Grand Text Auto

Computational Media is all around us — video games, social media, interactive narrative, smartphone apps, computer-generated films, personalized health coaching, and more. To create these kinds of media, to deeply understand them, to push them forward in novel directions, requires a new kind of interdisciplinary thinker and maker. The new graduate degrees in Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz are designed with this person in mind.

Did you know that our recent construal research is used by corporations like Samsung as they consider digital vs paper virtues? Or that game design teachers are modding Tiltfactor’s Grow-a-Game to consider issues of female exclusion in organizations? 

Dr. Mary Flanagan, Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies, and founding director of Tiltfactor Lab, at Dartmouth College notes that such examples show the real world impact of university research and innovation efforts. “If we can provide businesses and organizations with novel and equitable ideas and methods for future change, we are scaling up the impact of our research and creative approach,” she says.

Amanda Herz has been a student employee at Tiltfactor since the winter of 2016 and received a full-time fellowship in game design for the summer of 2016. Her daily schedule in the lab is usually varied, but Amanda works largely to create and implement games “with a focus on excellent user experiences.” While everyone at Tiltfactor works to target social issues and how to address these issues through games, Amanda is particularly focused on making sure that the games are as fun as possible for their players, because even the most impactful game will have no impact if nobody plays it.

Even in the summer months research doesn’t stop at Tiltfactor! We’re currently conducting game research at the Salt Hill Pub in Hanover and studying how party games are played.

Once concluded, the findings from these studies at Salt Hill Pub will join other papers and journal articles on our research, such as our recent papers on POX: Save the People and Buffalo the name dropping game. These studies, through illuminating the way individuals perceive and think about non-digital and digital media, can be, already have been, applied to gaming.

The Trope Tank is accepting applications for a writer in residence during academic year 2016-2017.

Our mission is developing new poetic practices and new understandings of digital media by focusing on the material, formal, and historical aspects of computation and language. More can be discovered about the Trope Tank here:

http://nickm.com/trope_tank/

The main projects of the Trope Tank for 2016-2017 are Renderings and Heftings, as I’ve described for a forthcoming article in Convolutions 4:

Here’s a first effort (as of 2am on July 22) at a bibliography of computer-generated books. I have not included books where the text has been obviously sorted computer (e.g. Auerbach, Reimer). I have included some strange outliers such as a book written with computational assistance and a book that is human written but is supposed to read like a computer-generated book.

I’d love to know about more of these. I’m not as interested in the thousands of computer-generated spam books available for purchase (unless a few of them are truly awesome), but would particularly like to know if some of the great NaNoGenMo books I’ve read are available in print.

Tiltfactor’s director Mary Flanagan was honored at the 13th Annual Games for Change Festival in June 2016!

Flanagan was awarded the Vanguard Award. This award recognizes the significant contributions of a practitioner by being a champion, advocate, and mentor for a new generation of game creators, and rewards outstanding individuals in impact games.

The Games for Change Festival organizers noted that Flanagan is:

“… A leading innovator, artist, educator and designer, whose works have included everything from game-inspired art, to commercial games that shift people’s thinking about biases and stereotypes. Flanagan established the internationally recognized game research laboratory Tiltfactor in 2003 to invent “humanist” games and take on social change through games.”

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

Scott Rettberg accepts the 2016 Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature

On June 11, 2016, during the Electronic Literature Conference at University of Victoria, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project won the top prize for a creative work in the field of electronic literature, the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2016 Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature! The jury’s remarks from the awards ceremony:

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature

This post is a distillation of some current thoughts on game preservation (extending to software preservation) that arose from a presentation I gave at Stanford two weeks ago. Video of that talk is here. The discussion in this post is a little more advanced and focuses mainly on the last 10-15 minutes of the talk.  I have also posted a link to another presentation I gave at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in February. This earlier one is exclusively about the issues with standard game preservation. If you are unfamiliar with this whole topic, definitely check it out.

Our new research studies published in the paper “High-Low Split” at #chi4good this year show that users demonstrate different types of psychological construal using digital screens– that is, a focus on concrete details (low level construal) as opposed to “big picture” thinking (high level construal), and media is very very interested in this research. This May our work has been covered in publications such as The Daily Mail, The Washington Post, Psychology Today, Fox News, Entrepreneur.com, and many news outlets in India, such as the Economic Times and Hindustan Times.

