Grand Text Auto

This past weekend Tiltfactor brought a bunch of our upcoming tabletop games to the Boston Festival of Indie Games at MIT! Among the 50 tables, the lab was represented at five!

We brought Bill of Health and Gut Check, two strategy games about the state of the U.S. health care system. Luminaries and Skyline are part of our BIAS project combat gender bias in science. Monarch is our crowd favorite – players play the daughters of the dying queen, vying for the throne.

This past week marked the launch of our brand new game in the Metadata Games project: Stupid Robot. In this quick and easy arcade game, players score points by teaching the adorable robot words about the image they are presented with. Players strive to teach it one word of each length, 4-letters long to 10-letters long – but there’s a catch! Stupid Robot doesn’t know every word; it only knows words that other players have already taught it.

“Stupid Robot looks at everything but understands nothing. Can you help? Teach it as much as you can about the image it sees. If you do well, soon Stupid Robot will become Smarty Robot!”

Earlier this month the Tiltfactor team headed down to New York to play new game prototypes and our classic hits with high school students on Staten Island. Professor Flanagan gave students insight into the process of designing games, and then they got a chance to try them out! As you can see below, the testers loved Awkward Moment (as always).

The students also enjoyed Microbes, a fast and furious card game designed to encourage players to wash their hands. They shared their thoughts about the game, which will help our design team improve the game play experience and our researchers make the game as effective as possible!

Yesterday team members Geoff, Max, and Joe reunited with Tilt’s former researcher Cote to play RePlay Health at the Center for Primary Care at Harvard Medical School’s 3rd Annual Innovation Conference with a group of community members, undergraduates, medical school students, and health professionals! Attendees took part in perhaps the zaniest workshop at the conference when they played our role-playing sport that models the U.S. health care system. “The Great Grabowski” was the name of the highest scoring group – they scored on average 23 points which is also an all time high score for RePlay Health sessions in general.

Just to be clear, I don’t condone gladiatorial fights (involving anyone) as a form of social control. That said, I believe the child gladiatorial fights in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy have several poorly and lazily designed elements that make the games both feel less fair to the competitors, and less fun to watch as a spectator sport.