Grand Text Auto

The long awaited Context Providers, edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna has just been released from Intellect Press! Context Providers explores the ways in which digital art and culture are challenging and changing the creative process and our ways of constructing meaning.

The authors introduce the concept of artists as context providers—people who establish networks of information in a highly collaborative creative process, blurring boundaries between disciplines. Technological change has affected the function of art, the role of the artist, and the way artistic productions are shared,
creating a need for flexible information filters as a framework for establishing meaning and identity. Context Providers considers the work of media artists today who are directly engaging communities through collaboration, active dialogue, and challenging creative work.

Our new board game, POX, was officially released at the New Hampshire Immunization Conference in Manchester NH this week!

Tiltfactor project manager SukdithPunjasthitkul and our über intern Max Seidman were on hand to explain gameplay, playtest with educators and public health officials, and discuss the design process.

Max Seidman shows folks how to play POX

Our partners in the planning and design process, Mascoma Valley Health Initiative, was awarded the 2011 NH Dept of Health and Human Services / Public Health Service “Excellence in Immunization Partnerships.” Edward Ihejirika of MVHI picked up the award in person.

Yes, we’re using it! The Critical Play Method, culled from work from the Values at Play project and Mary Flanagan’s  work creating games that take on issues that need to be deeply and meaningful ingrained in a game. It is included in Critical Play, but here’s a succinct checklist to share!

Please join the editors of Context Providers – Margot Lovejoy,
Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna – and contributors Mary Flanagan and
Ellen Levy for a brief introduction to the book, followed by a
reception at The New School, New York.

Context Providers
Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts

edited by Margot Lovejoy
Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna

Intellect Press, UK / University of Chicago Press

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo8920656.html

Tiltfactor continues to represent and engage at Pox East this weekend!

First off,  a panel discussion on Friday with lab director Mary Flanagan on Getting the Most Out of Your Game Education.

Pictured here, playtest sessions for our nearly-released game POX: Save the People with folks in the long lines by lab researcher Sukimon. A great way to pass the time, save lives, etc!

At the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference, esteemed designer Chris Trottier assembled advice from her astounding career as a game designer […]

This year’s Game Development Conference in San Francisco promises to be enjoyable and informative. We are doing a soft-launch of […]

E McNeill, a friend to Tiltfactor and one of Dartmouth’s own, constitutes the only one-person game making ‘team’ at this year’s Imagine Cup, the world’s premier student technology competition!
He’s a finalist in the Game and Development competition. He is showcasing his game ALTERNEX in Egypt! Follow the proceedings here and follow on twitter at #ImagineCup.

Games are a global medium, and to theorists such as Lisa Nakamura at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference 2009, one cannot separate the construction of digital games into particular cultures and practices. Having one national “essense” or sensibility is entirely fictional, Nakamura notes, because games are very global in their production practices and marketing practices. Nakamura brings up theorist Martin Lister (New Media: A Critical Introduction, 2003 ) to support her position, as Lister notes that “the videogame is the most thoroughly transnational form of popular culture, both as an industry” and “content” such as characters and stories.

Starting June 25th 2009!
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Practicum in Digital Culture & New Media – 10A
MACHINIMA

FLANAGAN  FS 49    DARTMOUTH   10A   301 N.FAIRBANKS

In this workshop, we conduct research in developing, understanding and advancing a real-time rendering and video production technique based on video games. This special topics course will allow a group of students to study the techniques of Machinima. Throughout the term students will examine film techniques and story creation techniques that apply to the traditional film form, examine Machinima on a technical and aesthetic basis, and critique current examples of Machinima films. Outside of class, students  will collaborate, putting  forth a large amount of effort to write and produce their own Machinima.  Our course aims to investigate the underlying concepts of this new form of media, examining the relationship to animation, traditional cinema, and forms of popular culture. During the course, we will create Machinima projects while developing the theoretical framework around this approach as it relates to film and video, games, play, and participatory media.

Heads up from Frank Lantz at Games for Change 2009 for some inspirational examples of games helping us understand social change. Check out the blog Overcoming Bias, by economist Robin Hanson;  Intuition Games’ Gray game, which has players attempt to get players in a mob to switch sides; the phenomenon of “Kidney Chains,” where nonsimultaneous altruistic organ donations, if organized, can occur in optimally useful networks. Lantz talked about the practice of Min – Maxing in games, and the kidney chain is a game-like optimal solution to solving a social issue (there are 60,000 people waiting for kidney transplants at a given time). Finally he discussed optimal social solutions: complexity theorist Bruce Sawhill has noted,  “You no longer want to find the best solution — you want to be living in a space of good solutions, so when the problem changes, you’re still there.”

massively multiplayer mushu by Tiltfactor

June 12-14, 2009 join us to play two Tiltfactor urban games at the Come Out & Play Festival! The festival will transform New York City once again into an urban playground!

Opening on Saturday June 13 at 4 PM at the Festival HQ at the The Tank (354 W 45th St. between 8th/9th Aves)– Photopolis! Team up with players from New York, Beijing, and Shanghai for a cross-continental photography challenge.

On Sunday June 14 at 11 AM, start playing Massively Multiplayer Mushu! Talk to strangers, find clues, and fetch ingredients for a secret collective food festival!

