Grand Text Auto

This Friday, Dartmouth is proud to welcome alumni in the gaming industry back to Hanover!

Games can be good for you in many ways– and there has been an explosion of  play systems and gadgets recently to help with obesity and fitness. Some new products have surfaced to popularity over last few months. Zamzee, Striiv, and SlimKicker are just a few of the examples popping up to join older systems such as Bodybugg. Yes, studies have shown that Wii and specifically DDR-style dance games can encourage weight loss, so there is significant promise for personal devices that come along on your day to also help you play.

I will be speaking on behalf of my artistic practice and Tiltfactor with Christopher Robbins, of the Ghana Think Tank, at TransTalks: Practice Makes Practice, a series of conversations among invited speakers, the MFA students in the Parsons Transdisciplinary Design program, and the public dedicated to exploring design’s capacity to investigate, disassemble and reframe the political, economic and social forces that define our everyday practices.

The goal for Flanagan is to allow the conversation to follow a similar path to the design process:  How do each of these artist/designers decide upon their design question? What methodologies are developed that shape that question? What outcomes could be considered successful? And importantly, in the form of a post-mortem across several projects as a reflective form of practice, How does failure play into particular experimental design endeavors?

This week, be sure to catch three new media artworks installed along Berry Main Street on the Dartmouth College campus. The projects were produced in the New Media Art class offered through Studio Art, taught by Professor Mary Flanagan. The students will be on-site and available to answer questions about the work on TUESDAY MARCH 6TH 2012 from 3-4pm.

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In the Front Hall: Uplift Me

By Hannah Collman ’15,  Kayla Gilbert ’12 and Shloka Kini ’13

Imagine that you could make a person suffer, and no one would ever know. Would you do so? Were you to pose that question in person, few if any would claim to exercise such a power. But wipe away any identifying factors, and give the respondent total anonymity—how will they respond?

My new media art students will be posting over the next 8 week a series of introspective blog posts on digital/ new media artists. Our aim is to post one every day or every other day. Enjoy, comment, discuss!

Our rather populous Winter Team (12 of us) has begun a new round of design and development for our STEM Bias project. No genre is left out: board games, card games, iPad/web games, and of course, performative games!

Meet Zara, our design guru; Jasmine, doing a balancing act; and Andrea and Viviana, busy modding!

It is currently a “Tiltfactor Week”: Our own reality show! Teams have a week to research and prototype a concept to playable completeness. It might not be pretty–it is raining ice outside, we’re disregarding any sense of game aesthetics, and if you ask about the hours of hard work students will put into project games–you may hear groans. But– I think our players will be happy with the results!

Wednesday January 18, 2012 4-7pm
304 North Fairbanks

Come greet the new year with the folks behind Dartmouth’s Game Research Lab for an open house! Play video games and board games! Meet our student designers, staff, and founder Mary Flanagan– and play games! This time we will be playing Kinect games, and showing our own new games including POX for iPad and prototypes for our gender stereotyping and STEM field-related games, and we’ll discuss our new after school programs in Lebanon! And, we’ll play XBOX Kinect games and eat Thai food!

Huzzah!

This winter, there is a new media art course being offered between two departments at Dartmouth.

Currently the course is accepting enrollments!

STRP Festival

The 2011 STRP Art and Technology Festival in Eindhoven NL will host lab director Mary Flanagan (that would be me) in a keynote talk at the miniconference “Master of Play,” and show four of her new video works. The STRP Festival is one of the largest art & technology festivals in Europe. It should be rad! The eclectic mixture of art, technology, music + e-culture has made it a highly-anticipated annual event. It is designed to appeal to a wide audience, and the multidisciplinary program boldly “combines a full sensory experience and adventure.” Can’t wait!

Twelve Propositions from a Critical Play Perspective:

1. Values are everywhere,  designed into play and into games

2. The history of computed games has created certain types of interactions.

3. These technical constraints have limited what we think we can do today.

5. Unorthodox methods spur change.

6. Meaning in a game  comes from the feeling of responsibility.

8. Producing challenging work as an artist means that  you are willing to break the rules.

Our entire team has read the research report by the Association of American University Women (AAUW) that offers compelling evidence to help explain what is going on in the US with science, technology, math and science and women. By the way, in 1885, a group of AAUW members conducted a survey that debunked the popular theory that higher education was bad for women’s health. . . So, thanks to the organization for that one, and for more contemporary research on women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

Well this year’s Indiecade, the coolest international festival of independent games, has drawn to a close. The fest attracts small independent game makers and a handful of artists to play, discuss, eat, watch, and play some more. It is a hands-on, grassroots group who comes. Some of my favorite games included the whimsical Hohokum, a line drawing vector based game; Ordnungswissenschaft, a game that integrates stacking blocks in the real world into that of the virtual. Interesting little games also included The Witch; Way, a game that features two player capacity but each as a different point of view, and Halycon, a musical toy and matching game.

