Grand Text Auto

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.

Professor Flanagan discusses Tiltfactor’s work during the online Games for Impact festival in Poland celebrating games with social impact on December 8-11, 2020.

Check out this comprehensive report on Tiltfactor’s large multi-year research project on bias and women inn STEM! Cutting Through the Bias: Using Games and Interactive Experiences to Transform Bias Against Women in STEM, is now available on Amazon!

In January 2021 Tiltfactor Lab will kick-off a new project with the National Academy of Sciences LabX to design and develop a board game to engage and excite players about science!

Amazing Quest should be completely open to the interpretation of players, to their appreciation of it, and, if they choose, to their rejection of it.

I refrained from discussing anything about the game during the IF Comp. Now that it’s over, I am glad to answer some questions that have arisen—with the earnest hope that my answers don’t preclude people from coming up with their own interpretations and responses.

These aren’t really frequently asked questions, but they are all actually questions that have been asked at least once. When I quote directly, the quotations are from anonymous feedback from IF Comp players. Whether quoted or in paraphrase, all of these are real questions or responses that I’ve gotten.

Professor Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman contributed to an article entitled “Developing and piloting videogames to increase college and university students’ awareness and efficacy of the bystander role in incidents of sexual violence.” Games for Health Journal 8, no. 1 (2019) 24-34. The article is cited in Catherine Sanderson’s new book, Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels.

Sharang Biswas D’12 TH’13 and former Tilt staff member has done it again! His new game: Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games has been nominated in the 2020 IndieCade Games. His 2018 game: Feast won the Indie Groundbreaker Award for “Most Innovative” game and was nominated for “Game of the Year” at the same awards.

Figma Visual Game; Temptation by Akiah Watts (above) and stig · ma  by Irene Lam (below) explore social conflict admist pandemic times.

Professor Mary Flanagan became chair of the Film and Media Studies Department in June.