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.

To do this, Amanda is working in the game development program Unity, and has become familiar with creating art, storyboards, and audio for video games. She has also learned to effectively express and push for ideas she thinks are worthwhile. “You must have a balance between not getting too attached to your ideas but also not giving up on them too easily” during brainstorming sessions at the lab, she explains.

“You must have a balance between not getting too attached to your ideas but also not giving up on them too easily”

Indeed, according to Amanda, one unique aspect of Tiltfactor is that student input is highly valued. One of her own proposed ideas—to create a crowdsourced narrative game called Crowded Dungeon—is now in the process of becoming a reality. “As a student you have sway at Tiltfactor. If you have a good idea everyone’s really willing to take it on board.” Freedom is very important in a game design company, she adds, and she finds that kind of flexibility at Tiltfactor.

Currently Amanda is working with several other members of the Tiltfactor team to create an interactive comic game, which will be undergoing beta testing in the next few weeks.  Amanda says she is staunch in her belief that all of Tiltfactor’s projects have the potential to make real impacts on those who engage with them. “I believe in our projects,” she says, “and I know they can create change.”

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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.

Tiltfactor’s award-winning game POX: Save the People, which was created as a game to increase positive attitudes toward vaccines, became available on iPads in addition to its original board game form in 2011. Game research on POX, where we asked participants to play either the board game or the iPad version and then compared their experiences, led to our paper published in the Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and subsequently featured in places like Psychology Today. These game studies helped us to investigate how technology impacts perception and comprehension.

In our party card game Buffalo the name dropping game, players race to shout out the names of real people or fictional characters that match cards like “British” and “Wizard.” Buffalo was created to reduce players’ prejudices, and in a game study where Buffalo players were told either that the game was about “Pop culture knowledge” or “Pop culture stereotypes”, we found that players who were told the game’s true purpose showed less prejudice reduction than players who thought it was just a trivia game. This research led to our paper on how “embedding” (or hiding) a game’s purpose can make the game more effective! Much like POX, research showed that Buffalo has subtle but important impacts on its players’ attitudes.

Game research helps shed light on how human processes, attitudes and behaviors can be altered, and also helps us understand the impact that popular media has on our society. But we can’t study games without your help! Participants tell us that playing games as part of Tiltfactor’s research is a blast. Sound like fun? Sign up for our mailing list to be given chances to participate in our game studies. Even better, if you’re in the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire/Vermont, sign up for one of our party game testing sessions at the Salt Hill Pub on Thursday August 18th and come get paid to play games! There are only a few open spots remaining, so if interested, please sign up at http://tinyurl.com/salthill.

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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:

The Renderings project is an effort to locate computational
literature in languages other than English — poetry and other
text generators, combinatorial poems, interactive fiction, and
interactive visual poetry, for example — and translate this work
to English. Along the way, it is necessary to port some of this
work to the Web, or emulate it, or re-implement it, both in
the source language and in English. This provides the original
language community better access to a functioning version
of the original work, some of which originates in computer
magazines from several decades ago, some of which is from
even earlier. The translations give the English-language
community some perspective on the global creative work that has
been undertaken with language and computation, helping
to remedy the typical view of this area, which is almost always
strongly English-centered.

Heftings, on the other hand, is not about translation into
English; the project is able to include translation between any
pair of languages (along with the translation of work that is
originally multilingual). Nor does it focus on digital and computational
work. Instead, Heftings is about “impossible translation” of all
sorts — for instance, of minimal, highly constrained,
densely allusive, and concrete/visual poems. The idea is that
even if the translation of such works is impossible, attempts at
translation, made while working collaboratively and in conversation
with others, can lead to insights. The Heftings project
seeks to encourage translation attempts, many such attempts
per source text, and to facilitate discussion of these. There is no
concept that one of these attempts will be determined to be the
best and will be settled upon as the right answer to the question
of translation.

The Trope Tank’s work goes beyond these main projects. It includes developing creative projects, individually and collaboratively; teaching about computing, videogaming, and the material history of the text in formal and informal ways; and research into related areas. Those in the Trope Tank have also curated and produced exhibits and brought some of the lab’s resources to the public at other venues. The lab hosts monthly meetings of the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction and occasional workshops.

There are no fees or costs associated with the residency; there is also no stipend or other financial support provided as part of the appointment. A writer in residence has 24-hour access to and use of the Trope Tank, including space to work, power and network connection, and use of materials and equipment. As a member of the MIT community, a writer in residence can access the campus and check out books from the MIT Libraries. We encourage our writer in residence to attend research and creative discussions and join us in project work and other collaborations, but this is not expressed with a particular requirement to be in the Trope Tank some amount of time per week.

To apply, email me, Nick Montfort, at moc.mkcin@mkcin with short answers (in no case to exceed 250 words each) to the following questions:

• What work have you done that relates to computation, language and literature, and the mission of the lab? Include URLs when appropriate; there is no need to include the URLs when counting words.

• How would you make use of your time in the Trope Tank? You do not have to offer a detailed outline of a particular project, but explain in some way how it would be useful to you to have access to the materials, equipment, and people here.

• What is your relationship, if any, to literary translation, and do you see yourself contributing to Renderings, Heftings, or both? If so, how?

• What connections could you potentially make between communities of practice and other groups you know, either in the Boston area or beyond, and the existing Trope Tank community within MIT?

Include a CV/resume in PDF format as an attachment.

Applications will be considered beginning on August 15; applicants are encouraged to apply by noon on that day.

We value diverse backgrounds, experiences, and thinking, and encourage applications by members of groups that are underrepresented at MIT.

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.

Carpenter, J. R. GENERATION[S] Vienna: Traumawien, 2010.

Cayley, John and Daniel C. Howe, How it Is in Common Tongues. Providence: NLLF, 2012.

Cayley, John. Image Generation. London: Veer Books, 2015.

Chamberlin, Darick. Cigarette Boy: A Mock Machine Mock-Epic. [Seattle]: Rogue Drogue: 1991.

Chan, Paul. Phaedrus Pron. Brooklyn: Badlands Unlimited, 2010.

Daly, Liza. Seraphs: A Procedurally Generated Mysterious Codex. [San Francisco]: Blurb, 2014.

Fuchs, Martin and Peter Bichsel. Written Images. 2011.

Hartman, Charles and Hugh Kenner. Sentences. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995.

Heldén, Johannes and Håkan Jonson. Evolution. Stockholm, OEI Editör, 2014.

Kennedy, Bill and Darren Wershler-Henry. Apostrophe. Toronto, ECW Press, 2006.

Kennedy, Bill and Darren Wershler. Update. Montréal, Snare, [2010.]

Larson, Darby. Irritant. New York and Atlanta: Blue Square Press, 2013.

Montfort, Nick. World Clock. Cambridge: Bad Quarto, 2013.

Montfort, Nick. Zegar ?wiatowy. Translated by Piotr Marecki. Krakow: ha!art, 2014.

Montfort, Nick. #! Denver: Counterpath, 2014.

Montfort, Nick. Megawatt. Cambridge: Bad Quarto, 2014.

Montfort, Nick, Serge Bouchardon, Carlos León, Natalia Fedorova, Andrew Campana, Aleksandra Malecka, and Piotr Marecki. 2×6. Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2016.

Racter, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed. Illustrations by Joan Hall. Introduction by William Chamberlain. New York: Warner Books, 1984.

Rosén, Carl-Johan. I Speak Myself Into an Object. Stockholm: Rensvist Fo?rlag, 2013.

Walker, Nathan. Action Score Generator. Manchester: if p then q, 2015.

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.”

Tracy Fullerton introduces the 2016 Games for Change Vanguard Award

The award was introduced by the visionary behind USC’s Game Innovation Lab Tracy Fullerton, who noted:

“Mary Flanagan is one of those people who just can’t be described simply. Her work spans the artistic, the scientific, the scholarly, and the playful. She is a game designer, an inventor, a theorist, and a fine artist. And what always amazes me is that she doesn’t merely span these domains, she is able to synthesize them in all of her work… Mary is also an amazing educator. Her students have gone on to work in the games industry, as well as in many other fields of digital media. Each of them clearly carries with them the unique spirit of critical thought and creative practice that Mary has instilled in them.”

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

“The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature” is an award given for the best creative work of electronic literature of any length or genre. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from supporters and members of the ELO, this annual prize aims to recognize creative excellence. The Prize for “1st Place” comes a $1000 award, with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. One prize for “Honorary Mention” is awarded and consists of a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

Honourable Mention. Kate Pullinger, Andy Campbell, Chris Joseph, Ian Harper,
Inanimate Alice: Episode Six – The Last Gas Station

Inanimate Alice, begun in 2005, tells the story of Alice, growing up in the near-future, as she moves around the world with her family. Episode Six: The Last Gas Station is a 3D storyworld as well as a series of additions to the tools the team creates for educators, including a downloadable package of teachers’ versions of the first five episodes.

One jurist wrote, “An excellent use of immersion and 3D to relay narrative to a variety of audiences. The rich media compels us further to experience the storyworld and build intimacy with the character, Alice.”

1st Place. Scott Rettberg, Roderick Coover, Daria Tsoupikova, Arthur Nishimoto
Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is a 3D narrative cinematic experience that premiered in the affective sensory environment of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory’s CAVE2 at the University of Illinois Chicago. It gives voice to stories of this violence and the post-traumatic stress experienced by ordinary American soldiers who became torturers in the course of serving their country. Based on interviews of American soldiers conducted by Dr. John Tsukyama, the work takes viewers travel through the domestic spaces and surreal interior landscapes of soldiers who have come home transformed by these experiences, triggering their testimonies by interacting with objects laden with loss.

One jurist wrote, “A major achievement. Rettberg and Coover harness the power of digital technologies to tell a powerful story and in doing so go far in changing the audience’s hearts and minds about torture.”

TLDR; The current preservation practices we use for games and software need to be significantly reconsidered when taking into account the current conditions of modern computer games. Below I elaborate on the standard model of game preservation, and what I’m referring to as “network-contingent” experiences. These network-contingent games are now the predominant form of the medium and add significant complexity to the task of preserving the “playable” historical record. Unless there is a general awareness of this problem with the future of history, we might lose a lot more than anyone is expecting. Furthermore, we are already in the midst of this issue, and I think we need to stop pushing off a larger discussion of it.

The standard model of game preservation

Any preservation activity must first decide on its scope, on the boundaries of what it considers to be worthy of saving, and on the basic definitions for the objects involved. In game preservation, the standard model for most (not all, as mentioned below) of the work I’ve been involved in resembles the image below.

There are essentially three major areas of interest: the physical extent of the game, the data stored on it, and the hardware necessary to run it. Briefly, the focus of a good deal of preservation effort is on the issues associated with accurately extracting data from physical media and maintaining both the physical media and hardware. For the former, there is an assumption that the data extracted from physical media can be run through the use of an emulator. This is a piece of software designed to take in old game data and make it playable on a modern machine. We are in pretty good shape with the emulation of the “major” computer systems and consoles released pre-2005 or so. (I have “major” in quotes because most emulation effort is directed towards the more popular platforms, with commercial success being the predominant criteria for selection as opposed to technical innovation, gameplay advances, or any other suitable historical metric.) The MAME project, with its new open source licensing and the inclusion of MESS, provides support for hundreds of systems, some swimmingly so, and others just barely. I’m aware that many other emulation projects exist, that they are highly fragile since many of them are passion projects, and that they suffer a lack of proper institutional backing. But at least there is a chance that if you have the proper game data, you can put it in an emulator and get back some playable experience.

