Grand Text Auto

There’s a great profile of our lab director Mary Flanagan out –Read the full story by Jennifer Wulff ’96, published in the November/December 2014 issue of Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. And Dartmouth Now has some Tiltfactor news to share too!

There’s a lot going on in the lab this fall! Tiltfactor is hosting a webinar series on crowdsourcing; we just did “Crowdsourcing 101: Fundamentals and Case Studies,” and another is in the works for the new Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries and Archives (CCLA) funded by the IMLS. The group aims to bring together leading scholars, information specialists, archivists and more to collect best practices, shared tool sets, and strategies for using crowdsourcing. The first webinar attracted 187 registrants across 42 states as well as several countries.

Our lab director Mary Flanagan and her long time collaborator Helen Nissenbaum are proud to announce the release of Values at Play in Digital Games, just published by MIT Press! The book starts from the idea that human principles, or values, are already embedded in any game. They then present a practical framework for not only identifying values in games, but guiding designers to design for values in their work.

Inspired by the Value-Sensitive Design community and critical technical practice proponents, the authors started this values-centered game design movement with the Values at Play project, which features a curriculum, video interviews with designers, free design tools, and more.

We have great news for Tiltfactor fans in the UK! Our games Buffalo and Awkward Moment are finally shipping to the UK with the online retail partner Uncommon Goods!

The games are incredibly popular! Thanks, fans, for making it all happen!! Now, along with our new games (hush hush!) and nifty research, getting our games to the Continent is our next priority. We receive many many requests for games, including Grow a Game, all across Europe, and we know shipping is a real bear. We’re hoping to make this easier soon!

Tiltfactor researcher Geoff recently represented the lab (and the Metadata Games project in particular) at the 2014 Human Computation Roadmap Summit, held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, from June 18-20. This 2.5 day workshop, which brought together a diverse array of scholars, researchers, and industry representatives from the field of human computation, focused on identifying key success stories and laying out potential future research directions concerning the use of various facets of human computation (including systems such as crowdsourcing platforms, social networks, and online games) for the betterment of society. In addition to utilizing a number of unique and creative approaches to trigger thought and discussion (e.g., an illuminating conversation with scientist and author David Brin centering on the value of science fiction in highlighting future horizons for human computation), the summit gave participants the opportunity to form smaller working groups to devise and iteratively refine a set of detailed research roadmaps for the potential employment of human computation to address a particular social cause or issue.

Earlier this month Tiltfactor game designer Max Seidman represented the lab at the annual Games for Health conference in Boston. The conference is exactly what it sounds like: a place where game experts, health professionals, and health stakeholders come together to share innovations in improving health and health care through games, as well as to be inspired to make further breakthroughs!

Lab director Mary Flanagan and her collaborator, philosopher Helen Nissenbaum, are pleased to discover that their book Values at Play in Digital Games is coming to bookstores and Amazon (where you can pre-order it) in late July!

The book is a result of their work on Values at Play, a project with the National Science Foundation to investigate values in technologies and games. The book has all kinds of info on their theory about values in games, and goes on to get useful information to designers in a practical turn for makers of games. They talk about using Grow-a-Game cards too!

Those looking to develop games for impact might benefit from reading this handy guide from the White House Office of Science, Technology and Policy Academic Consortium on Games for Impact.

Check it out — the short pdf guide contains quick info on vetted sources,  cost estimations, and other resources.
Enjoy!

Thanks Edward Kim and The D!

Hello, friends, this is Jordan, the mysterious postdoctoral researcher, and I’m here to talk about a thing that we at Tiltfactor have been playing with more and more: text-based, interactive narratives. They’ve become big parts of several projects we’ve recently proposed, so it’s appropriate to take some time to think about why they might be useful and important ways to communicate values and institute social change (while avoiding that whole “boring and irritating” problem that more traditional appeals can have).

With a bevy of new additions joining veteran postdoc Geoff and returning research assistants Joe and Sara – including a brand new postdoctoral researcher in psychology Jordan Carpenter*, and an army of new RAs – the intrepid Tiltfactor research team is preparing to run an exciting slate of studies this fall!

The team is set to tackle a host of timely and provocative research questions. Here’s just a sample of them:

• Can a party game inspire greater interest in science and math?

This year’s Game Development Conference in San Francisco promises to be enjoyable and informative. We are doing a soft-launch of our new beloved tiltfactor.org site (uber exciting!), as well as following lab director Mary Flanagan as she’s speaking at the GDC Education Summit: Monday 10:00-11:00 Room 301, South Hall: http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12198.

(and, just for GDC, we’re donning our new sneak-preview Tiltfactor bling, soon available on our web site!)

