Generative games as storytelling partners
Open accessAbstract
Gameplay involving player creativity can be both satisfying for players and enticing for designers to pursue, but understanding of how to design deliberately for player creativity remains limited. In this paper, we propose that a class of features previously identified as common elements of "gardening games"---including generativity, limited player control, and "incrementality" or "idleness"---are also particularly conducive to player creativity. By analyzing narrative artifacts created by players as retellings of their play experiences in games that implement these features, we highlight how these features enable players to overcome specific barriers to creativity. Based on this analysis, we then offer concrete suggestions to game designers who want to facilitate player creativity and propose ways that the design patterns discussed here might be extended to further support creative activity by players.
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The observed interaction pattern was contrary to the expectation that participants might rely on the CST to overcome a blank page.
“and contrary to our expectation that participants might rely on the CST to overcome a blank page [50, 52].”
From Homogenization Effects of Large Language Models on Human Creative Ideation (2024) · cites this paper as [52]
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Cites
Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies
(2010) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.47-4465 · Cited by 297 · see citing works
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Goldberg, N. (1998) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 274 · see citing works
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Lamott, A. (2008) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 225 · see citing works
Mixed-initiative co-creativity
Yannakakis, G. N., Liapis, A., & Alexopoulos, C. (2014) · OAR@UM (University of Malta) · Cited by 138 · see citing works
Re-Tellings: The Fourth Layer of Narrative as an Instrument for Critique
Eladhari, M. P. (2018) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-04028-4_5 · Cited by 60 · cited 2× · see citing works
“In Eladhari’s terms, players recognize in these games a certain kind of “narrative potential”—or what could potentially be construed even more broadly as “co-creative potential”—and are drawn to it [7].”
BackgroundSmith, G., Gan, E., Othenin-Girard, A., et al. (2011) · doi:10.1145/2000919.2000926 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 4
- Kate Compton and Michael Mateas. 2015. Casual creators. In International Conference on Computational Creativity. 228-235.
- Nigel Cross. 1967. Simulation of Computer Aided Design. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).
- Max Kreminski and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. 2018. Gardening games: an alternative philosophy of PCG in games. In PCG Workshop.
- Ben Samuel. 2016. Crafting Stories Through Play. Ph.D. Dissertation. UC Santa Cruz.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Homogenization Effects of Large Language Models on Human Creative Ideation
Anderson, B. R., Shah, J. H., & Kreminski, M. (2024) · Creativity and Cognition · doi:10.1145/3635636.3656204 · Cited by 188 · see citing works
Self-citationWhy Are We Like This?: The AI Architecture of a Co-Creative Storytelling Game
Kreminski, M., Dickinson, M., Mateas, M., & Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2020) · International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games · doi:10.1145/3402942.3402953 · Cited by 50 · see citing works
“This bootstrapping of social context mitigates fear of the blank canvas [4, 13] in players by providing an interesting starting scenario, with many sites of narrative potential for players to develop through play.”
BackgroundSelf-citationStoryDrawer: A Co-Creative Agent Supporting Children's Storytelling through Collaborative Drawing
Zhang, C., Yao, C., Liu, J., Zhou, Z., Zhang, W., Liu, L., Ying, F., Zhao, Y., & Wang, G. (2021) · Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3411763.3451785 · Cited by 35 · see citing works
Unmet Creativity Support Needs in Computationally Supported Creative Writing
Kreminski, M., & Martens, C. (2022) · Proceedings of the First Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing 2022) · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.in2writing-1.11 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
Self-citationShields, S., Calderwood, A., Johnson-Bey, S., Wardrip-Fruin, N., Mateas, M., & Melcer, E. (2024) · 2024 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) · doi:10.1109/cog60054.2024.10645553 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
“Academical 2.0 makes use of StoryAssembler [28], a narrative engine based on the storylet pattern [29].”
MethodInfluentialSelf-citation
- Authors
- Kreminski, M., & Wardrip-Fruin, N.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Santa Cruz (US)
- UC Santa Cruz
- ORCID
- Kreminski, Max
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-08-26
- Pages
- 1-8
- OpenAlex
- W2971371103
- Cited by
- 24
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 3
- FWCI
- 12.12
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Games and Media
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Artificial Intelligence in Games
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Educational Games and Gamification
- Keywords
- player creativity, game design patterns, storytelling, incrementality, idleness, barriers to creativity, game design
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