Grand Text Auto

At Tiltfactor, we wanted to celebrate our first term back in person with a shout-out to our amazing student squad! These critical play superstars are hard at work in the @tiltfactor lab examining gender bias in AI datasets, testing upcoming editions of games both old and new, and keeping up with current events in the world of games and social impact. Coming from diverse academic disciplines, passions, and backgrounds, all of our students add a valuable lens to our work.

But while we could definitely hype them up all day, we thought you’d like it more if you heard it from them directly! Read on to check out their self-introductions.

If you thought my last post about a 32 byte (plus 2 byte load address) Commodore 64 demo was esoteric, wait until you burrow into this one.

Back in March at Lovebyte I released a C64 demo that is a total of 6 bytes. I contrived this one so that the 4b of code end up “wedged” into a zero-page routine that runs every time RETURN is pressed. The effect is a pulsing pattern on the border. (You can just as easily make the screen pulse, which I personally find less aesthetically pleasing because the pulsing in that case happens over any text that is on the screen. It’s also a bit more eye watering and more likely to trigger seizures.) While it’s a very simple effect, I don’t know of any demo at all for this platform that has this file size or any smaller one. Some extensive trickery was involved in injecting my code into existing memory contents to produce this effect.

Yesterday I wrote a little demoscene production, an intro, called “Tyger Tyger.” It’s a Commodore 64 machine language program with 32 bytes of code and the requisite 2 byte header, found on all C64 PRG files. It only garnered third place out of five entries in the 256b compos at @party 2021, behind two impressive entries that were for a different platform (DOS) and went to the limit of allowable code (eight times as much).

Tiltfactor and LabX examine the challenges of forensic science in an upcoming game that will be announced this fall. Can you and your partner figure out the clues in time? Look for a sneak peak coming soon!

Dartmouth Alumni Magazine’s, Ask the Expert series, interviewed Professor Mary Flanagan in light of the significant increase in consumer spending on games during the pandemic. Check out what Mary says here. 

As a scientist sucked into a conflict playing out across parallel universes, you will have to solve puzzles between alternate versions of your lab to stay one step ahead of pursuit. Log in to Steam and check it out here: Entangled on Steam.

Sponsored by the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth (ICE), scientists and humanists gathered to ponder our future from different perspectives. See Tiltfactor’s Director, Professor Mary Flanagan’s talk entitled “Love in the Glitch: Humanizing the Future” here.

Dartmouth Professors share six words of life advice with the Class of 2021. See what Professor Flanagan and her colleagues have to say to Dartmouth’s latest grads! https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2021/06/professors-share-six-words-of-life-advice-with-the-class-of-2021

Tiltfactor’s Director, Professor Mary Flanagan’s new chapter, “If you Play it,  Do you Believe It?” has now been published in a new book. “Narrative Mechanics: Strategies and Meanings in Games and Real Life“, eds Beat Suter, René Bauuer, and Mela Kocker, Columbia University Press, explores the relationship between game mechanics, political narratives and motivational design.

Tiltfactor’s mobile trailer, called the “Playcube” has been used for many different types of events over the years, including art performances, exhibitions, and installations; game play-testing and research studies; and most recently as a ‘rental’ booth for Outdoor Programs. As COVID protocols required social distancing practices, even outside, the play-cube became a safe venue for the rental of cross-country skis and ice skates this past winter. Outdoor Programs will continue to use the cube as a safe place for students to meet program representatives and borrow equipment for various outdoor activities throughout the spring.

Aifric Campbell’s new novel The Love Makers contains an essay by Professor Mary Flanagan. For more on her larger Feminist AI project, check out Flanagan’s studio work here: https://studio.maryflanagan.com/

Kristen Toohill, former visiting researcher at Tiltfactor and author of the “Buffalo Facilitator’s Workbook” publishes two recent articles discussing both the game and the book. Read “How To Use a Fun Party Game to Tackle Implicit Bias” and “How to Enjoy a Virtual Game Night with Colleagues” to find out more!

Flanagan discusses games as an art form and more in this interview on “table for One“.

Dead Alive Press has just published my Golem, much to my delight, and I am launching the book tonight in a few minutes at WordHack, a monthly event run by the NYC community gallery Babycastles.

