In an era of packaged toys and online games, have our children lost the knack of creative play? While American kids may never again prefer sticks and other found objects to the manufactured experience, Laura Seargeant Richardson of frog design believes children can still evolve from game consumers to game designers. In a talk that reveals the future look and feel of games, Richardson advocates making space in the physical and digital worlds to abet children’s inventiveness. For Richardson, basic requirements for creativity involve open environments and tools, flexible rules that kids can make or change themselves, and what she calls “super powers.” Richardson and a partner have been experimenting with a game along these lines. They have developed a “gleeve,” a gloved sleeve with sensors, RFID reader, speakers, microphone and camera that can be used straight from the box, but which also allows the user to devise new games, or reconfigure traditional ones. With this device, “hide and seek can take on a new element of strategy,” says Richardson. She has come up with a list of “21st Century Super Powers of Play.” One involves manipulation – such as the transformation of a familiar object. Richardson shows a ‘hacked’ Fisher-Price record player that can read a child’s drawing as music. She cites as well “thinking with the body,” and collaboration. Yet another ‘power’ involves multidimensional thinking. This is an area dear to Richardson’s heart. She has been studying synaesthesia, where two senses link up in unusual ways, so for instance, the letters of the alphabet take on particular smells. She reads a short story, “Yawns Are Yellow,” that she composed with her young daughter.  Many of these game ‘powers’ turn out to have analogies in the grow-up world, Richardson notes. NASA and Boeing engineers must demonstrate they can work with their hands, not just model in virtual reality. Shrinky Dink plastic jewelry inspired an advance in microfluidics and launched a...