Games Talk: “Downpour” & more: How and why to make Creative Tools

V Buckenham recently released “Downpour”, an app that anyone can use to make little games on their phone. She is a big advocate of making creative tools and loves the feeling of seeing other people make cool stuff, and knowing that she enabled that to happen. And she finds doing this is a particular form of participatory art – setting the conditions for other people to be creative, and shaping the forms that that creativity takes.

“Downpour” contains some lessons she learnt over the years from making this kind of work. The value of thinking through the entire context for creating works – not just where people are directly making the work but – do they have a prompt to riff off, or are they faced with a blank page? How do they share their work with others? How do people create in response to other people’s creations? Often it’s through solving these seemingly background problems that we can unlock the biggest impact.