Mary Flanagan’s chapter ends the provocative Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (MIT Press 2016), Edited by Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. The book offers a diverse set of perspectives on wargaming’s past, present, and future, covering both digital and tabletop games.  In her chapter, “Practicing a New War Game,” Flanagan notes that wargames have long been understood a form of war simulation. She asks, however, if their simulation of conflict isn’t so much about war as it is about critical thinking and critique? In this conclusion to a very hefty, rich, and insightful book, Flanagan posits provocations against which readers can consider the readings in the book in order to continue to look at the ancient practice of wargaming in new light. In the end, she calls for new models of war games to foster creative solutions to all kinds of conflict facing the world today.

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 are looking for a full stack developer to create a small mobile application that can capture, process, and display images. The software is to run in a standalone setting— the main reason for mobile is to use the touchscreen on wall-mounted tablets (likely iPads) and access the camera. Therefore the project could be made in a wrapped browser window inside something like Phonegap — it’s not intended for distribution on the app store.

On Saturday, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (and, happy birthday, too, Will), I delivered to Twitter, via post-haste dispatch, the following four Commodore 64 BASIC programs, versions of the famous “Hello world” program:


400 ? chr$(147)"hello world":for a=1 to 500:next:? chr$(19)"brave":new:rem #c64

400 ? chr$(144)chr$(79)chr$(84)”hello world”:rem #c64

400 ? “hello world”chr$(4^3+(2b or not 2b)):rem #c64

400 for a=0to255:? chr$(147)spc(a)”(QRQ) hello world”:next:? chr$(147):rem #c64

Type ’em in to a for-real Commodore 64 or to this Web-based emulator here. No special characters are involved, so entering these programs should be easy; lowercase letters will appear capitalized and the few capital ones will appear as graphical symbols.

I had a launch event Saturday afternoon for my new book, Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities. Not a typical reading or book party, but a workshop for people completely new to programming but interested in pursuing it. It was at the excellent gallery and venue, Babycastles, on West 14th Street in Manhattan.

Tiltfactor Lab Open House

April 27 (Wednesday)
3:30 – 6:00pm
Room 245 in the Black Family Visual Arts Center (VAC)

Enjoy Thai appetizers and beverages while playing video games developed at Dartmouth’s very own Tiltfactor lab, including the award-winning Smorball, as well as top secret games still in development, and board and card games. Meet and chat about games and game design with Professor Mary Flanagan and the Tiltfactor team.

I’m pleased to announce the publication of Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities, an MIT Press book to teach programming as a method of inquiry and creativity, no background required.

I’ll be running events that are associated with the book to help people start programming. The first of these is at Babycastles (137 West 14th Street in Manhattan) on April 23. If you’re near and interested in starting to program, please sign up! A copy of the book is included with the workshop fee, which, with processing charges, comes in under $60 and supports this community-oriented gallery.

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 had a great panel at SXSW Interactive on March 11, exploring several radical ways in which langauge and computing are intersecting. It was “Hacking Language: Bots, IF and Esolangs.” I moderated; the main speakers were Allison Parrish a.k.a. @aparrish; Daniel Temkin
DBA @rottytooth; and Emily Short, alias @emshort.

I kicked things off by showing some simple combinatorial text generators, including the modifiable “Stochastic Texts” from my Memory Slam reimplementation and my super-simple startup name generator, Upstart. No slides from me, just links and a bit of quick modification to show how easily one can work with literary langauge and a Web generator.

Everyone, we are excited to announce that Dr. Gili Freedman will be joining our Tiltfactor team. Gili is a social psychologist who is interested in how people interact with each other and how we can make those interactions better.

She received her B.A. in Psychology from Haverford College and her Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, she was a visiting assistant professor at Roanoke College researching social rejection and teaching social psychology, personality psychology, and psychology in the media. Dr Freedman is very excited to be joining Tiltfactor this Spring, and we are excited to have her!

Christian read late last semester in the Purple Blurb series, a Trope Tank and CMS/W production. Here’s a video record of this appearance of his at MIT: