Mark J. Nelson, Swen E. Gaudl, Simon Colton, Rob Saunders, Edward J. Powley, Peter Ivey, Blanca Pérez Ferrer, Michael Cook (2017). Design methods for democratising mobile game design. In Proceedings of the CHI Play Workshop: Critical Reflections on Participation in Game Development.
Playing mobile games is popular among a large and diverse set of players, contrasting sharply with the limited set of companies and people who design them. We would like to democratise mobile game design by enabling players to design games on the same devices they play them on, without needing to program. Our concept of fluidic games aims to realise this vision by drawing on three design methodologies. The interaction style of fluidic games is that of casual creators; their end-user design philosophy is adapted from metadesign; and their technical implementation is based on parametric 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 empower end user game design on mobile phones in a way that rises beyond the level of typical user-generated content.
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