Grand Text Auto

SPIEL Essen is one of the world’s largest board game conventions boasting of roughly 1000 exhibitiors and over 150,000 visitors annually. Professor Flanagan attended this year’s extravaganza, meeting with many game designers and publishers.

Hypertherm is a 100% employee-owned company focusing on industrial cutting technologies and solutions and is leading the industry in this area. Their local campus in Lebanon, NH invited Tiltfactor to their annual human resources retreat in an effort to seek advice about how to enhance employee experience at the company. Max engaged the staff in game play and discussion, sharing the Tiltfactor method of Embedded Design, and how it can be used to foster a fun and inclusive work environment.

Homo Ludens, a youtube channel dedicated to history and board games, featured Mary Flanagan along with other game professionals and researchers in a stream that aired on Feb 27. The discussion centered around the evolution, ethics, and history of colonialist depiction in board games and tabletop wargames. Watch “Game Ethics #2: Playing Colonialism” here.

Glitch Squad was created in a collaboration between Professor Mary Flanagan’s game design publishing company, Resonym, LabX, a public engagement test bed at the National Academy of Sciences, and Tiltfactor Lab. The game is designed to interest the public on issues surrounding forensic science.

The goal of the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communication is to “encourage high-quality science communication and build a diverse community of science journalists, research scientists, and institutions that will help society meet the challenges and opportunities posed by climate change, future pandemics, human genome editing, and other issues that can only be understood and navigated with the help of effective science communication.” These annual awards, give to 24 exceptional writers, total $60,000. Professor Flanagan was among the jury members in 2022 and will continue into the 2023 award cycle. Says Flanagan, “It was a lot of work but such great writing— what a pleasure!”

PAX Unplugged is an annual tabletop game convention in Philadelphia, PA in December. This year, Professor Mary Flanagan’s game studio Resonym featured two games at the convention: Phantom Ink and Retrograde. Joined by Tiltfactor alum Lucas Sanford-Long (Dart ’12), Tiltfactor’s staff Max Seidman (Dart ’12) and Sukie Punjasthitkul, Mary and the crew enjoyed a productive 3 days, and even a surprise visit from Geoff Kaufman, former Tilt research guru!

Professor Flanagan’s game company Resonym has introduced two new games this year: Phantom Ink and Retrograde. Her recent trip to Gen Con indicated that Phantom Ink is a huge hit already with gamers, families, and enthusiasts! On the writing front, 2023 will begin for Flanagan with the introduction of her new book entitled Playful Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Board Games – MIT Press. This book is the result of several years of research and travel throughout Europe, focusing on Germany and France.

Professor Mary Flanagan delivered the keynote talk at Gen Con this summer. Gen Con is one of the largest gaming conventions in North America and is held annually in Indianapolis, IN.

PortrAIts: Digital Portraiture & Social Identity opened in the BVAC Student Gallery on Tuesday, May 24th with a small but very engaged crowd of viewers. The interactive exhibition explored how artificial intelligence visually reproduces existing forms of bias in our digital commons. The show featured a series of digital portraits created by using a text-to-image generative algorithm trained on large datasets of images sourced from the internet. Viewers were be able to participate in the generation of AI art and engage in critical conversations about the work.

Tiltfactor and LabX examine the challenges of forensic science in an upcoming game that will be announced this fall. Can you and your partner figure out the clues in time? Look for a sneak peak coming soon!

Dartmouth Alumni Magazine’s, Ask the Expert series, interviewed Professor Mary Flanagan in light of the significant increase in consumer spending on games during the pandemic. Check out what Mary says here. 

As a scientist sucked into a conflict playing out across parallel universes, you will have to solve puzzles between alternate versions of your lab to stay one step ahead of pursuit. Log in to Steam and check it out here: Entangled on Steam.

Sponsored by the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth (ICE), scientists and humanists gathered to ponder our future from different perspectives. See Tiltfactor’s Director, Professor Mary Flanagan’s talk entitled “Love in the Glitch: Humanizing the Future” here.

Dartmouth Professors share six words of life advice with the Class of 2021. See what Professor Flanagan and her colleagues have to say to Dartmouth’s latest grads! https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2021/06/professors-share-six-words-of-life-advice-with-the-class-of-2021

Tiltfactor’s Director, Professor Mary Flanagan’s new chapter, “If you Play it,  Do you Believe It?” has now been published in a new book. “Narrative Mechanics: Strategies and Meanings in Games and Real Life“, eds Beat Suter, René Bauuer, and Mela Kocker, Columbia University Press, explores the relationship between game mechanics, political narratives and motivational design.

Tiltfactor’s mobile trailer, called the “Playcube” has been used for many different types of events over the years, including art performances, exhibitions, and installations; game play-testing and research studies; and most recently as a ‘rental’ booth for Outdoor Programs. As COVID protocols required social distancing practices, even outside, the play-cube became a safe venue for the rental of cross-country skis and ice skates this past winter. Outdoor Programs will continue to use the cube as a safe place for students to meet program representatives and borrow equipment for various outdoor activities throughout the spring.

Aifric Campbell’s new novel The Love Makers contains an essay by Professor Mary Flanagan. For more on her larger Feminist AI project, check out Flanagan’s studio work here: https://studio.maryflanagan.com/

Kristen Toohill, former visiting researcher at Tiltfactor and author of the “Buffalo Facilitator’s Workbook” publishes two recent articles discussing both the game and the book. Read “How To Use a Fun Party Game to Tackle Implicit Bias” and “How to Enjoy a Virtual Game Night with Colleagues” to find out more!

Flanagan discusses games as an art form and more in this interview on “table for One“.

Tiltfactor’s own Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman, along with Tilt alum Geoff Kaufman have a published a new Chapter called “Creating Stealth Game Interventions for Attitude and Behavior Change: An ‘Embedded Design’ Model,” in the book Persuasive Gaming In Context, edited by Teresa de la Hera, Jeroen Jansz, Joost Raessens and Ben Schouten. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021,  pp. 73-90. http://doi.org/10.5117/9789463728805_ch05

Check out Professor Mary Flanagan’s essay on game history, “A Path to Our Futures,” in the inaugural issue of the new journal ROMchip!

Find out in Professor Mary Flanagan’s forthcoming article: “Using Comics and Tweets to Raise Awareness about Gender Biases in STEM.” Co-authored by former Tiltfactor Post-Doc researchers Geoff Kaufman and Gili Freedman, along with Melanie Green of the University of Buffalo. Psychology of Popular Media (forthcoming 2021).

Professor Mary Flanagan has published a new essay entitled “Taking Binaries off the Table” in the book Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games, eds Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and John Bath. New York: Routledge, 2020.

The Hopkins Center for the Arts, Department of Film & Media Studies, and Tiltfactor Lab are partnering up host this virtual event as part of the 2021 Winter Carnival Celebration. Alumni in various parts of the gaming industry including Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto 5), Activision (Call of Duty), and Xbox (Wasteland 3), and Electronics Arts (The Sims 4) will participate in a panel moderated by Professor Mary Flanagan on Tuesday, February 16th at 5:00pm. REGISTER HERE TO JOIN THE EVENT

Flanagan and others have recently published an article in the Psychology of Popular Media entitled: “Obituaries can popularize science and health: Stephen Hawking and interest in cosmology and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”