We are also bringing student designer E McNeill, winner of the 2009 Imagine Cup game design second place, as he launches his first indie game Auralux; also along is Heidi Gamer, our Virtual Finance Expert. Tiltfactor is also participating in the Game Education Rant at the GDC on Tuesday 4:15- 5:15 Room 301, South Hall.

Ubermorgen’s Clickistan is a wild ride. Designed as a web art extravaganza, and in part serving to fund raise for the Whitney Museum of American Art (a pretty credible cause, as causes go) Clickistan is a conceptual work that locates its work somewhere “between the 7th and 8th bit of every byte.” In other words, Clickistan is a nation surfing the hinterlands of the on and off of binary logic. This makes us very excited at Tiltfactor!

Today at Tilt we are thinking about play and motivation, looking at variable ratio reward scheduling, empathy, and other means by which players might find pleasure in a game. To Caillois in his Man, Play, and Games, the experiences of competition, chance, altered perception (vertigo), and make believe are ways in which play can set the stage for pleasure. Csíkszentmihályi’s flow state (and the nice excerpt from Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention) is worth a read; it is a nice investigation into pleasure through perseverance. But what about the simple satisfaction of completion, or taking a step toward completion? Or, how about, the classic Barthes treatise on The Pleasure of the Text, one of Tiltfactor’s all time favorite reads?

a big big honor! Dartmouth Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies Jodie Mack received a Jury’s Choice First Prize award at the 2011 Black Maria Film Festival for her animated film. Mack describes her winning 28-minute “Yard Work is Hard Work” as “an animated musical featurette made with thousands of cut-outs from discarded printed materials. The piece follows a pair of newlyweds as they learn the perils of home ownership and life in general.”

Sherry Turkle is coming to Dartmouth to speak on the 10th of February about her newest research, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books. The 15th of April 2011 we’re hosting a DIGITAL POETRY SYMPOSIUM at DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, with leading digital poets John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Marjorie Luesebrink.
See more info at Dartmouth’s Digital Studies Website.

Indie Game Designer E. McNeill's new game, Aurora

Dartmouth’s own E McNeill has released his indie game Aurora for PC. Aurora is an ambient indie RTS game. It’s beautiful, abstract, and — be warned, it is utterly addictive!

Congrats E, we are proud of this fantastic accomplishment!

Researchers at Tiltfactor have been working into the wee hours on honing the Metadata system. Many doughnuts have been consumed as we work out plans for trust algorithms and community motivation.

Sukdith Punjasthitkul (Dartmouth ’98 MS Evaluative Clinical Sciences) and Robinson Tryon (Dartmouth ’04 BA Computer Science)

If you are interested in helping us test our system and games, let us know! We need many participants even in the testing phase.

Tiltfactor’s official foray into health games begins this spring. Our new board game and associated web based game are launching in March at the NH Immunization Conference. The game will be for sale on our newly designed website, launching also in March. Watch this space!

Since the 1950s, games have been a part of the culture of scientific discovery.
In 1951, The Nimrod was a special purpose computer built to play the game of Nim, for display at the Exhibition of Science during the 1951 Festival of Britain. In 1952, the game OXO, a naughts and crosses game (tic-tack-toe for Americans) was developed in Cambridge UK by Alexander S. Douglas, a PhD candidate, for an EDSAC computer, and this research lead to the development of the field of Human Computer Interaction. The game was displayed on a cathode ray tube used to control tanks.
In 1958, William Higinbotham, of Brookhaven National Laboratory, developed Tennis for Two.

see an emulation of the game, above!

Dartmouth student designer Max Seidman watches a playtest while MVHI Program Coordinator Edward Ihejirika plays

Tiltfactor is finalizing a game with local public health group Mascoma Valley Health Initiative in New Hampshire on immunization. The game will players understand “herd” immunity and the need to vaccinate against particularly pernicious diseases.

Check out the interview by our director on Resonance FM, UK from October 2010: Mary Flanagan discusses art, games, and activism.

Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor is a partner in the Games for Learning Institute, centered at NYU. We’re launching a game competition and invite you to participate!

wow! from 2003, some fun quotes here from our lab Director, such as
“I Love the Huge Pixels” — worthy of t-shirts!

Isn’t it interesting to get a reminder that even in carnie games, the American obsession with guns prevails? In the UK, the carnie game of choice is archery, as seen here in a vibrant Leicester Square.

and stereotypical, this recently spotted advert in London by Tiltfactor folks reminds us of some of the, ah, allegedly ‘old school myths’ about gender and computing.

Holiday shopping is already in swing. For him, the Vanquish Game. For her, Stella McCartney Gift Set.