Authoring of Digital Games via Card Games: Make Playful Play Happen

Literature and previous studies show that creative play is easy to emerge when children interact with tangible, low-tech toys and games than with digital games. This paradoxical situation is linked to the long-standing problem of end-users (or players) authoring of digital contents and systems. We propose a new scenario in which trading card games help making sense and re-design computer games, to support players express themselves aesthetically and in a highly creative way. Our aim is to look for a middle ground between players becoming programmers and simply editing levels. The main contributions are to show how card games can represent digital games, how playful play can emerge in card games and digital games, and to begin defining a new way to express game behavior without the use of universal programming languages.