Grand Text Auto

Windham Aging, a Vermont-based nonprofit, aims for older Vermonters to be self-determined, connected, and fulfilled. And they’re making plans to get there.

In the summer of 2025 Professor Flanagan’s Game Design Studio class partnered with Windham Aging to create games to help older players: age in place, and be more self-determined, fulfilled, and connected. Student teams designed 5 tabletop games with different genres and goals. They created games from concept through to finish physical product, and delivered the resulting games to Windham Aging to be played by their partnering organizations!

Growing Closer

NarraScope is just a cool cool event, and this year it’s pay what you can and online. NarraScope 2020: Celebrating Narrative Games May 28 – June 4  2020. On Thursday May 28, we discovered that Matthew Farber is running “Terrifically Awkward: Games To Teach Social Emotional Learning” (link) using our very own Awkward Moment party card game for middle school age kids and older. Hurray! The game is backordered at Uncommon Goods, whah! but is available on Amazon.

Years ago we created a board game, POX: Save the People, a gane tgat helped players understand infections diseases, as well as ZOMBIEPOX and POX: Save the Puppies, about vaccinating pets. Watch a video about the project, read an interview, and read one paper about an empirical study, looking at the basic question of whether transferring a public health game from an analog to a digital format would impact players’ perceptions of the game and the efficacy of the game for stimulating changes to beliefs and cognitions; or read paper two which looked at the design process and how we modeled “herd immunity.” We love public health, with or without the undead.

Grace is a sophomore at Dartmouth College doing game design, development, and research at Tiltfactor

There’s a reason computer science majors are stereotyped as being socially awkward. It’s because we are. That’s why when I started working at Tiltfactor, the one part of the job I was not sure I could handle was the communication with other people. It is also the area of the job that I have learned the most from.

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.

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).

March is a time of many talks! Tiltfactor director Mary Flanagan spoke at the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series at the University of California Berkeley. The audience represented those interested in art, dance, post colonial studies, gender studies, game design, and even peace studies. It was fantastic to meet you all!

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.

https://vine.co/v/eBFut17iE3b
Tiltfactor folks are busy making new Metadata Games! Fun!

For Immediate Release:
September 30, 2014

The National Science Foundation’s Research on Education and Learning (REAL) program has awarded Dr. Mary Flanagan, Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth, and collaborator, Dr. Melanie Green, University at Buffalo, a three-year, $1,134,208 grant to develop and research an “interactive narrative” technology for use by students and instructors in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms.

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!

For Immediate Release

January 22, 2014

Hanover, NH — A photograph or a piece of film might stay in a library storage box for one hundred years and be seen by very few visitors. What if that image or that film could be digitized and posted online, so that the public could not only see it, but help librarians discover its subject? Or identify the speaker in an archival video? And what if the public could contribute that new knowledge through play?

We are excited to launch Play Southend, an online game to imagine the future of Southend-On-Sea in the UK, tomorrow at the Village Green arts and music festival! Play Southend draws on open participatory techniques to develop a collective vision of the town created by its communities. In the game, players — of all ages and experiences — take on challenges, such as obstacles and prizes, that are entirely created by community members. Players play over time and the world grows through endless drawings.

The following is the third in a 3-part series of posts by Tiltfactor student interns. Metadata Games is a NEH-funded open source project that uses games to help crowdsource archive and library holding tags. Here, interns Andrea and Viviana briefly describe their prototyping process for designing a competitive multi-player mobile game:

Our team was assigned with the task of creating a mobile, multiplayer metadata collection game that incorporates elements of fast paced competition and “one upping” your competitor. The catch is that we had to turn what worked as a competitive synchronous game into an asynchronous game. How would we enable players to form an exciting attachment to the game and be competitive with each other as each player interacted with the game over varying time spans? What would make players come back and play another round?

