Grand Text Auto

This year’s Game Development Conference in San Francisco promises to be enjoyable and informative. We are doing a soft-launch of our new beloved tiltfactor.org site (uber exciting!), as well as following lab director Mary Flanagan as she’s speaking at the GDC Education Summit: Monday 10:00-11:00 Room 301, South Hall: http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12198.

(and, just for GDC, we’re donning our new sneak-preview Tiltfactor bling, soon available on our web site!)

We are also bringing student designer E McNeill, winner of the 2009 Imagine Cup game design second place, as he launches his first indie game Auralux; also along is Heidi Gamer, our Virtual Finance Expert. Tiltfactor is also participating in the Game Education Rant at the GDC on Tuesday 4:15- 5:15 Room 301, South Hall.

Ubermorgen’s Clickistan is a wild ride. Designed as a web art extravaganza, and in part serving to fund raise for the Whitney Museum of American Art (a pretty credible cause, as causes go) Clickistan is a conceptual work that locates its work somewhere “between the 7th and 8th bit of every byte.” In other words, Clickistan is a nation surfing the hinterlands of the on and off of binary logic. This makes us very excited at Tiltfactor!

Today at Tilt we are thinking about play and motivation, looking at variable ratio reward scheduling, empathy, and other means by which players might find pleasure in a game. To Caillois in his Man, Play, and Games, the experiences of competition, chance, altered perception (vertigo), and make believe are ways in which play can set the stage for pleasure. Csíkszentmihályi’s flow state (and the nice excerpt from Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention) is worth a read; it is a nice investigation into pleasure through perseverance. But what about the simple satisfaction of completion, or taking a step toward completion? Or, how about, the classic Barthes treatise on The Pleasure of the Text, one of Tiltfactor’s all time favorite reads?

a big big honor! Dartmouth Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies Jodie Mack received a Jury’s Choice First Prize award at the 2011 Black Maria Film Festival for her animated film. Mack describes her winning 28-minute “Yard Work is Hard Work” as “an animated musical featurette made with thousands of cut-outs from discarded printed materials. The piece follows a pair of newlyweds as they learn the perils of home ownership and life in general.”

Sherry Turkle is coming to Dartmouth to speak on the 10th of February about her newest research, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books. The 15th of April 2011 we’re hosting a DIGITAL POETRY SYMPOSIUM at DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, with leading digital poets John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Marjorie Luesebrink.
See more info at Dartmouth’s Digital Studies Website.

Indie Game Designer E. McNeill's new game, Aurora

Dartmouth’s own E McNeill has released his indie game Aurora for PC. Aurora is an ambient indie RTS game. It’s beautiful, abstract, and — be warned, it is utterly addictive!

Congrats E, we are proud of this fantastic accomplishment!

Researchers at Tiltfactor have been working into the wee hours on honing the Metadata system. Many doughnuts have been consumed as we work out plans for trust algorithms and community motivation.

Sukdith Punjasthitkul (Dartmouth ’98 MS Evaluative Clinical Sciences) and Robinson Tryon (Dartmouth ’04 BA Computer Science)

If you are interested in helping us test our system and games, let us know! We need many participants even in the testing phase.

Tiltfactor’s official foray into health games begins this spring. Our new board game and associated web based game are launching in March at the NH Immunization Conference. The game will be for sale on our newly designed website, launching also in March. Watch this space!

Since the 1950s, games have been a part of the culture of scientific discovery.
In 1951, The Nimrod was a special purpose computer built to play the game of Nim, for display at the Exhibition of Science during the 1951 Festival of Britain. In 1952, the game OXO, a naughts and crosses game (tic-tack-toe for Americans) was developed in Cambridge UK by Alexander S. Douglas, a PhD candidate, for an EDSAC computer, and this research lead to the development of the field of Human Computer Interaction. The game was displayed on a cathode ray tube used to control tanks.
In 1958, William Higinbotham, of Brookhaven National Laboratory, developed Tennis for Two.

see an emulation of the game, above!

Dartmouth student designer Max Seidman watches a playtest while MVHI Program Coordinator Edward Ihejirika plays

Tiltfactor is finalizing a game with local public health group Mascoma Valley Health Initiative in New Hampshire on immunization. The game will players understand “herd” immunity and the need to vaccinate against particularly pernicious diseases.

Check out the interview by our director on Resonance FM, UK from October 2010: Mary Flanagan discusses art, games, and activism.

Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor is a partner in the Games for Learning Institute, centered at NYU. We’re launching a game competition and invite you to participate!

wow! from 2003, some fun quotes here from our lab Director, such as
“I Love the Huge Pixels” — worthy of t-shirts!

Isn’t it interesting to get a reminder that even in carnie games, the American obsession with guns prevails? In the UK, the carnie game of choice is archery, as seen here in a vibrant Leicester Square.

and stereotypical, this recently spotted advert in London by Tiltfactor folks reminds us of some of the, ah, allegedly ‘old school myths’ about gender and computing.

Holiday shopping is already in swing. For him, the Vanquish Game. For her, Stella McCartney Gift Set.

Tiltfactor’s Mary Flanagan is giving a talk this Wednesday in the UK at METAL, and participating in an arts pecha kucha this Thursday.

