FIERO: Empowering Creative Writing Through Collaborative Game Play
2026-07-13 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how people create stories together and found that it can be hard when ideas clash or get lost. They made a web-based card game called FIERO that uses physical cards and a digital screen to help groups share ideas better. Their game helped players come up with more new ideas and made the stories more organized compared to just writing online together. The cards helped with social interaction and structure, while the digital part helped keep the story clear and combined everyone's ideas using AI. This shows that playing a game together can make collaborative storytelling easier and more creative.
collaborative storytellingcreative collaborationmultiplayer gamegenerative AInarrative coherenceidea fluencyplot developmentphysical-digital interactioncreative synergyweb-based application
Authors
Chu Zhang, XiaoKe Zeng, Jin Zhang, Ruoyu Wen, Vince Siu, Richard William Allen, Ray LC
Abstract
Creativity often flourishes in collaboration, such as when designers brainstorm a new app together, or storytellers collectively build a world with elements of each person's narrative. However, collaborative storytelling can have challenges for its participants, such as when they disagree about the plot proposed, or when different ideas become fragmented when voiced individually. While current tools for creative collaboration focus on synchronous online text sharing, they often neglect the social dynamics of in-person collaboration critical to creative synergy. To address this, we created FIERO, a multiplayer web-based card game. Physical cards provide tangible scaffolding and social interaction, while the digital interface generates contextual visuals, facilitate group decisions, ensure narrative coherence, and synthesize different idea contributions using generative AI. Compared against online collaborative writing alone, the game significantly enhanced intuitive stimulation, idea fluency, and novelty generation, and also improved the content of the stories produced, leading to greater plot coherence (N=60). The cards provided creative structure and social engagement, while the interface provided contextualized augmentation without affecting player agency. This work shows how collaborative play can be utilized to foster creative support.