SPORE's Magic Crayons

Speakers: Chaim Gingold

Track: Game Design

Format: Lecture

Experience Level: All

Description: Why do players enjoy making things, and why do we, as game developers, want them to? The relationship between player inventiveness to gameplay, game aesthetics, and technology is explored, as well as considerations for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Aligning player expectations, domain expertise, and the possibility space you want players to navigate results in good interaction design. Conceptualizing the player's experience as an exploration of a possibility space is used to understand the quality and breadth of what players will make, and who will be able to make it. Special emphasis is given to the aesthetics, design, challenges, and lessons learned from SPORE's editors. Other programs, such as SIMCITY, Photoshop, KidPix, and various broken editors, are analyzed similarly.

Idea Takeaway: Why Spore's editors look and feel as they do, how they interoperate with the game's tech, gameplay, and high level concept. How games and software that enable player creativity work, from a design standpoint. Techniques for designing and incorporating player expression into a game.

Intended Audience: This talk is intended for designers who are interested in understanding how player creativity games operate on an aesthetic and game design level. This is an advanced lecture that assumes familiarity with a variety of development and design topics, but all concepts will be explained, to make the talk more accessible and fun.