Grand Text Auto

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.

The Tiltfactor team was busy at DiGRA 2011. Thursday September 15th, I presented (with  Jonathan Belman)  our paper on the design approach behind POX: Save the People. Friday September 16th, Jonathan Belman shared our latest paper on our Grow-A-Game cards, “Grow-A-Game: A Tool for Values Conscious Design and Analysis of Digital Games,” with audience members on Friday. Read the essays now!

Digra2011-PreventingPox-FlanaganEtAl-Paper

Digra2011 – GrowAGameTool-BelmanNissenbaumFlanaganDiamond
See below for full citations on these articles!

I’ll be following up with written thoughts, but here are a few video highlights courtesy of the Utrecht School of the Arts.

Tiltfactor‘s Mary Flanagan will be giving a keynote at this year’s Digital Games Research Association Conference. “After Leveling Up in the Netherlands (2003), Changing Views in Canada (2005), Situated Play in Japan (2007) and Breaking New Ground in England (2009) the 5th DiGRA Conference returns to the Netherlands for THINK DESIGN PLAY. ” Tiltfactor’s Jonathan Belman is also presenting our new Grow a Game study, and we are co-presenting on our recent POX: Save the People study. We are also participating in the “Building a Game Lab 2.0: Surviving and Thriving” panel,  and a game scholar rant. Check out the schedule and come along if you are near Utrecht!

We weathered the storm without mishap — and even had some leftovers! Now, the group is gearing up for a fruitful fall production period. Thanks to everyone who pitched in to make sure Tilt folks stayed safe. Our hearts go out to those whose homes and businesses have been destroyed by the flooding; the team wants you to know that we care and carry thoughts for you. We find ourselves very grateful that the lab, Dartmouth campus, and nearby surrounds went untouched.

Tiltfactor at Dartmouth College readies the Lab for Hurricane Irene: Lab Director Mary Flanagan finds the fire-resistant suit and begins lab preparedness…ah… preparation.

Matt Cloyd, Intern, continues to batten down the hatches– and storm windows, and power supplies, and snacks … and…

We suspect lab manager Sukie Punjasthitkul is behind the acquisition of the Flame Retardant Suit, but we cannot confirm this. He is a very prepared person.

Have no fear! Tiltfactor will brave on and make games!  In fact, tonight is a research night, playing Tichu with Mary’s relatives til the wee hours. It is the best meta-game ever! Bridge, meets 500, meets go fish, meets crazy eights, meets poker. Awesome!

After reveling in the glow of Gen-Con (check out the photos on FB), our Lab director Mary Flanagan has just announced that starting this September, we are launching into a new project to develop games that explore nuanced aspects of stereotype threat and implicit bias! The  project “Transforming Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) For Women and Girls: Reworking Stereotypes & Bias” has three primary goals: 1) To understand how games could be used to shift the current cultural understandings around STEM fields; 2) challenge these stereotypes by making learning activities into games for girls– and the community–to play, and 3) develop a set a of design principles in order to recommend approaches to activities and games that increase girls’ self esteem and interest in STEM. Resulting games that incorporate the design principles will be tested with the target audience, iterated, and released for distribution on the Tiltfactor.org website and in partnership with Seattle’s EdLab, home of the National Girls Collaborative Project.

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context we cannot properly describe.

  –Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form

By Parker Phinney

This spring, I worked as a Dartmouth Digital Studies Fellow on the Usable Images project and the MetadataGames project.
The Problem=====
Several United States Federal agencies maintain repositories of public domain images. These repositories have thousands of images with practical uses. For example, a health sciences professor creating a textbook to share for free on line is greatly helped by the public domain (free of copyright restrictions) images available for free on the Center for Disease Control’s website, which range from photographs of disease symptoms, to microscope slides, and beyond.

Digital Art Panel: Photo Courtesy of Marcin Ramocki

The weekend event of the year: the first Woodstock Digital Media Festival in Woodstock Vermont! The morning started the proceedings with two parallel panels: one on digital art (with discussants Christiane Paul, gallerists from Postmasters, Marcin Ramocki, and Mary Flanagan), and the other on digital media journalism, commerce, and nonprofits. Both were packed last Saturday!

The evening ended with a bang (or, a MOO?) at a working farm almost on midsummer’s night. Nullsleep played tunes that reverberated the classic post and beam renovated barn.

Streetmapping art and various psychogeographic events have taken hold of the imagination of artists and participants over the past decade, in part due to a reaction (ranging from delight to dismay) to advances in geographic information systems and the proliferation of on-demand, amazingly detailed maps such as Google maps, and due to an interest in re-politicizing the growing number of corporately owned and controlled spaces in urban life.

The artists, business people, and open source mappers assembling in a quaint Vermont town on Saturday June 18th for the first Woodstock Digital Media Festival provide a range of projects to satisfy those curious about how we understand space through experiencing and making maps.

