Grand Text Auto

Looking for gifts but don’t know what to get? The Tiltfactor staff has come up with gift picks that should satisfy the “non-gamer” or 733t player.

Check out the gift suggestions from Tiltfactor’s most popular Post-Doc, Geoff, and incredible interns Max and Erika (reprinted from our Facebook Page):

In the Boston area? Please join us today for the last Purple Blurb event of the semester:

Penumbra: Rich Media & Gestural Text

Samantha Gorman

Creator of Penumbra, Books of Kells, Canticle

Instructor in Performance Studies & Digital Literature, RISD
M.F.A. Brown University

Monday, December 5, 5:30 pm

MIT’s 6-120

Samantha Gorman is a writer and media artist who composes for the intersection of text, dance, performance, and digital culture. She holds an MFA and BA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where she studied poetry and writing for digital media. Penumbra, a hybrid art/literature app for the iPad created with Danny Cannizzaro, challenges the notion of a static “ebook” by carefully integrating short film, rich animation, illustration and fiction.

Sponsored by the Angus N. MacDonald Fund

As always, this Purple Blurb event is free and open to the public.

Madden NFL 11 – EA Sports

Game telemetry is being used both during development and post release. One of the most exciting applications of this work is the use of game telemetry to support the game design process. Game telemetry analysis can help a designer answer the following questions:

• How do players interact with the game?
• Which features, modes, and content are players experiencing?
• Why do players quit playing the game?

I really hope this gets to you in time! During a trip to Brookline,
Massachusetts I was robbed — robbed of all poetic impulse. All of the
brilliance of language was stolen from me. My poetic license was taken as
well. I need your help encountering English once again.

I know the unusual diction of this note, the unusual nature of this
request, the fact that I am using more than one exclamation point per
email, and the fact that it is being sent to everyone in my address book
must make it seem like my account was hacked, but I assure you, that’s
not the case!

Recent developments in digital game hardware allows for multiple methods of interacting with a given game. For example, the Nintendo DS incorporated the use of both a stylus-based touchscreen and tangible game control buttons. Similarly, Android and iOS games often use a combination of touchscreen controls and accelerometer-based controls.

In these platforms, there is often a moment in which players must transition from one mode of interaction to another, or use both simultaneously. I believe this transition or need to multitask a player’s mode(s) of interaction can be utilized to develop new skills.

In the Boston area? Please join us for a talk by

Brian Moriarty

Creator of Wishbringer, Trinity, Loom, and other interactive fiction and graphic adventure titles

and professor of practice, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

“Beyond Zork: Games & Interactive Fiction”

Monday, November 28, 5:30 pm

MIT’s room 6-120

Brian Moriarty built his first computer in the fifth grade. He began
publishing games in the early 1980s and in 1984 joined legendary text
adventure company Infocom, where he authored three award-winning interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer (1985), Trinity (1986) and Beyond Zork (1987). His first graphic adventure game, Loom, was published in 1990 by Lucasfilm Games to wide critical acclaim.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Here’s a little more (okay, a lot more) to digest along with your turkey (or tofurkey) this year…

Given that one of the major goals of Tiltfactor’s current research is to design games aimed at reducing implicit bias held toward (or by) women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), I thought it would be worthwhile to take a step back and discuss what psychologists have discovered about implicit bias – and how games might be an especially powerful means of reducing or combating it.

An exhortation for those creating or researching electronic literature to please submit to Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints, the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization conference. The gathering will take place June 20-23, 2012 in Morgantown, West Virginia. A juried Media Arts Gallery Exhibit will be held from Wednesday, June 13 through Saturday, June 23, 2012 at The Monongalia Arts Center. Registration costs have been kept down to make it easier for writers and artists who don’t have institutional travel support to be part of the event.

The deadline for abstracts & proposals is November 30, by the way.

An interview that James J. Brown, Jr. did with me is now up as part of the latest issue of JEP: The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

It’s entitled “The Literary and the Computational: A Conversation with Nick Montfort.”

I’ve banged up against some fairly conservative, and indeed rather backwards, ideas about what publishing is recently; it was great to talk with Brown and see him and JEP representing a much more positive idea.

We’re planning a workshop on Design Patterns in Games in conjunction
with next year’s Foundations of Digital Games conference. There is
more info on our website (http://dpg.fdg2012.org/) or you can contact
me directly.

CFP follows:

I went to the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science this weekend (Sunday and today), and gave the keynote that opened this event. I spoke about Platform Studies, describing how the difference between Pong and Hunt the Wumpus could be better understood by considering that these games were made of different stuff — different material computing systems. Then, I brought in the five-level model of digital media studies that I introduced in Game Studies in my article “Combat in Context” back in 2006. I spoke about the existing and forthcoming titles in the Platform Studies book series by MIT Press: Racing the Beam (Montfort & Bogost, 2009); the book on the Wii, Codename: Revolution by Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal; and The Future was Here by Jimmy Maher, covering the Amiga. I also spoke about 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); GOTO 10, a book engaging with platforms that I, and nine co-authors, are completing. Finally, I concluded by offering 16 questions about the digital humanities, in a lecture moment that was inspired by a particular 20th century American composer.

This winter, there is a new media art course being offered between two departments at Dartmouth.

Currently the course is accepting enrollments!

