Grand Text Auto

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contact -at- tiltfactor -dot- org
(603) 646-1007

July 31, 2012 (Hanover, NH) – The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced that Tiltfactor director Mary Flanagan is one of seven award recipients in the endowment’s inaugural Digital Humanities Implementation Grant program. The Digital Humanities Implementation grants “support the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field.”

(PDF version here)

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Contact:
cont…@tiltfactor.org
603.646.1007

Tiltfactor Laboratory is pleased to announce that ZOMBIEPOX™ has been selected for the IndieCade showcase at the 2012 annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show at the Los Angeles Convention Center from June 5th to June 7th. E3 is presented by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and is the world’s premier trade show for video game and related industries, with last year’s attendance peaking at 46,800.
http://www.e3expo.com/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
cont…@tiltfactor.org
603.646.1007

Dr. Mary Flanagan, director of Tiltfactor Laboratory and Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, will deliver several talks this summer and fall on such topics as critical play, games as an art form, and games as a medium for social change. Scheduled venues include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Games for Change Festival, and the IndieCade Conference.

I will be speaking on behalf of my artistic practice and Tiltfactor with Christopher Robbins, of the Ghana Think Tank, at TransTalks: Practice Makes Practice, a series of conversations among invited speakers, the MFA students in the Parsons Transdisciplinary Design program, and the public dedicated to exploring design’s capacity to investigate, disassemble and reframe the political, economic and social forces that define our everyday practices.

The goal for Flanagan is to allow the conversation to follow a similar path to the design process:  How do each of these artist/designers decide upon their design question? What methodologies are developed that shape that question? What outcomes could be considered successful? And importantly, in the form of a post-mortem across several projects as a reflective form of practice, How does failure play into particular experimental design endeavors?

Next Tuesday, January 31st, new media curator and digital art scholar Christiane Paul will be speaking in Loew Theater at 4:30pm. She will be presenting a talk titled “Feedback: Histories of New Media Art,” sponsored by the Digital Humanities Initiative and the Department of Studio Art.

Christiane Paul is the Director of the Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School as well as the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on new media art and technology with publications like Digital Art and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. At the Whitney Museum, she has curated shows like ”Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools” (May 2011), “Profiling” (2007), and “Data Dynamics” (2001), and the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Wednesday January 18, 2012 4-7pm
304 North Fairbanks

Come greet the new year with the folks behind Dartmouth’s Game Research Lab for an open house! Play video games and board games! Meet our student designers, staff, and founder Mary Flanagan– and play games! This time we will be playing Kinect games, and showing our own new games including POX for iPad and prototypes for our gender stereotyping and STEM field-related games, and we’ll discuss our new after school programs in Lebanon! And, we’ll play XBOX Kinect games and eat Thai food!

Huzzah!

Attention NH/VT Upper Valley kids!

The Tilt team is heading to the library, and we’re bringing our games with us!

On November 12th, we will bring many classic games (such as Set, Uno, and Apples to Apples) as well as our own mid-design stage games for some fun times.

We hope you’ll join us as with games, it’s always the more the merrier!

Game Day
Saturday, Nov. 12
1-4PM
Lebanon Public Library

Mark your Calendars!

Happy Halloween everyone! We’ve been keeping this a secret for sometime now and we’re happy to announce that POX: Save the People® is now available for the iPad!

All of us here at the Tiltfactor Lab are very excited about the release!

Based on our board game, POX: Save the People® is a 1-4 player game in which players fight the spread of a disease that threatens to take over a community. The game is based on the way a typical disease spreads, and players must work together to contain the spread of infection by either vaccinating or curing citizens.

¡Algo nuevo! ¡Tenemos las instrucciones para POX: Salve la gente, en español! Descargue las aquí.

Today is the last chance to get POX at the preorder discount! So order today if you want to buy POX for $21.95, because tomorrow it will cost $25!

Tomorrow if you have ‘liked’ our facebook page, then you’ll have a chance to win a free POX game and Tilt T-shirt! So if you haven’t done so yet, ‘like’ Tiltfactor right now!

We weathered the storm without mishap — and even had some leftovers! Now, the group is gearing up for a fruitful fall production period. Thanks to everyone who pitched in to make sure Tilt folks stayed safe. Our hearts go out to those whose homes and businesses have been destroyed by the flooding; the team wants you to know that we care and carry thoughts for you. We find ourselves very grateful that the lab, Dartmouth campus, and nearby surrounds went untouched.

We want POX (the game) to spread everywhere, so Tiltfactor is announcing the POX Outbreak Giveaway. Simply ‘like’ our facebook page for a chance to win a free copy of POX!

On 9/1 we will draw 2 names from everyone liking our facebook page. First prize is a copy of POX – 2nd Edition. The runner up will receive a Tiltfactor T-shirt.

What are you waiting for? Start liking!

Thanks to everyone for the tremendous response we received at Gen Con!

