Grand Text Auto

We’re happy to announce that Tiltfactor is the proud recipient of an Arts Integration Initiative Grant from the Hopkins Center for the Arts to sponsor our student and faculty-led work. Our ongoing project is focused on using feminist AI to explore gender bias in art and create new works from female artists.

The Arts Integration Initiative “is part of the Hop’s Arts at the Core Initiative which aims to enrich disparate areas of study through the arts and to support an arts-infused network of students, faculty and artists.”

It’s been a while since I stopped over in Buffalo, but I’m finally unfrozen, and I’m unfreezing my blog, too, to comment a bit on the exhibit I saw — this was the purpose of my brief wintry sojourn — Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art at the Albright-Knox Northland. I visited the show with my spouse, Flourish; Tina Rivers Ryan (who curated the exhibit with Paul Vanouse) was kind enough to give us a big chunk of her day and provide a detailed tour.

Tiltfactor founding director Mary Flanagan and Tiltfactor alum Gili Freedman (currently Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland) recently collaborated on an article entitled “The Effect of Embodying a Woman Scientist in Virtual Reality on Men’s Gender Biases” for the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior.

Flanagan and Freedman, along with collaborators Max Seidman (Tiltfactor Senior Game Designer) and Melanie Green (Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Buffalo) tested “whether embodying a woman scientist in virtual reality (VR) leads to more positive attitudes toward women in STEM.”

Tiltfactor Lab’s very own Mary Flanagan was inspired by the Atari 2600 digital experiences of her childhood to create the artwork [giantJoystick], a 10-foot tall Atari CX40 controller weighing about 3,000 pounds.

[giantJoystick] was recently recognized by the Guinness World Records 2022 Book as the largest joystick in the world and is currently housed in the permanent collection of ZKM Center for Art and media in Karlsruhe, Germany. To learn more about the piece and gain exclusive insights into Mary Flanagan’s artistic journey, check out our Dartmouth News profile below!

Source: https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2021/10/atari-style-artwork-makes-guinness-world-records-2022-book

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.”