Motivating Visual Interpretations in Iconoscope: Designing a Game for Fostering Creativity

This paper introduces Iconoscope, a game aiming to foster the creativity of a young target audience in formal or infor-mal educational settings. At the core of the Iconoscope de-sign is the creative, playful interpretation of word-concepts via the construction of visual icons. In addition to that, the game rewards ambiguity via a scoring system which favors icons that dichotomize public opinion. The game is played by a group of players, with each player attempting to guess which of the concepts provided by the system is represented by each opponent’s created icon. Through the social interac-tion that emerges, Iconoscope prompts co-creativity within a group of players; in addition, the game offers the poten-tial of human-machine co-creativity via computer-generated suggestions to the player’s icon. Experiments with early prototypes, described in this paper, provide insight into the design process and motivate certain decisions taken for the current version of Iconoscope which, at the time of writing, is being evaluated in selected schools in Greece, Austria and the United Kingdom. 1