Because there was so much interest in POX, we’ve decided to start shipping the second edition early! No need to wait until September. In fact, if you order before September 1st you’ll still get the discounted pre-order price of $21.95 USD!

And we’re oh-so excited. Gen-Con: Release your inner gamer! August 4-7, in Indianapolis. As someone new to the Tiltfactor team, I feel such enthusiasm in the lab during game-play testing that I swear it’s contagious. Gladly, no vaccine for enthusiasm is necessary. Speaking of things being contagious, Pox’s popularity had us itching to ship in some more copies of the game, and now that they’ve arrived, I get feverish just looking at the sleek, sweet packaging! Okay, okay, no more pox puns.

Come meet us all at our Gen-Con Booth. We will have Grow-a-Game as well as our Giant Pox, Normal POX: Save the People, and a massively cool new SECRET game we’re testing on-site!

A couple of months back, Microsoft and the Games for Learning Institute(G4LI) challenged the public with the educational holy grail:

“Can you make learning fun?”

Tiltfactor, as the team of intrepid explorers that we are, rose to the challenge, and birthed Flagellla. Flagella was Tiltfactor’s response to Microsoft and G4LI’s task: To create games that can be introduced into schools that address certain curriculum points. Flagella is a flash game that not only addresses the concept of estimation but bundles in a mini-lesson on mutation as a bonus. In that sense it reminded me of the EA game Spore that I thoroughly enjoyed a while ago, but that’s a completely different ballgame.

For the past several weeks the Tilt team has been working on (among other things) a zombie-themed board game.  After several different versions with tons of interesting mechanics, we’re closing in on our final design!  Work together with your fellow players to evacuate the office before the outbreak escapes into the city.  Over the next few weeks we’re going to be testing and revising, and you should look forward to seeing a prototype in early August. We’re researching cooperative play with this one too, a hallmark of our design approach.

Want to get your undead on?  Come play the game at Gen Con, the EPIC game convention in Indianapolis!

Tiltfactor is going to Gen Con this year! Held in Indianapolis, Indiana August 4-7, 2011, Gen Con is “the original, longest running, best attended, gaming convention in the world.”

We will have an exhibit booth, demoing our latest game, the 2nd Edition of POX: Save the People, as well as a couple of other surprises. More details to come as we get nearer to Gen Con.

The Tiltfatory is cranking on the 2nd Edition of POX. 2nd Edition includes minor tweaks to the game board, cards, and the game instructions. If all goes well, we hope to have POX 2nd Edition game sets available by late August. What’s so awesome is that we are already getting pre-orders for the 2nd Edition. MUCHO THANKS!

Pre-Order now at a discounted price, now through 7/25!

Pre-Order POX 2nd Edition set

The Digital Studies initiative at Dartmouth College is seeking applications for postdoctoral position in Learning Sciences and Assessment. The Postdoc will be affiliated with The Tiltfactor Laboratory (http://www.tiltfactor.org), the leading game design research group in values-conscious design.

Tiltfactor at Dartmouth College designs, creates, and studies games. From social activist games, where we examine empathy, to games for health where we study if players are learning about immunization, we focus on what we call ‘critical play’ that fosters human values. We also encourage the artistic and innovative place of games in culture. Given the multidisciplinary nature of our projects, the candidates will likely have interests that span several disciplines, such as psychology, gaming, and learning; or machine learning, social games, and HCI. Technical expertise among candidates is highly favored.

Wow! In less than two months, we are SOLD OUT of the 1st edition of our Pox Game! But do not fret! The Tiltfactor team is publishing a 2nd edition. Pre-Order Edition 2 now! Expected ship date 9/1/2011. We’ll have some at GENCON in Indiana this August as well at our BOOTH!

Thanks to everyone who bought a set and helped -ahem- spread the word about POX.

The Indiecade call for submissions is OUT! Submit your game(s) as soon as possible and spread the word Submissions for the 2011 IndieCade Festival are now open!

IndieCade is awesome, for it is the only stand-alone international festival of independent games out there. The festival showcases budding new game designers from around the world — the student, basement hacker, and former industry idealist alike. The festival will take place October 6-9 in L.A.-adjacent downtown Culver City, bringing together the worldwide indie community, industry heavy-hitters, and players to see, hear, and experience the next big thing.

Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip Fruin, and Mary Flanagan, half of the art-theory collaboration Grand Text Auto, gathered at the Digital Games Research Association’s 2009 Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory in Uxbridge, UK. Mateas is speaking on “Operational Logics,” Wardrip Fruin’s paper is “Agency Reconsidered,” and Flanagan is presenting the co-written paper, “Anxiety, Openness and Activist Games: A Case Study for Critical Play,” and speaking in an interactive workshop called ““Some Assembly Required”: Starting and Growing a Game Lab.” In between these presentations, both of Flanagan’s more recent books (Critical Play and re:SKIN), and Wardrip Fruin’s Expressive Processing are available in the MIT bookshop on site!

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.