Grand Text Auto

Tiltfactor’s Mary Flanagan is giving a talk this Wednesday in the UK at METAL, and participating in an arts pecha kucha this Thursday.

METAL is the artist’s laboratory space set up by Jude Kelly OBE in 2002 to create space for artists and thinkers to develop their ideas and further the philosophy of their work. METAL is committed to supporting artists from all disciplines through residencies, commissioning, producing, debate and discussion, touring and publishing.

The public is invited to participate in the third autumn debate sponsored by METAL, entitled ‘Visualising Our World’ at the Park Suite, Chalkwell Park at 7.30PM on Wednesday 20 October 2010.

Tiltfactor is interested in design and human values, and our influential research project begun in 2005 with Helen Nissenbaum and Mary Flanagan (PIs) with a group of diligent, introspective, and committed researchers called Values at Play has produced a strong body of research. Check out the article in the Canadian game studies journal Loading… Vol 3, No 4 (2009) for our article “Instructional Methods and Curricula for “Values Conscious Design,” which details the curricula and instructional materials created to date. Values at Play researchers investigate how social, moral, and political values are expressed in digital games. Values at Play has developed a systematic approach to considering values in the design process. We have also created and disseminate for all a values based curricula and instructional materials including online Grow-a-Game tool for introducing game design students to the consideration of values in “values conscious” design. Another useful report on research is published in Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 2010; 4 (1), p. 57-67. “Exploring the Creative Potential of Values Conscious Design: Students’ Experiences with the Values at Play Curriculum” offers a report and discussion the results of a focus group study and design work conducted with students in an undergrad game design course with the Values at Play curriculum. Enjoy more articles posted on our website — the project has produced nearly ten journal and conference publications to date , and games from Layoff Profit Seed to Massively Multiplayer Soba and Massively Multiplayer 晚餐 [wǎncān] – and thanks to all of our team members, and especially our Advisory Board: Celia Pearce, Tracy Fullerton, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, Katie Salen. Values at Play has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Better than ever before, the new series of Grow-A-Game cards are out!

Grow-a-Game are colorful, professionally produced brainstorming tools used in top game design programs at major universities, in game design companies, and in high school programs. Version 2.0 now comes in three different sets (Classic, Apprentice, and Expert). Thousands of participants since 2007 have brainstormed games using these values-centered tools. Tiltfactor developed the cards as part of our research with Values at Play, a National Science Foundation research project led by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum.

The Small World Exhibition examines how the world is being shaped by new technologies, setting this in the context of the last 160 years of industrial and global change. To accompany the show there will be a series of talks and educational events.

Opening times: Thurs / Fri / Sat 11am – 6pm.
Or by appointment. Please call 01702 470700.

Venue: Chalkwell Hall, Chalkwell Avenue, Southend-on-Sea SS0 8NB

Small World Fair – programme of events:

A series of panel-led discussions with artists, activists, business leaders and academics will debate technology, its impact and implications for progress and society.

The innovative X0y1 project in Spain has released a new Spanish ebook of cyberfeminist writing! Download it here!
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Como parte de las actividades de X0y1 (plataforma para la investigación y la producción artística sobre identidad y cultura de redes), ellos presentan su 1er ebook X0y1 #ensayos sobre género y ciberespacio, Coordina: Remedios Zafra; Traduce: Natalia Pérez-Galdós. Colaboran en esta publicación: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. A ellos hemos sumado la traducción de una breve selección de trabajos sobre estudios de género y cultura digital de investigadoras que trabajan sobre feminismo y tecnología como Mary Flanagan, Gesche Joost o Sandra Buckmüller. Puedes descargarlo en: www.x0y1.net/ebook/

Mary Flanagan’s collaborator at Tiltfactor in the rather hush-hush Book of Jing manga project, Jonathan Jay Lee, has had a solo show in Hong Kong and been featured in Penninsula magazine as a “rising star” in the comics world.

Go Jonathan!
And… a sneak peak — Book One!

This past week’s Virtual Cinema course at Dartmouth College proved that machinima works can go far beyond the tried and true. A mere handful of students explored lost love, gaming culture, poet-zombie attacks, and perhaps most importantly, the pensive and strange qualities of virtual life. Check out their playlist, and celebrate with Tilt.

