Grand Text Auto

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:

• First off, Mary’s work [bombscotch] is showing in the PUSH PLAY exhibition January 12 – March 4 2017 at the Hedreen Gallery, Seattle http://www.gamescenes.org/2017/01/event-push-play-january-12-march-4-2017-hedreen-gallery-seattle-1.html
• Also in January: I’m in HACKING / MODDING / REMIXING as Feminist Protest at the Miller Gallery CMU that begins January 28 http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/HackingModdingRemixing/index.php
• In February, she’ll be at the College Art Association speaking on the panel, ‘Game Studies at 20’ 17 Feb hosted by John Sharp with Ian Boost, Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth. http://ow.ly/2fmV307OPCI 
• Mary will be speaking at the Board Game Studies Colloquium http://bgs20.tors.ku.dk  Copenhagen, Denmark 17-20 May!

Tiltfactor’s director Mary has found herself quite into Instagram. You’ll find her posts crossing all the domains in which she works: the art world, Tiltfactor, game industries, writing, and other curiosities. Find her Instagramming over at @critical.play, https://www.instagram.com/critical.play/

My New Year’s poem for 2017 is Colors, a 1KB Web page, online at http://nickm.com/poems/colors.html and here it is, too:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html style="overflow:hidden">
<head><meta charset=utf-8>
<!-- Copyright (c) 2016 Nick Montfort <nickm@nickm.com>   2016-12-31, 1KB

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is,
without any warranty.

My New Year’s poem for 2017 is Colors, a 1KB Web page, online at http://nickm.com/poems/colors.html and here it is, too:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html style="overflow:hidden">
<head><meta charset=utf-8>
<!-- Copyright (c) 2016 Nick Montfort <nickm@nickm.com>   2016-12-31, 1KB

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is,
without any warranty.

Happy 2016 in review! It is now a tradition for us to take a moment this time of year to give thanks for everyone’s contributions and debrief a little on studio happenings.

Bineshii Hermes-Roach ’17 has had Tiltfactor on her radar since she arrived at Dartmouth. “During my freshman fall, I spoke with Max Seidman (a senior Tiltfactor game designer) at the activities fair and always kept Tiltfactor in the back of my mind, hoping one day I could involve myself with the lab.”

Bineshii explains that in the winter of her sophomore year she decided to take an off term and, after applying to work at Tiltfactor, receive a part-time position for game design that she kept through the spring. This past summer, for Dartmouth’s heralded Sophomore Summer, Bineshii applied for and was granted a summer game design fellowship at Tiltfactor.

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

(Portuguese translation, courtesy of Artur Weber)

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.