series of generators that create adventure games from data sources such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, as a lens we explore several tradeoffs and issues in maximalist game design. This includes the tension between transformation and fidelity, between decorative and functional content, and legal and ethical issues resulting from this type of generativity. This paper sketches out the design space of maximalist data-driven games, a design space that is mostly unexplored.