This seems like a great time to credit the editors and presses I have worked with to publish several of these books, and to let you all know where they can be purchased, should you wish to indulge yourselves:

• Golem, 2021, Dead Alive’s New Sight series. Thank you, Augusto Corvalan!
• Hard West Turn, 2018, published by my Bad Quarto thanks to John Jenkins’s work on the Espresso Book Machine at the MIT Press Bookstore.

For Immediate Release
March 17, 2021

Tiltfactor Lab at Dartmouth College is pleased to announce a new partnership with LabX, a public engagement program of the National Academy of Sciences that seeks to generate interest and enthusiasm around science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) topics through a variety of creative strategies. Through this collaboration, Tiltfactor and LabX are designing and developing a science-themed tabletop game, which will designed to captivate and excite players while demonstrating the relevance of science and scientific thinking. While most people recognize that science improves our lives, it is often perceived as complex and unapproachable. The Tiltfactor and LabX partnership aims to address this problem.

Tiltfactor’s own Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman, along with Tilt alum Geoff Kaufman have a published a new Chapter called “Creating Stealth Game Interventions for Attitude and Behavior Change: An ‘Embedded Design’ Model,” in the book Persuasive Gaming In Context, edited by Teresa de la Hera, Jeroen Jansz, Joost Raessens and Ben Schouten. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021,  pp. 73-90. http://doi.org/10.5117/9789463728805_ch05

Check out Professor Mary Flanagan’s essay on game history, “A Path to Our Futures,” in the inaugural issue of the new journal ROMchip!

Find out in Professor Mary Flanagan’s forthcoming article: “Using Comics and Tweets to Raise Awareness about Gender Biases in STEM.” Co-authored by former Tiltfactor Post-Doc researchers Geoff Kaufman and Gili Freedman, along with Melanie Green of the University of Buffalo. Psychology of Popular Media (forthcoming 2021).

Professor Mary Flanagan has published a new essay entitled “Taking Binaries off the Table” in the book Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games, eds Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and John Bath. New York: Routledge, 2020.

The Hopkins Center for the Arts, Department of Film & Media Studies, and Tiltfactor Lab are partnering up host this virtual event as part of the 2021 Winter Carnival Celebration. Alumni in various parts of the gaming industry including Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto 5), Activision (Call of Duty), and Xbox (Wasteland 3), and Electronics Arts (The Sims 4) will participate in a panel moderated by Professor Mary Flanagan on Tuesday, February 16th at 5:00pm. REGISTER HERE TO JOIN THE EVENT

Flanagan and others have recently published an article in the Psychology of Popular Media entitled: “Obituaries can popularize science and health: Stephen Hawking and interest in cosmology and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”

Generative Unfoldings is an online exhibit of generative art, running live in the browser and consisting entirely of free/libre/open-source software. I am curating the exhibit. Sarah Rosalena Balbuena-Brady, D. Fox Harrell, Lauren Lee McCarthy, and Parag K. Mital worked with me to select fourteen artworks. The show will feature:

• Can The Subaltern Speak? by Behnaz Farahi
• Concrete by Matt DesLauriers
• The Curse Of Dimensionality by Philipp Schmitt
• Gender Generator by Encoder Rat Decoder Rat
• Greed by Maja Kalogera
• Hexells by Alexander Mordvintsev
• Letter From C by Cho Hye Min
• Pac Tracer by Andy Wallace

Professor Mary Flanagan, Director of Tiltfactor, has published an essay entitled “Enter the Dragon” which is included in De Koven’s posthumously published book, The Infinite Playground. The essay describes the time that Flanagan met De Koven in Denmark during a game event at a DiGRA conference. Flanagan details a game De Koven led– a physical, group game that opened the minds of even the most experimental game designers present. His knack for getting the naysayers and spoil-sports to truly play, to move outside their comfort zone into a realm of discovery, will always be remembered.

Tiltfactor’s Mary Flanagan discusses the psychology and meaning of games from a long term humanistic perspective in this fun podcast with game designers Gil Hova and Emma Larkins.

Find out in this article co-written by Tiltfactor’s Mary Flanagan, Max Seidman, and others in the journal Psychology of Violence.