There is a new podcast interview featuring yours truly, Mary Flanagan, along with Suzanne Seggerman about games for change at the Brainy Gamer. Everyone’s preparing for the Games for Change festival in NYC — just a few weeks away! Read more at http://www.tiltfactor.org.

Today Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School and Co-Founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, spoke at Dartmouth on “Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet.” Zittrain first defined the term “civic technologies” to mean those technologies that rise and fall and depend on participation.

Zittrain spoke first on Internet history: the development of the Arpanet –> Internet, he noted, was inherently playful and had an exhilarating sense of freedom and respect among users. The financial constraints for the development of the Internet significantly influenced — helpfully so — its design. Courtesy in networks, from access to attitude, as well as the the lack of business plans made this endeavor revolve around free information in the first place. Costs were low in production, and fees were not expected to be recouped through the use of the system (no sales, for example, were planned to support the infrastructure).

While many GTxA works are exhibited in Illinois, USA right now, if you happen to be in Germany,Tiltfactor‘s LAYOFF game has been included in an interesting new exhibition, “Let’s restart!!!” at D21 Leipzig, Germany. Other artists include Jim Andrews, Parangari Cutiri, monochrom, and Joan Leandre.

lets restart signage 2009

Tiltfactor is at new digs and has another new game. Tilt and the multi-institutional Values at Play project are proud to announce the release of the new casual computer game, LAYOFF.

Developed by members of the Tiltfactor Lab and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Game Design and Development program, LAYOFF is an examination of the current financial scandal.

Come one, come all to the variable_d public lecture series on Digital Arts and Humanities this Winter and Spring at Dartmouth College, Hanover NH. Jesper Juul, Celia Pearce, our own Nick Montfort, Tracy Fullerton, Eric Zimmerman, Katherine Isbister, Luis von Ahn, Ros Picard, and Doris Rusch will be visiting from January 2009 – June 2009.

We are very pleased to bring these fine scholars, artists, and designers to campus.

Dear GTxA readers, come one, come all to the inaugural open house at the new Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College!

Student researchers, lab staff, affiliated faculty, and I will be hosting our open house and holiday festival: TUESDAY the 2nd of December, 2008, from 3-7.
We will be showing games we’ve made (RAPUNSEL project’s PEEPS game, Profit Seed, Massively Multiplayer Soba, prototypes of Skoolin (codename) and Layoff) and games we like to study (too many to list here!). Hear the students talk about their projects, including a study being conducted in Aden Evens’ course on immersion with the game Warhammer, which I have heard will culminate in a performative game action on the college green this week.

We are also announcing our new lecture series, courses, and salon. The new lecture series, called the Digital Arts and Humanities Lecture Series 2009, will be underway as of January. Invited speakers include Celia Pearce, Tracy Fullerton, Jesper Juul, Nick Montfort, and more.

I’m sitting in a conference room in Bulgaria at the 20th annual Computer Space Conference in Sophia Bulgaria, listening to Peter Molyneux’s cousin who is a UK apple rep talk about Apple products (and the retelling of how indie developer Steve Demeter developed the $5 iPod game Trism for 250K profit) — all with the hum of simultaneous translation in the back.

This conference is Eastern Europe’s version of SIGGRAPH

Announced today, the The Games for Learning Institute (G4LI) is a joint research endeavor of Microsoft Research, New York University and a consortium of universities, including Dartmouth College. Tiltfactor will be home to the 3 year research initiative at Dartmouth, where researchers will be evaluating computer games as learning tools. We will be specifically focusing on math and science subjects among middle-school students. The Tiltfactor laboratory anticipates a limited number of student positions in relationship to this research, so please contact us for more information!

Perhaps you have heard reports of the new study funded by Pew and MacArthur on video games. The survey, Teens, Video Games and Civics, was conducted with 1102 young people aged 12-17. Some are saying the results are “surprising” and even that they “shatter stereotypes” by finding that almost all US teens play games (console, mobile, online, etc) and at least half play games on a given day. Other findings include that most teens play games socially, either with others physically or online, and these games can “incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.” Interestingly, this study, with its particular look at civic engagement, found that “civic gaming experiences” (defined in the study) occurred equally among all kinds of game players without distinction among income, race, and ethnicity categories.

Two games from Tiltfactor launch this week– an urban game, Massively Multiplayer Soba, and a screen-based casual game, Profit Seed. Participants are still welcome for Massively Multiplayer Soba this weekend in NYC@Conflux!

I’ve just taken a new position at Dartmouth College as the inaugural Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, where I will be centralizing the development of the digital side of things on campus as they relate to the arts and humanities. The post offers flexibility and time for both studio and academic research. My teaching will involve working across departmental lines; while my academic home will be in Film and Media Studies, I am able to teach courses across campus related to gaming, art, technology studies, innovation, design, and the like, in both theoretical and practical domains. Awesome! Tiltfactor, my laboratory, is moving with me, of course.

Like holiday decorations in your favorite retail outlet, faculty positions are being announced earlier and earlier every year!! Looking back on 2007’s post by Noah on available spots in the digital arts and humanities, game studies, and other positions related to those who might read (and post on) this blog, and seeing what a valuable asset to the community such postings are, I thought I’d start a “2008-2009” academic application year by beginning with an opening at Dartmouth College in Music.

There is apparently “anti-video game legislation” happening in New York state. Check out the letter from our own J.D.R. to NY developers, and if you are a New Yorker, decide to help if you can.