Grand Text Auto

This past Friday was the second annual Dartmouth at Play event and it was a blast!

There were great discussions happening all afternoon, and it was enlightening and inspiring to hear alumni panelists talk about games and game design. Topics ranged from the fun, with questions such as, “Tell us of your biggest career success and your biggest failure,” to the serious, “Do games promote violence, or are they unfairly targeted? Has media desensitized the public?” to the practical, “How do you interest players with diverse play styles?”

Although the &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing may appear at first to be an HTML character entity reference, it’s actually a new book. Arranged back-to-back like Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee in The Killer, it offers copious amounts (400 pages) of recent provocative writing in various genres. It’s published by Lake Forest College Press.

I’m delighted to have my work in the good company of that by many excellent writers, including J.R. Carpenter, Craig Dworkin, and Michael Leong. My contribution to the volume is just a page each of output from the Latin and Cyrillic versions of “Letterformed Terrain,” from Concrete Perl.

I direct a lab at MIT called The Trope Tank. This is a lab for research, teaching, and creative production, located in building 14 (where the Hayden Library is also housed), in room 14N-233. Its mission is to develop new poetic practices and new understandings of digital media by focusing on the material, formal, and historical aspects of computation and language.

DARTMOUTH AT PLAY
FRIDAY MAY 17
Loew Auditorium 2 – 5 PM
GABRIEL SCHLUMBERGER DISNEY · MIKE MEARLS WIZARDS OF THE COAST · CATE GARY BLIZZARD ENT. · REGINA GLOCKER PRESIDENTIAL GAME · JUSTIN KRETER HASBRO INC · LINDEN VONGSATHORN MICROSOFT

Tiltfactor is pleased to announce our second annual Dartmouth at Play event!

What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn’t reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky.

O

HYMEN! O hymenee!
Why do you tantalize me thus?
O why sting me for a swift moment only?
Why can you not continue? O why do you now cease?
Is it because, if you continued beyond the swift moment, you would soon certainly kill me?

[This “House of Leaves of Grass” is a 24K poetry generator that produces about 100 trillion stanzas. Vast, it contains multitudes; it is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. By Mark Sample, based on “Sea and Spar Between.”]

Members of the Tiltfactor team attended the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in San Francisco and presented research on games designed for our BIAS project!

Geoff introduced our work by discussing the goals of our lab and the theories behind our BIAS research. We then talked about our games Awkward Moment and buffalo and played a few rounds of each game with the audience. The attendees were receptive of our games and eagerly joined in to play! Geoff finished our discussion by presenting data to show that our games can help players think of themselves and others in ways that reduce the effects of implicit bias. The audience seemed particularly interested that we presented evidence of some transformation in players’ thinking – we love evidence-based research, too! We had a wonderful and engaged audience and thank them for attending our session and for their thoughtful questions about our work.

Well, this time they did. And a Canadian one at that.

This week is the Digital Arts Exhibition at Dartmouth! All week long FAB(rication) Lab has been going on in the Hopkins center with students and visitors learning about programming, animation,  and many other subjects that combine art and technology!

Tomorrow (Thursday, May 9th) from 7pm to 10pm in the Black Family Visual Arts Center will be the Digital Arts Exhibition with interactive installations, games to play, and student artwork! There will be food from Salt Hill Pub. There will be a student animation showing at 7:30pm and student live action showing at 9:00pm.

At UC Santa Cruz we’re launching a new professional MS in Games and Playable Media, which will be offered through our Silicon Valley campus and will include working both with our current game faculty and with new personnel hired specifically for the program. We are currently in the selection process for the first position to be hired, the Creative Director. Simultaneously, the job ad is now live for the Program Director. For this newly-opened position we’re seeking someone with demonstrated leadership in the games and playable media field. Application review begins May 29, 2013. The job includes program and curriculum vision, planning, management, and evaluation; teaching and advising students in the program; and ongoing professional work and/or research in the games field. Those who have already applied to the Creative Director position are encouraged to also apply for the Program Director position, if appropriate.