Dr. Cordelia Fine, with a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, notes in her summary of many gender studies in her book, Delusions of Gender, about gender and the brain a) several studies have found no difference in hemispheric size in neonates; b) the allegedly bigger female corpus (callosum) is in dispute and c) size vs function has not been proven: as Dr. Fine notes, “getting from brain to behavior has proved a challenge.” There may be biological difference in brain, but what do they show us about our thinking?

A recent article in the Washington Post discusses South Korea’s world-leading gaming culture. Considered the world’s most technologically integrated country, with high numbers of gamers and internet users, South Korea is the one to watch as far as gaming policies. Appx 95% of households have broadband access, and in July 2010 there were appx 420,00 concurrent users of the popular online game Maple Story — that is about one in every 115 South Koreans playing the same game at the same time. The e-sports movement has gained massive momentum in South Korea as well, with popular Starcraft competitions.

The 3G Summit a visionary 4-day initiative in Chicago that convenes 50 urban teenage girls with five leading women game designers and scholars for intensive dialogue, inquiry, game-play, and mentorship. Through multi-faceted workshops and a public forum, this initiative will critically confront gender representation and participation in our society’s fastest growing cultural medium.

In their quest to use human computation ability to its fullest, U-Washington researchers made a game called Foldit available on the web to model the folding of proteins. Based on Rosetta@home project, where volunteers were contributing the downtime on their home computers to power a protein-folding program, Foldit uses human volunteers as game players. (Read further in a recent NYTimes article). Players can compare their results in the system and celebrate the acuity of pattern-recognition among people!

There are many recent studies that try to discover anew why, during a time when women are increasingly prominent in medicine, law and business, there so few women scientists and engineers.

The 2010 AAUW research report Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) presents evidence that can help to explain this puzzle. Primarily, the research points to environmental and social barriers – including stereotypes, gender bias and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities. These elements persist to block women’s participation in STEM, but the report does recommend things everyone can do to help the associated fields open up. A collection of related recent reports can help flesh out this picture. The good news: Women are slowly on the increase in academic departments in these areas. The bad news: women continue to earn less $ than their equally educated and experienced male counterparts, across the board in almost every career category.

device design by Ed Flanagan

We’re taking a moment to reflect on the lab’s move to Dartmouth. First, we found some press to share if you’d like to chart our progress with us! In an upcoming post, we’ll review all of our new games. It has been a lot of fun setting up camp at Dartmouth and we’re thankful for the support and enthusiasm around us. Thanks to colleagues near and far, friends, advisory board, the administration at our home institution, our emerging program, staff, interns, and STUDENTS!
Go Tilt!

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There have been a variety of recent news reports on the relationship between computer ownership and education patterns around the world. The NY Times article from 9 July 2010, Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality, is one of the many articles discussing the recent studies by economists about class, income, computers, and academic achievement. Duke researchers just released a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper called “Scaling the Digital Divide.” It examined the introduction of broadband internet service from 2000-2005 in North Carolina. Their study examined the simultaneous effects on middle school testing scores in that period. Unfortunately, there were lower math scores as broadband was introduced, an after several broadband providers appeared to serve an area, there was a decrease in reading scores.

The study ultimately suggests that home computers and Internet access may have a negative effect for those already poor, and can contribute to widening academic achievement gaps between groups. Indeed, a study with middle schoolers and free laptops in Texas noted “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.”

Try our online version of the Grow-A-Game© cards!

We are currently waiting for the arrival of our new editions of Grow-A-Game, so our ordering area is offline for the moment until they are in.

The lab is in full swing with several projects: Metadata Games, a game exploring biodiversity, and some games for health– right now, HIV games and games to combat sexual assault. Interns this summer are: Max Seidman, Alicia Driscoll, and visiting for the summer from USC, Mike Ayoob. Folks working with us this summer include Playmatics, Cecile Williams, Robinson Tryon, Vanessa Moy, and Sukdith Punjasthitkul. Welcome!

and…Finally!  After 7 years, we have Tiltfactor bling! Soon available on our web site.

The 2010 Summer courses at Dartmouth have begun: Virtual Cinema, which is an exploration of Machinima practices as well as a hands-on studio course in game-related movie making, and Games and Playculture, a theory seminar on play.

