Can Children Emulate a Robotic Non-Player Character's Figural Creativity?

Can intelligent non-player game characters (NPCs) increase children's creativity during collaborative gameplay? Children's creativity is influenced by collaborative play with creative peers through social emulation. In this paper, we study children's emulation of an AI-enabled social Non-Player Character (NPC) as a new type of game mechanism to elicit creative expression. We developed Magic Draw, a collaborative drawing game designed to foster children's figural creativity that allows us to investigate the efficacy of an NPC's creativity demonstration in enhancing children's creativity in the resulting drawings. The NPC is an emotively expressive social robot that plays Magic Draw with a child as a peer-like playmate. We present the results of a study in which participants co-draw figures with a social robot that demonstrates different levels of figural creativity, to understand whether an NPC's creativity in its own contributions stimulates figural creativity in children. 78 participants (ages 5--10) were randomly assigned to a non-creative robot control condition (C-) and a creative robot condition (C+). Participants who interacted with the creative robot generated significantly more creative drawings, and hence exhibited higher levels of figural creativity. We infer that the social robotic peers' demonstration of figural creativity in a collaborative drawing game is emulated by young children. We discuss a new game design principle grounded in the social learning mechanism of emulation, specifically, that social and intelligent NPCs in games should demonstrate creative behavior to foster the same in human players.