Designing Games for Enabling Co-creation with Social Agents
This work addresses the problem of enhancing children's creativity through game-based interactions with social agents, offering incremental strategies for game designers and HCI researchers.
The authors designed three collaborative games with a social robot to scaffold creativity in children aged 5-10, play-tested with 146 participants, and identified game mechanics that stimulate verbal, figural, and divergent thinking creativity.
Digital tools have long been used for supporting children's creativity. Digital games that allow children to create artifacts and express themselves in a playful environment serve as efficient Creativity Support Tools (or CSTs). Creativity is also scaffolded by social interactions with others in their environment. In our work, we explore the use of game-based interactions with a social agent to scaffold children's creative expression as game players. We designed three collaborative games and play-tested with 146 5-10 year old children played with the social robot Jibo, which affords three different kinds of creativity: verbal creativity, figural creativity and divergent thinking during creative problem solving. In this paper, we reflect on game mechanic practices that we incorporated to design for stimulating creativity in children. These strategies may be valuable to game designers and HCI researchers designing games and social agents for supporting children's creativity.