Grand Text Auto

Our lab director, Mary Flanagan, is one of thirty fellows in the Higher Education Video Game Alliance. Read more about it in the Dartmouth news.

We’ve just received funding to design, create, and study a digital game intervention prototype to decrease loneliness in elderly populations, specifically in rural communities! We also have new support to continue our construal research (whether and how digital and non-digital platforms activate differing default levels of cognitive construal) by studying youth in a learning environment–this through the Neukom Institute at Dartmouth.

These projects, along with work on women in STEM, bias, and bystander intervention keep the team buzzing. Yay team!

New research from Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor Lab will be presented at theSociety for Personality and Social Psychology (#spsp2017) conference in San Antonio this week! Our fiction in STEM research, “Interpretations of a Science Bias Narrative Vary by Gender,” will be discussed by Gili Freedman and includes the work of Kaitlin Fitzgerald, Melanie Green, Gili herself, Geoff Kaufman, and Mary Flanagan.

Here are some venues at which to catch Mary Flanagan speaking or showing art in the spring of 2017:

• First off, Mary’s work [bombscotch] is showing in the PUSH PLAY exhibition January 12 – March 4 2017 at the Hedreen Gallery, Seattle http://www.gamescenes.org/2017/01/event-push-play-january-12-march-4-2017-hedreen-gallery-seattle-1.html
• Also in January: I’m in HACKING / MODDING / REMIXING as Feminist Protest at the Miller Gallery CMU that begins January 28 http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/HackingModdingRemixing/index.php
• In February, she’ll be at the College Art Association speaking on the panel, ‘Game Studies at 20’ 17 Feb hosted by John Sharp with Ian Boost, Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth. http://ow.ly/2fmV307OPCI 
• Mary will be speaking at the Board Game Studies Colloquium http://bgs20.tors.ku.dk  Copenhagen, Denmark 17-20 May!

Tiltfactor’s director Mary has found herself quite into Instagram. You’ll find her posts crossing all the domains in which she works: the art world, Tiltfactor, game industries, writing, and other curiosities. Find her Instagramming over at @critical.play, https://www.instagram.com/critical.play/

Did you know that our recent construal research is used by corporations like Samsung as they consider digital vs paper virtues? Or that game design teachers are modding Tiltfactor’s Grow-a-Game to consider issues of female exclusion in organizations? 

Dr. Mary Flanagan, Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies, and founding director of Tiltfactor Lab, at Dartmouth College notes that such examples show the real world impact of university research and innovation efforts. “If we can provide businesses and organizations with novel and equitable ideas and methods for future change, we are scaling up the impact of our research and creative approach,” she says.

Tiltfactor’s director Mary Flanagan was honored at the 13th Annual Games for Change Festival in June 2016!

Flanagan was awarded the Vanguard Award. This award recognizes the significant contributions of a practitioner by being a champion, advocate, and mentor for a new generation of game creators, and rewards outstanding individuals in impact games.

The Games for Change Festival organizers noted that Flanagan is:

“… A leading innovator, artist, educator and designer, whose works have included everything from game-inspired art, to commercial games that shift people’s thinking about biases and stereotypes. Flanagan established the internationally recognized game research laboratory Tiltfactor in 2003 to invent “humanist” games and take on social change through games.”

Tiltfactor’s director gave day one’s closing keynote at Connected Life 2016: Collective Action and the Internet, a two day-long conference, held at the University of Oxford on 20th and 21st June 2016. The conference is dedicated to igniting multidisciplinary exchanges on internet research across information studies, digital humanities, psychology, engineering, business, health, and computer science. This is an excellent gathering focused on emerging research that brims with promise for the further of tech scholarship. @OxConnectedLife

Our new research studies published in the paper “High-Low Split” at #chi4good this year show that users demonstrate different types of psychological construal using digital screens– that is, a focus on concrete details (low level construal) as opposed to “big picture” thinking (high level construal), and media is very very interested in this research. This May our work has been covered in publications such as The Daily Mail, The Washington Post, Psychology Today, Fox News, Entrepreneur.com, and many news outlets in India, such as the Economic Times and Hindustan Times.

Mary Flanagan’s chapter ends the provocative Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (MIT Press 2016), Edited by Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. The book offers a diverse set of perspectives on wargaming’s past, present, and future, covering both digital and tabletop games.  In her chapter, “Practicing a New War Game,” Flanagan notes that wargames have long been understood a form of war simulation. She asks, however, if their simulation of conflict isn’t so much about war as it is about critical thinking and critique? In this conclusion to a very hefty, rich, and insightful book, Flanagan posits provocations against which readers can consider the readings in the book in order to continue to look at the ancient practice of wargaming in new light. In the end, she calls for new models of war games to foster creative solutions to all kinds of conflict facing the world today.

On the 14th of May 2016, Tiltfactor’s director, Mary Flanagan, received an Honorary Doctorate in Design from the Illinois Institute of Technology. She was honored with an honorary degree with Ray Kurzweil, inventor, and Chris Gladwin, entrepreneur.

The degree recognized, among other significant contributions, the innovative focus human values in design, and research into gender in computing, in her work.

Mary Flanagan (Center) with President Cramb (Left), Ray Kurzweil, and Provost Frances Bronet (Right)

We are looking for a full stack developer to create a small mobile application that can capture, process, and display images. The software is to run in a standalone setting— the main reason for mobile is to use the touchscreen on wall-mounted tablets (likely iPads) and access the camera. Therefore the project could be made in a wrapped browser window inside something like Phonegap — it’s not intended for distribution on the app store.