This week at the annual Game Developer’s Conference Education Summit, Tiltfactor Director Mary Flanagan has been called out to a ‘Game Design Curriculum Deathmatch,’ where leading game design instructors battle it out by revealing secrets to their game design teaching, their design philosophies, and pedagogical quirks. Speakers include yours truly (Mary), USC Interactive Media Division chair and Game Innovation Lab director Tracy Fullerton, UC Santa Cruz Expressive Intelligence Studio co-director and Expressive Processing author Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Rules of Play and the Game Design Reader co-author and NYU Game Center professor Eric Zimmerman. The program will be MC’d by designer Justin Hall! Don’t miss it — the session ID is 823443.

The following is the second in a 3-part series of posts by Tiltfactor student interns. Metadata Games is a NEH-funded open source project that uses games to help crowdsource archive and library holding tags. Below, interns Alannah and Rebecca briefly describe their process for designing a tag verification digital game:

Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College is seeking applications for a postdoctoral research position in Learning Sciences and Assessment for the 2013-2014 academic year. The postdoctoral researcher will be affiliated with Tiltfactor Laboratory (http://www.tiltfactor.org), the leading group in values-conscious game design and research, which is led by Dr. Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and Professor of Film & Media Studies at Dartmouth.

In my short time as a game design intern here at Tiltfactor, I’ve found the real difficulty rests in the balance between challenge and simplicity (as it often does with the rest of life). How do you foster arenas for motivation, learning, and fun without tilting too far into states of boredom or anxiety (as described in the Three Channel Model of flow)?

Kiili’s (2009) Extended three-channel model of flow (modified from Csikszentmihalyi, 1991).

In his paper “Digital game-based learning: Towards an experiential gaming model” Kristian Kiili (2005) argues for an educational game model, integrating educational theories and game design, that facilitates “flow” of flow theory in order to design meaningful and engaging educational games.

Ideally, medical solutions would be straightforward. If a patient had an illness, they could go in to see a doctor, who would then have a diagnosis and an effective treatment option that aligned with the patient’s preferences and desires. In reality, it isn’t so simple, and there often isn’t a “best” option. Pioneered at Dartmouth, shared decision making involves increased communication between health care providers and their patients, in order to find solutions that best fit patients’ interests. The results seem to be overwhelming, with almost 70% of patients surveyed preferred taking part in making decisions with their doctors (The Guardian, 3/10/12). At tiltfactor, we’ve been working on our shared decision making game prototype. In our most recent game iteration I worked on coming up with potential treatments—such as surgery, topical treatments, or electing to undergo screening, and other actable qualities of a patient—working as a TV presenter, paranoid of needles, or having the responsibility of taking care of two young children.

Just to be clear, I don’t condone gladiatorial fights (involving anyone) as a form of social control. That said, I believe the child gladiatorial fights in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy have several poorly and lazily designed elements that make the games both feel less fair to the competitors, and less fun to watch as a spectator sport.

Modeling health system dynamics with a game of tag about zombies? Sounds impossible, but the Tiltfactor team experimented with just such a wacky game on the Dartmouth Green! The human team runs away from the zombies, because if they get tagged then they have to change teams. Meanwhile, the humans can choose to call in one type of specialist per round: either the soldiers to stun the zombies (you can’t kill them, duh), the medics to heal tagged humans, or the scientists to turn the zombies back into humans.

What a busy summer at the Tiltfactor Laboratory! As we have been preparing for GenCon and working on our games, we also spent some time at the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, NH hosting a Gamecrafting Workshop for local youth.

We had a wonderful week getting to know our campers and helping them design games! On Monday, campers played games such as Awkward Moment™ and Battleship to learn about games and what makes a game fun. On Tuesday, campers incorporated the game design ideas they learned from Dr. Flanagan and the Tilt staff to create the first prototypes of their games.

For Immediate Release
Contact: info @ maryflanagan.com

August 1, 2012 (Hanover, NH) – Tiltfactor Laboratory proudly presents two new games: buffalo™ and Awkward Moment™. buffalo is a card game of quick wits and zany combinations that requires players to flex their recollection muscles. In each round, players race to make matches using cards listing noun and adjective descriptors. The first to shout out the name of a real person or fictional character who matches the descriptors on two or more word cards, claims the matched cards, and flips over a new noun/adjective pair. When the deck runs out, the player who collected the most cards wins.