Grand Text Auto

This week at the annual Game Developer’s Conference Education Summit, Tiltfactor Director Mary Flanagan has been called out to a ‘Game Design Curriculum Deathmatch,’ where leading game design instructors battle it out by revealing secrets to their game design teaching, their design philosophies, and pedagogical quirks. Speakers include yours truly (Mary), USC Interactive Media Division chair and Game Innovation Lab director Tracy Fullerton, UC Santa Cruz Expressive Intelligence Studio co-director and Expressive Processing author Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Rules of Play and the Game Design Reader co-author and NYU Game Center professor Eric Zimmerman. The program will be MC’d by designer Justin Hall! Don’t miss it — the session ID is 823443.

Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College is seeking applications for a postdoctoral research position in Learning Sciences and Assessment for the 2013-2014 academic year. The postdoctoral researcher will be affiliated with Tiltfactor Laboratory (http://www.tiltfactor.org), the leading group in values-conscious game design and research, which is led by Dr. Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and Professor of Film & Media Studies at Dartmouth.

In honor of flu safety, we’d like to share with you an image from a doctor teaching his young young gamers about disease spread by playing POX: Save the People!

Tiltfactor pursues several main areas of research: games for health and wellness, games for addressing biases and stereotypes, and games for generating new knowledge. We’ve had an amazing year at Tiltfactor–we have many things to be thankful for as we think about our year in review.

Here are seven.

1) New Games. Our team was able to research and produce four awesome games this year!

The Tiltfactor team with Meaningful Play 2012 awards for Best Non-Digital and Best Digital Games. Yeah!

Tiltfactor will soon be announcing a post-doctoral position in Psychology and/or Learning Sciences. If you love what we do, have a PhD in hand, and want on-the-ground experience in studying and understanding games that make a difference, keep your eyes on this site and our 2013 advertisement. Meanwhile, for those of you in digital humanities, we have Neukom Institute positions at Dartmouth (starting to review now!) and the Five Colleges have a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities!

Tiltfactor is showing off our POX in DC this week at mHealth! Our digital, non-digital, and sport games are at the show through Wednesday.

Play vicariously with Ignacio R. @Igman05 and @RandomOutput Daniel and their friends (who are you guys?) as these guys from San Francisco rock the buffalo game! Not sure who is winning, but maybe they will comment and let us know!

IndieCade 2012 was the most exciting yet– great games, interesting talks, and an impressive crowd of makers and players. I met scores of new indie designers as well as old friends, and was impressed with the vision, energy, and enthusiasm of the folks I met. Glad to meet you all!

I missed the awards ceremony, but I heard it was fantastic. Some truly incredible games won awards, of many diverse genres and media including this really cool pervasive media game from USC called Reality Ends Here; a game called The Stanley Parable; Gorogoa, a hand drawn puzzler;  a beautiful point and click adventure game in the plant world; the board game where die are spaceship called Armada D6; a weird fantasy role playing game; and a physical art installation-game. I’d recommend learning as much as you can about all of these games– for great play, and inspiration!

If you’re in or near the Santa Cruz area, come check out Critical Play, a panel discussion on Art, Games, & History.

Greetings from GenCon! Our booth is a fantastic success and we’re thankful to all of the many GenCon attendees who have stopped by to play and those who not only play but pick up their own copies of ZOMBIEPOX (sold out), Buffalo (nearing extinction too) and Awkward Moment!

Bonnie Barber’s new piece on recent lab projects, including our National Endowment for the Humanities funding, our booth at GenCon, and my involvement in a White House consortium on games, is now online on Dartmouth Now. In the quick article I discuss the promise for games for change and social impact to make a difference.

More art than game, but still playful and instruction based, this work will be shown as part of the Permanent Collection show – a massively multiartist exhibition “covering” the works from MoMA’s permanent collection at the Nancy Margolis gallery, New York. It’s like the art equivalent of the cover album. The show is curated by Jordin Isip and Edward del Rosario. The opening is this Thursday 6-8pm and the show runs July 12 – August 4, 2012.

Drawing Series Mashup
[after Sol Lewitt’s Drawing Series III/2314/ B (1969) and Composite Series (1970)]

(l to r): Sam Beattie, Oge Young, Dave Roberts, Michelle Favaloro, Justin Gary, and Tracy Hurley respond to provocative audience questions at Dartmouth at Play '12

Held the Friday of Green Key weekend, one of the busiest times of the year on campus, our first annual Dartmouth at Play event was a smashing success.

This Friday, Dartmouth is proud to welcome alumni in the gaming industry back to Hanover!