STRP Festival

The 2011 STRP Art and Technology Festival in Eindhoven NL will host lab director Mary Flanagan (that would be me) in a keynote talk at the miniconference “Master of Play,” and show four of her new video works. The STRP Festival is one of the largest art & technology festivals in Europe. It should be rad! The eclectic mixture of art, technology, music + e-culture has made it a highly-anticipated annual event. It is designed to appeal to a wide audience, and the multidisciplinary program boldly “combines a full sensory experience and adventure.” Can’t wait!

This year the AAAI Fall Symposium Series included a track organized by Pat Langley on Advances in Cognitive Systems. Pat identified the following objective for the symposium:

Pursue the initial goals of artificial intelligence and cognitive science: To explain intelligence in computational terms and reproduce the entire range of human cognitive abilities in computational artifacts.

Pat’s motivation for re-evaluating the goals of artificial intelligence is presented in a recent editorial in Machine Learning, while my motivation for attending the symposium was to discuss how to build integrated, heterogeneous agents. The introduction to the symposium was a discussion of why AI research has gone astray. Pat identified the following issues in his talk:

When we started making Prom Week, our mission was to make social interactions truly playable. While games have increasingly gotten better at physical simulation, social interactions in games still tend to be scripted, with most games using dialogue trees of some form. A result of this is that many games end up being about physical conflict, as the physical simulation is the only part of the system dynamic enough to enable interesting gameplay.

Just like physics simulations in puzzle games such as Angry Birds support many emergent solutions to game challenges, we want to support emergent gameplay for social interaction.

*uck. After five years of activity at the dawning of the Web, after about fifteen years of keeping the site online, it seems that they are gone.

For the past two years we’ve been working on a game called Prom Week and I’m happy to announce we’ve just launched our closed beta! Look here for announcements, news, and tales of its development in the coming weeks!

Prom Week is a social simulation game where the player shapes the lives of a group of highschool students in the most dramatic week of their highschool career. Each story is centered around a character, and it is up to the player how it goes. Using our sophisticated social artificial intelligence system, Comme il Faut, Prom Week is able to combine the dynamic simulation of games like the Sims with the detailed characters and dialog of story driven games.

Attention NH/VT Upper Valley kids!

The Tilt team is heading to the library, and we’re bringing our games with us!

On November 12th, we will bring many classic games (such as Set, Uno, and Apples to Apples) as well as our own mid-design stage games for some fun times.

We hope you’ll join us as with games, it’s always the more the merrier!

Game Day
Saturday, Nov. 12
1-4PM
Lebanon Public Library

Mark your Calendars!

Twelve Propositions from a Critical Play Perspective:

1. Values are everywhere,  designed into play and into games

2. The history of computed games has created certain types of interactions.

3. These technical constraints have limited what we think we can do today.

5. Unorthodox methods spur change.

6. Meaning in a game  comes from the feeling of responsibility.

8. Producing challenging work as an artist means that  you are willing to break the rules.

Happy Halloween everyone! We’ve been keeping this a secret for sometime now and we’re happy to announce that POX: Save the People® is now available for the iPad!

All of us here at the Tiltfactor Lab are very excited about the release!

Based on our board game, POX: Save the People® is a 1-4 player game in which players fight the spread of a disease that threatens to take over a community. The game is based on the way a typical disease spreads, and players must work together to contain the spread of infection by either vaccinating or curing citizens.

Puyo Puyo games are simple puzzle games that require the player to rotate falling pairs of objects to build combos of four or more of the same color.  If the objects aren’t matched, they stack up and if they reach the top, the game is over.  As the levels progress, players must rotate the pairs more quickly in order to survive, as the speed at which the pairs drop increases.

One commercially successful example of a Puyo Puyo game that I played as a child is Sega’s Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.  The final level is depicted below, so you can get an idea of the gameplay.

Games are by definition about reward. You can’t have a game that doesn’t reward you in some way for doing something. Most games have both long-term rewards (say, winning in Monopoly), and short-term rewards (say, receiving money when someone lands on your hotel). I think it’s quite clear that these rewards are what make games so appealing to us as humans. In general, we like being rewarded for performing well.

When I find myself addicted to a digital game, I often find myself dreaming of and longing for a particular mechanic of the game. Below is a list of some game mechanics that I’ve found myself addicted to in the past:

Hey everyone!  I’m super excited to be involved in Tiltfactor’s NSF Bias project and will be reflecting on how current games have contributed to or influenced the topic we are addressing.

This week, I will be briefly discussing how Milton Bradley’s The Game of Life could potentially impact its players’ career and/or life goals.

The Game of Life is a table-top board game designed for children 9 or older that allows players to live through a compressed version of adulthood — from college to retirement.  Along the way, players get to do “adult things” like choose jobs, get married, have children, and buy a home.  I would like to specifically address how this game creates a skewed perspective of the potential benefits of going to college.

¡Algo nuevo! ¡Tenemos las instrucciones para POX: Salve la gente, en español! Descargue las aquí.

Our entire team has read the research report by the Association of American University Women (AAUW) that offers compelling evidence to help explain what is going on in the US with science, technology, math and science and women. By the way, in 1885, a group of AAUW members conducted a survey that debunked the popular theory that higher education was bad for women’s health. . . So, thanks to the organization for that one, and for more contemporary research on women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.