Tiltfactor Lab Open House

April 27 (Wednesday)
3:30 – 6:00pm
Room 245 in the Black Family Visual Arts Center (VAC)

Enjoy Thai appetizers and beverages while playing video games developed at Dartmouth’s very own Tiltfactor lab, including the award-winning Smorball, as well as top secret games still in development, and board and card games. Meet and chat about games and game design with Professor Mary Flanagan and the Tiltfactor team.

March is a time of many talks! Tiltfactor director Mary Flanagan spoke at the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series at the University of California Berkeley. The audience represented those interested in art, dance, post colonial studies, gender studies, game design, and even peace studies. It was fantastic to meet you all!

Everyone, we are excited to announce that Dr. Gili Freedman will be joining our Tiltfactor team. Gili is a social psychologist who is interested in how people interact with each other and how we can make those interactions better.

She received her B.A. in Psychology from Haverford College and her Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, she was a visiting assistant professor at Roanoke College researching social rejection and teaching social psychology, personality psychology, and psychology in the media. Dr Freedman is very excited to be joining Tiltfactor this Spring, and we are excited to have her!

We’ve been talking about player psychology to nudge us toward a better world for years and years. Journalists have even called this “social engineering.” That’s interesting, because games are intricate designed systems and typically, though not always, they are social. So social engineering may be an apt term for games in general, and not simply games that try to effect positive change.

Our research in bias is pushing ahead with thinking about implicit bias and stereotype threat. After the release of our recent paper “A psychologically “embedded” approach to designing games for prosocial causes,” which garnered national attention in the media, we’re currently working with digital and non-digital narratives to understand how these could help alleviate bias. And oooh, we have some really interesting data.

We’d love to share our gratitude for all of the good Tiltfactor goings-on with you! There is quite a bit to be thankful for this year.

Awards

This year, to date, Tiltfactor garnered much recognition!

Smorball and its ‘Best Serious Game’ award

1. In September, the Tiltfactor team won the “Best Serious Game Award” for our transcription game Smorball at the Boston Festival of Indie Games. Read all about it! Our computers were constantly filled, as players loved the game and fiercely competed to top each others’ high scores! Check out the complete list of awards at the festival.

Post Doctoral Researcher Position at Dartmouth College for 2016

The award winning  game design and research laboratory at Dartmouth College, Tiltfactor (http://www.tiltfactor.org) has an opening for a full-time postdoctoral research position in social psychology to begin January or August 2016. The Tiltfactor team designs, creates, and studies games for social impact. The postdoctoral researcher will design and conduct formal empirical studies, primarily on games.

New research at the Tiltfactor Game Research Laboratory at Dartmouth College indicates that people’s thinking about public health policies and spending priorities can be shifted through a novel new game genre–role playing sports.

A key challenge in public health in the United States is lowering costs by focusing on health priorities. Often, these priorities are discovered by complex visualizations and in-depth workshops such as those sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Aligning Forces for Quality initiative. Research groups across the country have taken a variety of approaches to rethinking health spending, for example. ReThink Health, an initiative from The Rippel Foundation, offers a robust dynamic modeling system for testing and visualizing scenarios and changes to the whole US health system.

Tiltfactor is proud to announce the NEH and IMLS
Co-Funded event to discuss Future of Crowdsourcing at #crowdcon 

Hanover NH— This week, lead organizers Dartmouth College and the University of Maryland-College Park, announce “Engaging the Public: Best Practices in Crowdsourcing across the Disciplines,” a workshop to gather by invitation over 60 leaders from the humanities, sciences, and cultural heritage domains in order to move the national discussion about crowdsourcing forward.

https://vine.co/v/eBFut17iE3b
Tiltfactor folks are busy making new Metadata Games! Fun!

The 2015 Tiltfactor team is bigger and bolder than ever. Dr. Mary Flanagan and her team are currently gathering data in a “Study-Palooza,” our term for enthusiastic and dedicated data collection. This awesome team is focused on the Bioheritage Diversity Library, Metadata Games, Bystander Intervention, Climate Change, and equity in STEM learning, just to name a few themes! Meanwhile, MONARCH and games for Robert Wood Johnson (Gut Check, Bill of Health) are en route to the printers. . .

Mary Flanagan’s Kickstarter campaign for the board game MONARCH is nearly wrapped up, and at 24 hours before close has well met it’s goal with over 300 supporters. In a recent Dartmouth Now article, Flanagan described Monarch as entertaining, beautiful, and “strategic—but not so strategic that it would be off-putting. I think of this as a gateway between popular games and the kind of heavy German board game that you sit down and play for six hours.”  Read the article by Hannah Silverstein here.

Mary Flanagan was recognized by the newly formed Higher Education Video Game Alliance (The Alliance) in their first annual awards program last week. (Read the Alliance Press Release.)  The Alliance was created by higher education leaders from across the country who share best practices, build partnerships and help universities strengthen their video game education programs.

The Alliance selected Flanagan for her work in “Advancing Theory and Research,” breaking ground in both conceptual and methodological domains in the investigation of games.

Flanagan was recognized for her innovative approach as an “academic trailblazer” and “intellectual architect.”