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Thanks to past GTxA hosts: the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture.
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Maanvi Singh has a piece about Buffalo on Code Switch, a race and culture outlet and a weekly podcast from American public radio network NPR. How awesome! Also listen to her earlier piece for Weekend Edition. Singh plays the game and interviews experts about the possibilities of shifting mental biases through games. When it is not sold out, the game is available through our retail partner Resonym on Amazon!
We are excited to report that we have a new paper out! Published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, our paper describes the potential of games as methods in social and personality psychology. We review the ways that games have been used in the past and provide a primer for researchers interested in making their own games for use in the psychology lab.
Freedman, G., & Flanagan, M. (2017). From dictators to avatars: Furthering social and personality psychology through game methods. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, e12368. doi: 10.1111/spc3.12368
There’s a new article by Matt Hongoltz-Hetling (@hh_matt) on Iowa farming strategies at the Weather Channel featuring some ideas from Professor Flanagan about motivating sustainable farming! There is other commentary from other faculty here at Dartmouth as well. Enjoy thinking about motivating sustainable behavior!! (Photo by Zach Boyden-Holmes).
A week ago, on October 2, we put Sentaniz Nimerik online. This is an electronic literature work, an example of digital storytelling and digital poetry, that is by Sixto & BIC and was facilitated by Michel DeGraff & Nick Montfort. It is in Haitian Creole — Kreyòl, as the language is called in the language itself. This language has a community of about 12 million speakers worldwide and is the language shared by everyone in Haiti. It is not the same as Haitian French or mutually intelligible with Haitian French (or any other kind of French).
The Gathering Cloud, J. R. Carpenter, 2017. (I was given a review copy of this book.)
Here are my slides from “C-Creativity: Cultural Creativity or, Why is there no middle C?,” the talk I just gave in Halifax. There are no text notes, and they don’t represent what I said very closely, but if they remind people who were there of my comments, that’s great. And if they provoke any questions, feel free to get in touch on the blog or by email.
Earlier this year we entered a Tiltfactor prototype game, Continental Drift, into the 2017 Board Game Geek Two-Player Print and Play Design Contest. This week we were excited to learn that, out of over 30 entries, Continental Drift was voted:
Whoa! We’re hoping to do something cool with this game, so stay tuned!
Tiltfactor has just started a local game development meet up –the Upper Valley Game Designers Meeting! Yes. First meeting is this Thursday, 6th July 2017, 6:30pkm at the lab, 245 Black Arts in Hanover NH.
Mary will be speaking in Delft next week, held jointly by ISAGA (International Simulation and Gaming Association) and SAGANET and at the Games for Change Festival in July!
“Renderings: Translating literary works in the digital age” by Piotr Marecki & Nick Montfort has been published, and is available online.
Typographers, fashionators, and makers of things most beautiful: Mary Flanagan and the Tiltfactor team are looking for an inventive new partner in design! We just posted an opportunity for an excellent graphic designer in our creative lab for social impact at Dartmouth College.
We do both print and digital projects, as you likely know, so we are looking for someone with a broad range of skills. Apply with your portfolio if you have inventive design chops and care about our mission. Remote work is possible, but for us to consider that, please be both an excellent designer and very organized. The official posting is here!
I just gave a talk at the local demoparty, @party. While I haven’t written out notes and it wasn’t recorded, here are the slides. The talk was “Book Productions: The Latest in Computer-Generated Literary Art,” and included some discussion of how computer-generated literary books related to demoscene productions.
My minimal book Sliders has been published by my press, Bad Quarto. The book contains 32 poems, some of which are only one word long. In a break from tradition, they are not computer-generated.
Currently Sliders is only available for sale at the MIT Press Bookstore, 301 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, Mass.
This post is more technical than most of our blog posts. If you’re not making computer games then this probably won’t be of terrible interest to you.
SALON 256 is a forum for presentation and discussion of very small creative computer programs. Such programs have featured in digital art and poetry, electronic literature, computer music, and the demoscene.
YOU are invited to present a tiny program of yours:
Monday May 1 . 5pm-7pm . MIT’s 14E-304
Presenters already confirmed:
Programs in an interpreted language are fine, as long as the code is 256 bytes or less; compiled programs with an executable file of 256b or less are fine, too.
