Grand Text Auto

Card games are more often associated with family-gatherings or leisurely afternoons than with realizing social change. However, one group of game designers is creating games with an aim to do just that.

Tiltfactor Lab, a Dartmouth College research laboratory with Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor Mary Flanagan at the helm, is dedicated to “creating games for social change.” They designed and produce Buffalo—described by Amazon reviewers as an “extremely simple,” “adaptable” party game—and Awkward Moment—and is “an interesting, family-friendly card game that is worthy of your attention” and “makes you laugh”— provide more than just endless fun at parties. According to a paper to be printed in CyberPsychology’s upcoming issue devoted to the prosocial effects of games, Buffalo and Awkward Moment are also games with a proven purpose. These games have been shown to change players’ implicit biases without them ever knowing!

Patrick Matlin Redondo is a senior at Dartmouth College and a game designer and researcher at Tiltfactor

Over the past year or so the Tiltfactor team has been working on a virtual reality puzzle game called “Entangled.” In Entangled, you’re trapped in a room, but you’re able to see a parallel dimension superimposed on yours. You can’t touch things in the other dimension, but you can get things in your dimension to overlap with things in the other dimension, “entangling” them and allowing you to manipulate them across both.

We are excited to launch our online adventure game, Crowded Dungeon!

Designed by Tiltfactor with development by Producto Studios, Crowded Dungeon at first seems like a traditional ‘dungeon crawl’-style game. The player directs a hero through many rooms of a very crowded dungeon, frequently encountering monsters that bar her way. Unlike traditional games, instead of fighting the monsters, players must talk their way past them; you’ll need to figure out what each monster wants, and figure out what you can type to convince them to let you pass.

We are excited to launch our online adventure game, Crowded Dungeon!

Designed by Tiltfactor with development by Producto Studios, Crowded Dungeon at first seems like a traditional ‘dungeon crawl’-style game. The player directs a hero through many rooms of a very crowded dungeon, frequently encountering monsters that bar her way. Unlike traditional games, instead of fighting the monsters, players must talk their way past them; you’ll need to figure out what each monster wants, and figure out what you can type to convince them to let you pass.

At the  recent annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, from January 23rd and 26th, Mary Flanagan offered her thought leadership on panels, dinners, and gave a presentation on games for impact. The panel “Putting Jobs Out of Work” had an excellent team of business leaders and academics; watch the video of  her solo talk, “Game Changers: Playing Games for Good” and read a (mostly) accurate description of the talk.

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At the  recent annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, from January 23rd and 26th, Mary Flanagan offered her thought leadership on panels, dinners, and gave a presentation on games for impact. The panel “Putting Jobs Out of Work” had an excellent team of business leaders and academics; watch the video of  her solo talk, “Game Changers: Playing Games for Good” and read a (mostly) accurate description of the talk.

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There’s a new article by Matt Hongoltz-Hetling (@hh_matt) on Iowa farming strategies at the Weather Channel featuring some ideas from Professor Flanagan about motivating sustainable farming! There is other commentary from other faculty here at Dartmouth as well. Enjoy thinking about motivating sustainable behavior!! (Photo by Zach Boyden-Holmes).

Typographers, fashionators, and makers of things most beautiful: Mary Flanagan and the Tiltfactor team are looking for an inventive new partner in design! We just posted an opportunity for an excellent graphic designer in our creative lab for social impact at Dartmouth College.

We do both print and digital projects, as you likely know, so we are looking for someone with a broad range of skills. Apply with your portfolio if you have inventive design chops and care about our mission. Remote work is possible, but for us to consider that, please be both an excellent designer and very organized.   The official posting is here!

Tiltfactor’s director gave day one’s closing keynote at Connected Life 2016: Collective Action and the Internet, a two day-long conference, held at the University of Oxford on 20th and 21st June 2016. The conference is dedicated to igniting multidisciplinary exchanges on internet research across information studies, digital humanities, psychology, engineering, business, health, and computer science. This is an excellent gathering focused on emerging research that brims with promise for the further of tech scholarship. @OxConnectedLife

On the 14th of May 2016, Tiltfactor’s director, Mary Flanagan, received an Honorary Doctorate in Design from the Illinois Institute of Technology. She was honored with an honorary degree with Ray Kurzweil, inventor, and Chris Gladwin, entrepreneur.

The degree recognized, among other significant contributions, the innovative focus human values in design, and research into gender in computing, in her work.