Visitors to the classes include designer and theorist Celia Pearce, designer Tracy Fullerton, machinima maker Claus-Dieter Schulz, senior level designer Zach Wilson, screenwriter Lisa Dethridge, and Hugh Hancock of Strange Company (machinima).  A very exciting term in a very beautiful New Hampshire/Vermont summer (rainbow spotted today! reminding me of the students’ beloved game…

A recent article highlights Dartmouth College’s rather unusual approach to game design by basing the process in humanistic thinking. Influenced by Professor Mary Flanagan’s commitment to social change design and human values through the Values at Play project, the students enrolled in Dartmouth’s games courses bring their eclectic backgrounds to the design process to make unique games. Currently in the works at the lab: games for pressing healthcare issues, a game on sustainability and biodiversity, metadata games, and research with the Games for Learning Institute, focusing on the links between industry designers’ everyday knowledge and popular learning theories.

A recent article highlights Dartmouth College’s rather unusual approach to game design by basing the process in humanistic thinking. Influenced by Professor Mary Flanagan’s commitment to social change design and human values through the Values at Play project, the students enrolled in Dartmouth’s games courses bring their eclectic backgrounds to the design process to make unique games. Currently in the works at the lab: games for pressing healthcare issues, a game on sustainability and biodiversity, metadata games, and research with the Games for Learning Institute, focusing on the links between industry designers’ everyday knowledge and popular learning theories.

We at Tiltfactor send out a tribute to Canadian game inventor Chris Haney, one of the designers of Trivial Pursuit.  We’d also like to those who have come before us to enrich our games, especially those at Dartmouth:  Thomas Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, inventors of the BASIC programming language, invented at Dartmouth College in 1964; Richard Tait, Dartmouth Alum and inventor of Cranium; Steve Russell, one of the students behind the game Spacewar! at MIT, finished his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College in 1958; John Donahoe (a really nice guy), with Ebay and Skype; and Ernest Everett Just, a distinguished African American biologist who graduated from Dartmouth in 1907,  Dr. George Stibitz, faculty and inventor of the first digital computer in  1940, and those who, in 1956, created the field of artificial intelligence research at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for decades!

catch it all tomorrow with a Tiltfactor open house 3-6pm hosted by Digital Humanities Professor Mary Flanagan and her student design team in 304 North Fairbanks, Dartmouth College;

followed by  “Rebooting Our Democracy”
a public lecture by Prof. Lawrence Lessig
7:00 p.m.  Thursday, May 27, 2010
Filene Auditorium, Moore Hall  Dartmouth College

Lawrence Lessig is Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics,
and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  He is the author of Remix (2008),
Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004), and The Future of Ideas (2001).  He has won umerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.
This event is free and open to the public.

After the Digital Humanities Symposium last week and the visit by Filmmaker Marcin Ramocki, Dartmouth is happy to host this week Helen Nissenbaum
Professor of Media, Culture and Communication and Computer Science. Nissenbaum will be giving a talk on “What’s Wrong with Behavioral Advertising?”

Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication and Computer Science NYU
May 18th at 3pm     105 Thornton Hall
Co-Sponsored by the Philosophy Department, Digital Humanities, and ISTS

Avatars discovered in the tenure process? Mobile spaces for transmedia exhibitions? Ancient manuscripts in MRI machines? Teaching with databases instead of texts? How are technicians, scientists, artists, designers, and humanists pursuing 21st-century research? How are institutions of higher education affected along with the scholars? As witnessed in scientific fields, new technology radically affects the ways in which scholars pursue their research. Digital technologies foster new questions about materials, practices, archives, and networks, and the digital affects the ways in which resources are archived, queried, searched, created, taught, and studied.

Stay tuned — a new PLAYCUBE event at Dartmouth!

Friday, May 7th: AREA+the Playcube present
“This is my World”
The Spring Student Art Exhibition
Gallery opening from 5-7PM, with the Cube serenading the Top of the Hop
Music + refreshments provided!
(in the belly of the the CUBE=digital photography and short films from the Dartmouth community!)

Dr. Doris Rusch visited Dartmouth today, and offered a compelling discussion of the purposeful use of games. She looked at the ways in which the human condition is expressed through other media such as language, literature, and film, and went on to argue for the value of thinking about games in their use of metaphor. Discussion several important recent design trend, Rusch skillfully moved between the theoretical and the practical, making lofty goals ideas concrete in designed form. This was followed by a game night at Tiltfactor, hosted with the help of the Jewel of India.

in the Tiltfactor laboratory