Grand Text Auto

News about game development, from USC’s great games program to the island of Malta! Tracy Fullerton’s game innovation lab is featured in the New York Times. Tiltfactor is happy to be honored with not only her work on various advisory boards, but also her insiprational pedagogy and loyal, generous students who also contribute to Tiltfactor and to Dartmouth’s games courses.

The University of Malta is part of an initiative to develop a games industry in the country.

Doris Rusch, MIT Gambit Game Lab

Wednesday April 28
4pm talk, “Purposeful Game Design” Tiltfactor Laboratory, 304 North Fairbanks, Dartmouth College

Thursday April 29th
Rusch visits 10am -12:  Game Design: Values at Play Course

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Marcin Ramocki, Filmmaker

Tiltfactor reps are in Taiwan listening to a panel at The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning, Digitel 2010 conference, where a panel discussion ensues on Research Policies on Technology Enhanced Learning. This panel is moderated by Ovid Tseng (Taiwan), with panelists: John Cherniavsky (USA), Chee-Kit Looi (Singapore), Roy Pea (USA), Chih-Wei Hue (Taiwan), and Beverly Woolf (USA).

If you happen to be in New England May 14th and have a burning desire for things digital, RSVP (so we can feed you) and drop in for the open-to-all, day-long Digital Humanities Symposium at Dartmouth College, 14th of May 2010. We have an impressive lineup of speakers, including Hany Farid, a computer scientist looking at image forenics; Laura Mandell, the Director of Digital Humanities at Miami University and the Chair, Committee on Information Technology, MLA; Doug Sery, Acquisitions editor, MIT Press; William Noel, curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books and Director of the Archimedes project; Tom Streeter; and so many more. Check it out!

This spring, visiting scholar Jonathan Belman is at Tiltfactor up at Dartmouth to do some research. We’ve been productive in research lately, with two new journal publications emerging from the lab: Belman, J. & Flanagan, M. (in press). “Exploring the Creative Potential of Values Conscious Design: Students’ Experiences with the VAP Curriculum.” Eludamos: The Journal for Computer Game Culture.
Belman, J. & Flanagan, M. (in press). “Designing Games to Foster Empathy.” Cognitive Technology Journal 14(2).

We’ve been busy at Tiltfactor! Our new Grow-a-Game card series is being sent to the printer as I type… We’re accumulating new Metadata games from our myriad developers, including Joe Pietruch and Charlie Whitney. We’ve begun working with Jonathan Jay Lee
on our educational, beautiful manga project. Out of the lab, we’re running the design course Values at Play: Game Design Workshop.
And, we have many more games in the works. Happy Spring!

Some of the Tiltfactor team members are attending Toyfair this week researching product development and educational toys. We especially enjoyed meeting folks at Rubbing Hands, a small company in Connecticut. They showed us their games including Fred and Capture the Gag, which were very well designed with interesting play dynamics.
We in turn shared Vexata,

our awesome board game that manifests in the rules various human values. Aimed for the middle school market, it is informed by our work on Grow-a-Game!

Did you know Tiltfactor has a YouTube channel? We have videos on the lab in general, the Playcube events, news coverage of the game LAYOFF, video of Massively Multiplayer Mushu and Massively Multiplayer Soba, and more.

In our director Mary Flanagan’s home state (coincidentally also home to D&D creator Gary Gygax and GenCon), Dungeons & Dragons is not allowed to be played in prison. In a recent New York Times article, prison officials were noted as saying that Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping” his or her incarceration situation. Another great discussion on this situation by Professor Ilya Somin at George Mason at this legal blog.

It is difficult to imagine anything but D&D as a wholesome family activity after this commercial:

Composer Pauline Oliveros joins us in our weekly variable_d salon via the
Dialogues. In Dialogues, students and members of the community come with ideas, themes, and questions and engage in a teleconferenced discussion of contemporary issues in the work. Past visitors have included Brenda Laurel, The Guerrilla Girls, and Katherine Hayles.

4pm, Jan 26th 2010
Tiltfactor lab

Additional links to Oliveros’ artifacts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9GJCL3PpYA
running electric charges through herself
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpJ2JjZhcFI

Pauline Oliveros, composer, performer and humanitarian is an important pioneer in American Music. Acclaimed internationally, for four decades she has explored sound — forging new ground for herself and others.

Please join us in Hanover for an upcoming symposium at Dartmouth College, “Activism in the Electronic Age: The impact of technology on political protest” will examine the recent 2009 Iranian elections and other historic moments of activism involving the use of technology. Tuesday, February 9, 2010 @ 4:30 PM, Location : Haldeman Center, Room 041.

We’ve got a slew games to design this winter term at Tiltfactor (http://www.tiltfactor.org), Dartmouth’s nonprofit game research lab — and you can help, if you are up to the challenge!

We’re asking Dartmouth students to propose to take on one of these five game challenges — more info will be sent on some of the projects upon inquiry. Approved proposals could launch student individuals or teams into game-stardom! Students who develop one of these games for Tiltfactor (with ample feedback from us) up to a working, fun, usable prototype will receive a Tiltfactor Fellowship, which comes with an honorarium of $1,000. Students of course will receive a design credit in the finished work.

Tiltfactor is interested in learning and in our context as an academic-focused research laboratory. The essay “Making College ‘Relevant” by Kate Zernike (Dec 29 2009) offers up an interesting take on “training” students for specific careers and jobs. While students and parents increasingly worry about the applicability of students’ future skills, the “Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on ‘the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,’ 81 percent asked for better ‘critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.’” We’re delighted to see this type of response. Students who work with Tiltfactor , and who learn at Dartmouth College, learn broad thinking, problem solving, and creativity skills while innovating in new forms of communication– in our case, games.

Indie Italian gamemaker Molleindustria’s release Every Day the Same Dream is a simple, elegant, exploration into the banalities of everyday corporate life.

While there are some glaring stereotypes that take away from its freshness and originality (especially in regard to gender; the character’s wife is in the kitchen with a frying pan in the morning and tells the character he is late for work; the office execs are all male, etc.), the game has a nice polish, another interpretation of the plight of the worker-drone already much explored in film (from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Mike Judge’s Office Space and Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer.)

Tonight, Kathe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls joined the variable_d salon to discuss activism in a digital age. Formed in 1985, the artists assumed the names of dead women artists and wore gorilla masks in public, concealing their identities and focusing on the issues rather than their tastes adn personalities. Between 1985 and today, over 100 women, working collectively and anonymously, have produced posters, billboards, public actions, books and other projects bring gender issues to the forefront of public debate and discussion.

Tiltfactor explores human values in games and in the game design process. Some of these values include things like sharing, loyalty, privacy, and cooperation. Often, these values are necessary for altruistic acts to occur.  Looking at the evolutionary roots for altruism, however, Dr. Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, studied how 18 month old children will automatically assist an adult who needs help opening a door. This behavior seems to arise earlier than most children are taught to be polite, suggesting that there is a natural inclination to help embedded within the human spirit. Read the November NY Times article, and
look at Tomasello’s book Why We Cooperate, with Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms and Elizabeth Spelke.

This just in from Tiltfactor at Sea correspondent E McNeill via games(TM) magazine.

Thursday 12 November 2009
at Dartmouth College

Feeling PLAYFUL this Autumn?
Join us anytime 4-7pm this Thursday, 12th of November for a
TILTFACTOR OPEN HOUSE!

Visit Dartmouth’s GAME RESEARCH LABORATORY, Tiltfactor
(http://www.tiltfactor.org).

ENCOUNTER our research with the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Values at Play, and the Games and Learning Institute!
PLAY our games (such as the casual hit of the spring, LAYOFF, and our new board game, VEXATA)!
SIP COCOA in the PLAYCUBE!
EXPLORE the games of Dartmouth’s student game designers!
JAM with Rockband — and SING so much, you’ll be a POPSTAR!!
EAT like Pac-Man from our esteemed snacks while you play!
ASK us about digital culture and games-related majors, minors, and courses!

Tiltfactor’s Mary Flanagan will be visiting MIT’s Gambit lab on Monday 2nd November, for Introduction to Game Studies. Later in the day she is speaking at the MIT series Purple Blurb about her art practice as it relates to her theory of Critical Play.

On Tuesday 3rd November, Flanagan is speaking in a Lunchtime Gallery Talk at 12:30pm related to the exhibition currently on, The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan.

First there is the series of conversations with folks like Kate Hayles, the Guerrilla Girls, and Brenda Laurel that is happening at Tiltfactor in the variable_d salon held in Hanover NH!

Second, a symposium on complex systems will take place next Friday (Nov. 6) that I thought would be of interest to many of you. It’s on Complex Systems and will be held in Spanos Auditorium at Thayer.  Keynotes will be given by Duncan Watts (Yahoo!), George Conrades (Akamai Technologies), and John Donahoe (eBay).

Fantastic! Join us!

Dartmouth College has a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor position available for an Animator. In two years (or less?) this person will be leading the animation area down the hall from Tiltfactor in the new Visual Arts Center. Work with great colleagues, collaborate with Tiltfactor, make friends at the nations’ first Center for Cartoon Studies the next town over, create great art, and teach excellent, creative Dartmouth students. Many things are possible here! Hurry – applications are due in November!

Tiltfactor’s Mary Flanagan will be speaking on the panel, “Designing For Impact: Where the Talk Meets the Walk,” with several other internationally recognized social impact game makers. “As the medium of games matures and new experimentation and exploration of the medium flourish, many game designers, educators and activists of all stripes are turning to games to address key international issues such as poverty, global conflicts and climate change. Games such as Food Force from the UN’s World Food Program and Darfur Is Dying are being played by literally millions of players. Yet what exactly are the end results? Is it enough to simply track numbers of plays or players and declare the game a success? Or is the emerging field finally ready to start looking more seriously at how to design for concrete impact in the real world? What if the game began with a petition, a march or a dollar amount needed and designed back from that real-world outcome? How do we build this new step into a design process already very well established? This panel of leading game developers and educators will discuss how a new paradigm of game design is needed to take this emerging field from Talk to Walk. Featuring Tracy Fullerton, Chair of EA Innovation Lab at USC, Mary Flanagan of Tiltfactor Lab, Alexander Eberts, Co-founder and VP Products, Akoha, and Suzanne Seggerman (moderator) President and Co-founder of Games for Change.”