A recent talk by Jonathan Belman spurred interest across Canada! Go Values at Play! You can read some of this published material in our article on empathy. Jonathan is continuing this work in his dissertation.

McDowell, Adam. “How High Is Your Empathy Score? The National Post. 3 June 2011. Available at: http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/03/how-high-is-your-empathy-score/

In a time when women are increasingly prominent in fields such as medicine, law and business, why are there so few women scientists and engineers? The situation in Science, Math, Engineering, and Technology fields has prompted a variety of investigations into how we might best attract women and girls to more technical fields, especially computer science. Today, I was on a panel at the annual NCWIT conference (National Center for Women & Information Technology) with Mitch Resnick, of the MIT Media Lab and known for the innovative programming software program Scratch, and fellow panelists: Kevin Clark and Tobi Saulnier. The panel provoked an interesting discussion with the audience, and I want to continue my thoughts a bit further here.

The Digital Studies initiative at Dartmouth College is seeking applications for postdoctoral position in Learning Sciences and Assessment. The Postdoc will be affiliated with The Tiltfactor Laboratory (http://www.tiltfactor.org), the leading game design research group in values-conscious design.

Tiltfactor at Dartmouth College designs, creates, and studies games. From social activist games, where we examine empathy, to games for health where we study if players are learning about immunization, we focus on what we call ‘critical play’ that fosters human values. We also encourage the artistic and innovative place of games in culture. Given the multidisciplinary nature of our projects, the candidates will likely have interests that span several disciplines, such as psychology, gaming, and learning; or machine learning, social games, and HCI. Technical expertise among candidates is highly favored.

Tiltfactor Director and Digital Humanities Prof. Mary Flanagan and students worked with local a health organization on “Pox: Save the People,” a game that depicts the importance of immunization. Read more at Dartmouth Now: http://bit.ly/g83Yxm

The Indiecade call for submissions is OUT! Submit your game(s) as soon as possible and spread the word Submissions for the 2011 IndieCade Festival are now open!

IndieCade is awesome, for it is the only stand-alone international festival of independent games out there. The festival showcases budding new game designers from around the world — the student, basement hacker, and former industry idealist alike. The festival will take place October 6-9 in L.A.-adjacent downtown Culver City, bringing together the worldwide indie community, industry heavy-hitters, and players to see, hear, and experience the next big thing.

Tiltfactor is humming, and the lab and the lab director Mary Flanagan are in recent news circles in the art world, commercial gaming, and in public health domains. See our latest press, including Flanagan’s work featured in the latest ARTnews article on videogames and art, April 2011; Melanie Plenda’s article. “POX: Play the game, save the people.” New Hampshire Union Leader, 8 April 2011, B1; Rick Ganley’s NHPR Morning Edition interview with Flanagan on POX;  HealthNewsDigest.com spreading the word on POX; and Stephanie Clifford’s piece on the new Monopoly game from Hasbro in the New York Times.

Dartmouth’s Digital Poetry Symposium, held all afternoon, Marjorie Luesebrink discussed her use of Microsoft Excel as a platform for her poetry. The idea that a story or poem can be revealed through direct manipulation drove her curiosity, and she had come to think of the interface as the defining part of the medium. The predominant trend is to make the relationship between machines and people more simple, yet it is the stage for complexity.

Metadata Games has several implemented games and our recent March 2011 pilot study on the tagging system using a control and experimental group with 200 of the same images showed some surprisingly accurate results, generating over 4000 new image tags. We’ll be doing a more public test very soon; contact us through contact at tiltfactordotorg if you want to help us test!

And Now, a message from our latest team member:

The POX game was in the NH Union Leader this past Friday, complete with interviews of Mary Flanagan and Martin Downs of the Mascoma Valley Health Initiative.
Here are some excerpts:
Flanagan is quick to point out the game takes no stance on whether vaccinations are good or bad, it simply explains how diseases are transmitted and allows the players to fight them. She may be quick to make that point given all the controversy over vaccines and the, turns out erroneous, link between the vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella and autism. A recent British Medical Journal article uncovered fraudulent data was the to blame for this belief and pretty much debunked the idea. “The game let’s you come to your own conclusion,” she said. “People can make their own choices, but you end up seeing how the system works.”

The new Tiltfactor game, POX: Save the People is released! Lab director Mary Flanagan spoke about the game with New Hampshire Public Radio today. Listen now if you missed it!

Last week, we launched our game POX: Save the People. Today, we’re visiting the New England Archivists to discuss results of our Metadatagames Pilot Test! And next Monday, Mary Flanagan will be interviewed (4/4)  during Morning Edition on NHPR.

Meanwhile, our new TiltBling is in stock  — Check out project manager Sukie in his new TiltWear:

This is the only known photograph of the Tiltfactor exclusive "I Heart Huge Pixels" shirt in existence.