Tiltfactor had the honor of hosting its first ever Game Jam in the lab as a part of the national Arctic Climate Game Jam (http://climategamejam.org). We had a great turnout, with creativity and free Thai food flowing through our participants’ veins. Esteemed Professor Ross Virginia, director of Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies, came and spoke to participants about the climate game jam and answered questions about climate change in general.
We split participants into 4 teams and they each will be creating games and coming back next week to present them. We will also be posting their projects on the blog next week. We can’t wait to see what they come up with!
The Trope Tank invites applications for a writer in residence during academic year 2017-2018, to start July 1 and with most involvement during the Fall, January, and Spring terms at MIT.
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:
Recent projects of the Trope Tank include Renderings:
Gordon, W. J. (1907). Round about the North Pole.
Max and I recently had the opportunity to talk to Barnard students in Stephanie Pfirman’s Exploring the Poles first year seminar about how games can be used as tools for effective communication.
To start things off, Max introduced Buffalo, and the students played for ten minutes. From our vantage point, it looked like there was fierce competition.
Our lab director, Mary Flanagan, is one of thirty fellows in the Higher Education Video Game Alliance. Read more about it in the Dartmouth news.
We’ve just received funding to design, create, and study a digital game intervention prototype to decrease loneliness in elderly populations, specifically in rural communities! We also have new support to continue our construal research (whether and how digital and non-digital platforms activate differing default levels of cognitive construal) by studying youth in a learning environment–this through the Neukom Institute at Dartmouth.
These projects, along with work on women in STEM, bias, and bystander intervention keep the team buzzing. Yay team!
Recently, at the suggestion of our writer in residence, Milton Läufer, we in the Trope Tankt have been producing digital files for discussion at meetings. These productions, almost always computer programs but not constrained to be such, must be at most 256 bytes.
It’s been extremely productive in terms of thinking about digital media, platforms and programming languages, and how we approach creative projects — and even other projects — generally. Postdoctoral researcher Sofian Audry prompted us to discuss this some at the last meeting.
So far we have three sets of 256b files which have landed in this directory, organized by date and with file names that indicate who wrote what:
Love is not Constantly Wondering if you are Making the Biggest Mistake of your Life. Portland, OR: Perfect Day Pub, 2011.
Roflcon III. Cambridge, MA: Self Published, 2012.
Bottke, Allison, Heather Gemmen Wilson, Gary Locke. Friend or Freak. Colorado Springs, CO: Faith Kidz, 2004.
Ball, Jonathan. Ex Machina. Toronto: BookThug, 2009.
(Also available from the MIT Libraries)
Bourbaki, Nicholas. If. Livingston, AL : Livingston Press, the University of West Alabama, 2014.
Burk, Jeff. Super Giant Monster Time! Portland, OR: Eraserhead Press, 2010.
(Also available from the MIT Libraries)
Carr, Mike. Robbers and Robots. New York: Random House, 1983.
This past week, I attended and presented three posters at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in San Antonio, Texas. The conference began for me with the Intervention Science Preconference, which made its SPSP debut. The day was filled with talks about how we can harness social psychology to create interventions to benefit society. Some of the highlights included listening to Dr. Mikki Hebl talking about her work on sexism, Dr. Betsy Levy Paluck discussing her research on creating anti-conflict interventions for adolescents, and Dr. Stephanie Fryberg describing her work with the newly founded school for the Tulalip tribes. During the poster session, I presented two of our studies on climate change to the other preconference attendees. At the main conference, I presented a poster on our work on gender bias in understanding STEM narratives as well as a poster on how relationship beliefs impact the way people think about ending relationships. Overall, it was an excellent conference and getting to hear about the current research in the field was invigorating.
New research from Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor Lab will be presented at theSociety for Personality and Social Psychology (#spsp2017) conference in San Antonio this week! Our fiction in STEM research, “Interpretations of a Science Bias Narrative Vary by Gender,” will be discussed by Gili Freedman and includes the work of Kaitlin Fitzgerald, Melanie Green, Gili herself, Geoff Kaufman, and Mary Flanagan.
Here are some venues at which to catch Mary Flanagan speaking or showing art in the spring of 2017:
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