METAL is the artist’s laboratory space set up by Jude Kelly OBE in 2002 to create space for artists and thinkers to develop their ideas and further the philosophy of their work. METAL is committed to supporting artists from all disciplines through residencies, commissioning, producing, debate and discussion, touring and publishing.

The public is invited to participate in the third autumn debate sponsored by METAL, entitled ‘Visualising Our World’ at the Park Suite, Chalkwell Park at 7.30PM on Wednesday 20 October 2010.

Tiltfactor is interested in design and human values, and our influential research project begun in 2005 with Helen Nissenbaum and Mary Flanagan (PIs) with a group of diligent, introspective, and committed researchers called Values at Play has produced a strong body of research. Check out the article in the Canadian game studies journal Loading… Vol 3, No 4 (2009) for our article “Instructional Methods and Curricula for “Values Conscious Design,” which details the curricula and instructional materials created to date. Values at Play researchers investigate how social, moral, and political values are expressed in digital games. Values at Play has developed a systematic approach to considering values in the design process. We have also created and disseminate for all a values based curricula and instructional materials including online Grow-a-Game tool for introducing game design students to the consideration of values in “values conscious” design. Another useful report on research is published in Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 2010; 4 (1), p. 57-67. “Exploring the Creative Potential of Values Conscious Design: Students’ Experiences with the Values at Play Curriculum” offers a report and discussion the results of a focus group study and design work conducted with students in an undergrad game design course with the Values at Play curriculum. Enjoy more articles posted on our website — the project has produced nearly ten journal and conference publications to date , and games from Layoff Profit Seed to Massively Multiplayer Soba and Massively Multiplayer 晚餐 [wǎncān] – and thanks to all of our team members, and especially our Advisory Board: Celia Pearce, Tracy Fullerton, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, Katie Salen. Values at Play has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Better than ever before, the new series of Grow-A-Game cards are out!

Grow-a-Game are colorful, professionally produced brainstorming tools used in top game design programs at major universities, in game design companies, and in high school programs. Version 2.0 now comes in three different sets (Classic, Apprentice, and Expert). Thousands of participants since 2007 have brainstormed games using these values-centered tools. Tiltfactor developed the cards as part of our research with Values at Play, a National Science Foundation research project led by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum.

The Small World Exhibition examines how the world is being shaped by new technologies, setting this in the context of the last 160 years of industrial and global change. To accompany the show there will be a series of talks and educational events.

Opening times: Thurs / Fri / Sat 11am – 6pm.
Or by appointment. Please call 01702 470700.

Venue: Chalkwell Hall, Chalkwell Avenue, Southend-on-Sea SS0 8NB

Small World Fair – programme of events:

A series of panel-led discussions with artists, activists, business leaders and academics will debate technology, its impact and implications for progress and society.

The innovative X0y1 project in Spain has released a new Spanish ebook of cyberfeminist writing! Download it here!
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Como parte de las actividades de X0y1 (plataforma para la investigación y la producción artística sobre identidad y cultura de redes), ellos presentan su 1er ebook X0y1 #ensayos sobre género y ciberespacio, Coordina: Remedios Zafra; Traduce: Natalia Pérez-Galdós. Colaboran en esta publicación: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. A ellos hemos sumado la traducción de una breve selección de trabajos sobre estudios de género y cultura digital de investigadoras que trabajan sobre feminismo y tecnología como Mary Flanagan, Gesche Joost o Sandra Buckmüller. Puedes descargarlo en: www.x0y1.net/ebook/

Mary Flanagan’s collaborator at Tiltfactor in the rather hush-hush Book of Jing manga project, Jonathan Jay Lee, has had a solo show in Hong Kong and been featured in Penninsula magazine as a “rising star” in the comics world.

Go Jonathan!
And… a sneak peak — Book One!

This past week’s Virtual Cinema course at Dartmouth College proved that machinima works can go far beyond the tried and true. A mere handful of students explored lost love, gaming culture, poet-zombie attacks, and perhaps most importantly, the pensive and strange qualities of virtual life. Check out their playlist, and celebrate with Tilt.

Dr. Cordelia Fine, with a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, notes in her summary of many gender studies in her book, Delusions of Gender, about gender and the brain a) several studies have found no difference in hemispheric size in neonates; b) the allegedly bigger female corpus (callosum) is in dispute and c) size vs function has not been proven: as Dr. Fine notes, “getting from brain to behavior has proved a challenge.” There may be biological difference in brain, but what do they show us about our thinking?

A recent article in the Washington Post discusses South Korea’s world-leading gaming culture. Considered the world’s most technologically integrated country, with high numbers of gamers and internet users, South Korea is the one to watch as far as gaming policies. Appx 95% of households have broadband access, and in July 2010 there were appx 420,00 concurrent users of the popular online game Maple Story — that is about one in every 115 South Koreans playing the same game at the same time. The e-sports movement has gained massive momentum in South Korea as well, with popular Starcraft competitions.

The 3G Summit a visionary 4-day initiative in Chicago that convenes 50 urban teenage girls with five leading women game designers and scholars for intensive dialogue, inquiry, game-play, and mentorship. Through multi-faceted workshops and a public forum, this initiative will critically confront gender representation and participation in our society’s fastest growing cultural medium.