The Tiltfactor team was busy at DiGRA 2011. Thursday September 15th, I presented (with  Jonathan Belman)  our paper on the design approach behind POX: Save the People. Friday September 16th, Jonathan Belman shared our latest paper on our Grow-A-Game cards, “Grow-A-Game: A Tool for Values Conscious Design and Analysis of Digital Games,” with audience members on Friday. Read the essays now!

Digra2011-PreventingPox-FlanaganEtAl-Paper

Digra2011 – GrowAGameTool-BelmanNissenbaumFlanaganDiamond
See below for full citations on these articles!

I’ll be following up with written thoughts, but here are a few video highlights courtesy of the Utrecht School of the Arts.

Tiltfactor‘s Mary Flanagan will be giving a keynote at this year’s Digital Games Research Association Conference. “After Leveling Up in the Netherlands (2003), Changing Views in Canada (2005), Situated Play in Japan (2007) and Breaking New Ground in England (2009) the 5th DiGRA Conference returns to the Netherlands for THINK DESIGN PLAY. ” Tiltfactor’s Jonathan Belman is also presenting our new Grow a Game study, and we are co-presenting on our recent POX: Save the People study. We are also participating in the “Building a Game Lab 2.0: Surviving and Thriving” panel,  and a game scholar rant. Check out the schedule and come along if you are near Utrecht!

We weathered the storm without mishap — and even had some leftovers! Now, the group is gearing up for a fruitful fall production period. Thanks to everyone who pitched in to make sure Tilt folks stayed safe. Our hearts go out to those whose homes and businesses have been destroyed by the flooding; the team wants you to know that we care and carry thoughts for you. We find ourselves very grateful that the lab, Dartmouth campus, and nearby surrounds went untouched.

Tiltfactor at Dartmouth College readies the Lab for Hurricane Irene: Lab Director Mary Flanagan finds the fire-resistant suit and begins lab preparedness…ah… preparation.

Matt Cloyd, Intern, continues to batten down the hatches– and storm windows, and power supplies, and snacks … and…

We suspect lab manager Sukie Punjasthitkul is behind the acquisition of the Flame Retardant Suit, but we cannot confirm this. He is a very prepared person.

Have no fear! Tiltfactor will brave on and make games!  In fact, tonight is a research night, playing Tichu with Mary’s relatives til the wee hours. It is the best meta-game ever! Bridge, meets 500, meets go fish, meets crazy eights, meets poker. Awesome!

After reveling in the glow of Gen-Con (check out the photos on FB), our Lab director Mary Flanagan has just announced that starting this September, we are launching into a new project to develop games that explore nuanced aspects of stereotype threat and implicit bias! The  project “Transforming Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) For Women and Girls: Reworking Stereotypes & Bias” has three primary goals: 1) To understand how games could be used to shift the current cultural understandings around STEM fields; 2) challenge these stereotypes by making learning activities into games for girls– and the community–to play, and 3) develop a set a of design principles in order to recommend approaches to activities and games that increase girls’ self esteem and interest in STEM. Resulting games that incorporate the design principles will be tested with the target audience, iterated, and released for distribution on the Tiltfactor.org website and in partnership with Seattle’s EdLab, home of the National Girls Collaborative Project.

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context we cannot properly describe.

  –Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form

By Parker Phinney

This spring, I worked as a Dartmouth Digital Studies Fellow on the Usable Images project and the MetadataGames project.
The Problem=====
Several United States Federal agencies maintain repositories of public domain images. These repositories have thousands of images with practical uses. For example, a health sciences professor creating a textbook to share for free on line is greatly helped by the public domain (free of copyright restrictions) images available for free on the Center for Disease Control’s website, which range from photographs of disease symptoms, to microscope slides, and beyond.

Digital Art Panel: Photo Courtesy of Marcin Ramocki

The weekend event of the year: the first Woodstock Digital Media Festival in Woodstock Vermont! The morning started the proceedings with two parallel panels: one on digital art (with discussants Christiane Paul, gallerists from Postmasters, Marcin Ramocki, and Mary Flanagan), and the other on digital media journalism, commerce, and nonprofits. Both were packed last Saturday!

The evening ended with a bang (or, a MOO?) at a working farm almost on midsummer’s night. Nullsleep played tunes that reverberated the classic post and beam renovated barn.

Streetmapping art and various psychogeographic events have taken hold of the imagination of artists and participants over the past decade, in part due to a reaction (ranging from delight to dismay) to advances in geographic information systems and the proliferation of on-demand, amazingly detailed maps such as Google maps, and due to an interest in re-politicizing the growing number of corporately owned and controlled spaces in urban life.

The artists, business people, and open source mappers assembling in a quaint Vermont town on Saturday June 18th for the first Woodstock Digital Media Festival provide a range of projects to satisfy those curious about how we understand space through experiencing and making maps.

A recent talk by Jonathan Belman spurred interest across Canada! Go Values at Play! You can read some of this published material in our article on empathy. Jonathan is continuing this work in his dissertation.

McDowell, Adam. “How High Is Your Empathy Score? The National Post. 3 June 2011. Available at: http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/03/how-high-is-your-empathy-score/