Mary Flanagan (Center) with President Cramb (Left), Ray Kurzweil, and Provost Frances Bronet (Right)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media contact: Amy Olson | amy.d.olson@dartmouth.edu | 603-646-3274

Digital Media May Be Changing How You Think
New Study Finds Users Focus on Concrete Details Rather than the Big Picture

HANOVER, N.H. – May 9, 2016 – Tablet and laptop users beware. Using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly, according to a new study published in the proceedings of ACM CHI ’16, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held May 7-12. The findings serve as another wake-up call to how digital media may be affecting our likelihood of using abstract thought.

We’ve been talking about player psychology to nudge us toward a better world for years and years. Journalists have even called this “social engineering.” That’s interesting, because games are intricate designed systems and typically, though not always, they are social. So social engineering may be an apt term for games in general, and not simply games that try to effect positive change.

Our research in bias is pushing ahead with thinking about implicit bias and stereotype threat. After the release of our recent paper “A psychologically “embedded” approach to designing games for prosocial causes,” which garnered national attention in the media, we’re currently working with digital and non-digital narratives to understand how these could help alleviate bias. And oooh, we have some really interesting data.

Madden NFL 11 – EA Sports

Game telemetry is being used both during development and post release. One of the most exciting applications of this work is the use of game telemetry to support the game design process. Game telemetry analysis can help a designer answer the following questions:

• How do players interact with the game?
• Which features, modes, and content are players experiencing?
• Why do players quit playing the game?

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.

Puyo Puyo games are simple puzzle games that require the player to rotate falling pairs of objects to build combos of four or more of the same color.  If the objects aren’t matched, they stack up and if they reach the top, the game is over.  As the levels progress, players must rotate the pairs more quickly in order to survive, as the speed at which the pairs drop increases.

One commercially successful example of a Puyo Puyo game that I played as a child is Sega’s Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.  The final level is depicted below, so you can get an idea of the gameplay.

Tale of Tales just released a new game or rather “experimental play experience” (a phrase surely concocted to appease those who don’t accept their repurposing of the word game).  Anyhow, it’s called Fatale and it is awesome.

Starting with The Endless Forest, Tale of Tale’s have consistently created environments that exist for the purpose of being looked at and explored.  This may not sound all that unique as most 3D games have environments that are explored, but the difference is that these games exist solely for this purpose.  To them, game environments are not containers for gameplay, but rather are the reason for gameplay.  By only affording the player navigation controls, the player’s mind is free to embark on a journey of induction and introspection.  In their own words, Fatale “offers an experimental play experience that stimulates the imagination and encourages multiple interpretations and personal associations.”

Recognize this? Of course you do.

I started playing Magic: The Gathering when I was in 5th grade.  Like all things from that age, it was a fad, and quickly faded behind the next hot toy.  However, I have been amazed with the frequent resurgence of the game in my life.  Multiple times, I have witnessed people with little in common admit that they were fans of the game, usually reluctantly or in jest, only to see enthusiasm snowball until a community has formed around the game, happily dishing out large sums of money for the latest cards.

I created a short game called Rationalization to help me think through some ideas.

The game is very abstract and its message is primarily procedural.  I look forward to hearing any reactions you may have.

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In my last post, I discussed how games are being used to communicate, not just to entertain.  Today, I want to discuss The Great Flu, a game recently released by Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  The game attempts to educate the public about the dangers of and difficulty in containing flu pandemics.

I don’t need to tell this audience about the momentum building behind educational games.  Even when I was an elementary student, going to the computer lab to play Math Blaster, Odell Down Under, or Oregon Trail was a special treat.  These days, kids grow up on video games: game consoles are nearly as common as TVs in households; cell phones are standard issue for kids of all walks of life; the internet is available to everyone, with its countless easily accessible, free games.

This summer, I’m working with Matt MacLaurin at Microsoft Research on Kodu Game Lab.  For those of you who aren’t familiar, Kodu is an environment for people with no programming experience to quickly create games.  Its visual programming language is designed to be intuitively understandable and its library of characters and objects facilitate rapid game development.  If you’re interested in checking it out yourself, it’s currently available for the very reasonable price of $5 through X-Box Live Arcade.

 One of my goals for the summer is to introduce some interesting AI features to the characters of Kodu.  Among those features is learning.  We want Kodu characters to be able to adapt their behavior based on their experiences.

A sketch for a "cute little dungeon crawl"

I’ve got a whole philosophy of game design I’m sitting on here, but today I’d like to share just one little provocative tidbit: game designers design players too.

Here’s a nice, simple game prototype that explores the core movement, inventory, and timing mechanics of Motherload that took just 10 minutes to design and 60 minutes to program using our new design tool.  Rather, this is the half of a nice, simple game prototype that supports human play testing, but there is more to it than that.