Games can be good for you in many ways– and there has been an explosion of  play systems and gadgets recently to help with obesity and fitness. Some new products have surfaced to popularity over last few months. Zamzee, Striiv, and SlimKicker are just a few of the examples popping up to join older systems such as Bodybugg. Yes, studies have shown that Wii and specifically DDR-style dance games can encourage weight loss, so there is significant promise for personal devices that come along on your day to also help you play.

I will be speaking on behalf of my artistic practice and Tiltfactor with Christopher Robbins, of the Ghana Think Tank, at TransTalks: Practice Makes Practice, a series of conversations among invited speakers, the MFA students in the Parsons Transdisciplinary Design program, and the public dedicated to exploring design’s capacity to investigate, disassemble and reframe the political, economic and social forces that define our everyday practices.

The goal for Flanagan is to allow the conversation to follow a similar path to the design process:  How do each of these artist/designers decide upon their design question? What methodologies are developed that shape that question? What outcomes could be considered successful? And importantly, in the form of a post-mortem across several projects as a reflective form of practice, How does failure play into particular experimental design endeavors?

This week, be sure to catch three new media artworks installed along Berry Main Street on the Dartmouth College campus. The projects were produced in the New Media Art class offered through Studio Art, taught by Professor Mary Flanagan. The students will be on-site and available to answer questions about the work on TUESDAY MARCH 6TH 2012 from 3-4pm.

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In the Front Hall: Uplift Me

By Hannah Collman ’15,  Kayla Gilbert ’12 and Shloka Kini ’13

Imagine that you could make a person suffer, and no one would ever know. Would you do so? Were you to pose that question in person, few if any would claim to exercise such a power. But wipe away any identifying factors, and give the respondent total anonymity—how will they respond?

My new media art students will be posting over the next 8 week a series of introspective blog posts on digital/ new media artists. Our aim is to post one every day or every other day. Enjoy, comment, discuss!

Our rather populous Winter Team (12 of us) has begun a new round of design and development for our STEM Bias project. No genre is left out: board games, card games, iPad/web games, and of course, performative games!

Meet Zara, our design guru; Jasmine, doing a balancing act; and Andrea and Viviana, busy modding!

It is currently a “Tiltfactor Week”: Our own reality show! Teams have a week to research and prototype a concept to playable completeness. It might not be pretty–it is raining ice outside, we’re disregarding any sense of game aesthetics, and if you ask about the hours of hard work students will put into project games–you may hear groans. But– I think our players will be happy with the results!

Wednesday January 18, 2012 4-7pm
304 North Fairbanks

Come greet the new year with the folks behind Dartmouth’s Game Research Lab for an open house! Play video games and board games! Meet our student designers, staff, and founder Mary Flanagan– and play games! This time we will be playing Kinect games, and showing our own new games including POX for iPad and prototypes for our gender stereotyping and STEM field-related games, and we’ll discuss our new after school programs in Lebanon! And, we’ll play XBOX Kinect games and eat Thai food!

Huzzah!

This winter, there is a new media art course being offered between two departments at Dartmouth.

Currently the course is accepting enrollments!

STRP Festival

The 2011 STRP Art and Technology Festival in Eindhoven NL will host lab director Mary Flanagan (that would be me) in a keynote talk at the miniconference “Master of Play,” and show four of her new video works. The STRP Festival is one of the largest art & technology festivals in Europe. It should be rad! The eclectic mixture of art, technology, music + e-culture has made it a highly-anticipated annual event. It is designed to appeal to a wide audience, and the multidisciplinary program boldly “combines a full sensory experience and adventure.” Can’t wait!

Twelve Propositions from a Critical Play Perspective:

1. Values are everywhere,  designed into play and into games

2. The history of computed games has created certain types of interactions.

3. These technical constraints have limited what we think we can do today.

5. Unorthodox methods spur change.

6. Meaning in a game  comes from the feeling of responsibility.

8. Producing challenging work as an artist means that  you are willing to break the rules.

Our entire team has read the research report by the Association of American University Women (AAUW) that offers compelling evidence to help explain what is going on in the US with science, technology, math and science and women. By the way, in 1885, a group of AAUW members conducted a survey that debunked the popular theory that higher education was bad for women’s health. . . So, thanks to the organization for that one, and for more contemporary research on women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

Well this year’s Indiecade, the coolest international festival of independent games, has drawn to a close. The fest attracts small independent game makers and a handful of artists to play, discuss, eat, watch, and play some more. It is a hands-on, grassroots group who comes. Some of my favorite games included the whimsical Hohokum, a line drawing vector based game; Ordnungswissenschaft, a game that integrates stacking blocks in the real world into that of the virtual. Interesting little games also included The Witch; Way, a game that features two player capacity but each as a different point of view, and Halycon, a musical toy and matching game.