Grand Text Auto

Bineshii Hermes-Roach ’17 has had Tiltfactor on her radar since she arrived at Dartmouth. “During my freshman fall, I spoke with Max Seidman (a senior Tiltfactor game designer) at the activities fair and always kept Tiltfactor in the back of my mind, hoping one day I could involve myself with the lab.”

Bineshii explains that in the winter of her sophomore year she decided to take an off term and, after applying to work at Tiltfactor, receive a part-time position for game design that she kept through the spring. This past summer, for Dartmouth’s heralded Sophomore Summer, Bineshii applied for and was granted a summer game design fellowship at Tiltfactor.

Amanda Herz has been a student employee at Tiltfactor since the winter of 2016 and received a full-time fellowship in game design for the summer of 2016. Her daily schedule in the lab is usually varied, but Amanda works largely to create and implement games “with a focus on excellent user experiences.” While everyone at Tiltfactor works to target social issues and how to address these issues through games, Amanda is particularly focused on making sure that the games are as fun as possible for their players, because even the most impactful game will have no impact if nobody plays it.

Even in the summer months research doesn’t stop at Tiltfactor! We’re currently conducting game research at the Salt Hill Pub in Hanover and studying how party games are played.

Once concluded, the findings from these studies at Salt Hill Pub will join other papers and journal articles on our research, such as our recent papers on POX: Save the People and Buffalo the name dropping game. These studies, through illuminating the way individuals perceive and think about non-digital and digital media, can be, already have been, applied to gaming.