The long term physical maintenance prospects, on the other hand, are not particularly good. Physical media and hardware degrade over time, and without upkeep will simple cease functioning. Data stored on magnetic disks, optical discs, etc. will stop being readable, and so again, there is considerable effort in getting the data off of them. Some of the more popular systems may always be physically playable due to the shear number of units available internationally, and the in-depth community knowledge of their technical specifications. There are numerous new consoles that are designed to play Nintendo Entertainment System games, for example, and maybe future production processes will allow for atomically perfect copies of older hardware. Regardless, both of these scenarios, either wholesale emulation or continuous physical maintenance will not hold up going forward.

This is because the standard model of preservation, and the solutions devised for it do not reflect the current state of game technology or our networked world. The historical object has now changed to a point where is does not reflect the methodologies developed for legacy games and game hardware. When I think of a video game, as an object, I think of the NES in the picture above. It is a singular experience, designed for a single piece of hardware and without any awareness of or dependence on the outside world. The problem is that for people not born in the 1980s, say people born around 2000, the video game, as an object, is a networked application on a mobile phone. Now, I’m not saying that if you were / weren’t born in either of those times then you must have these preconceptions. I’m sure some people born in 2000 totally love the NES. But that the preservation effort that I see in games is for the preservation of the past as seen from the standpoint of those active in game preservation. Those people want to make sure that their past isn’t lost, that you can still find out about and play M.U.L.E. or Escape from Mt. Drash, for the foreseeable future.

This fear of loss is totally understandable; there are other mediums whose early histories are replete with stories of historical devastation. I routinely hear, and think about, the fate of silent film, where a significant percentage of its early productions are permanently lost. Much of the loss is due to a lack of public acceptance of early film as something worth preserving. The modern idea that film is a medium in need of a preservation record took nearly 50 years to fully develop, in which time much was lost. Early games may have been in that same state, but I’m beginning to think that that’s no longer the case. There are extensive historical listings of games available, certain early consoles are nearly totally preserved (in the sense that there is available data from most of their games), and there is constant, sustained community effort to reinforce those records. I’ve come to believe that games (and software) are going to deal with an inverse of the issues confronting early film. Namely,

We are producing objects that are getting more technologically complex, more interdependent, and less accessible. And we are producing them at a rate that dwarfs their previous historical outputs, and that will terminally outpace future preservation efforts. 

Future Issues

(As a quick aside, this thinking is based, in part, on the recent survey work of David S. Rosenthal in Emulation and Virtualization as Preservation Strategies and on some ideas from James Newman’s book Best Before. If you would like more insight on the issues with networked emulation see the former. For gameplay preservation and historical considerations of play, check out Newman.)

I don’t think I need to support that games are getting more technologically complex. Major studios are much, much larger then they used to be, and teams for AAA titles are incredibly large. Over 1000 people made GTA V. Around 10 people were responsible for DOOM. I know that modern, independent games have moved development back to smaller teams, but their work is also now dependent on toolsets and technologies that are significantly more complex and sprawling then those of even a decade ago.

That games are more interdependent is also not a controversial position. Most games are now distributed over a network, do not have physical dissemination of any kind, and require some form of network connection for play or updating. This is one of the major problems with future preservation activity. When a system is dependent on multiple parts that are asymmetrically disseminated, reconstructing the object and its played experience become much more difficult. By “asymmetrical dissemination” I mean that the player of a mobile game, like Candy Crush, receives a game client through an app store. That client requires a connection to a foreign game server to deliver the experience, and handle monetary transactions and record keeping. The older model of software preservation cannot deal with this asymmetry of access. If the foreign server turns off at some point in the future, that part of the game system is now, most likely, irrecoverable. If that server is gone, then in all likelihood, the game client will no longer function. This risk is inherent for a majority of current games. Even when the client is not as dependent on a server connection for play, there may be other parts of the system, like updates, automatic patching or mobile platform APIs, that do still require network access.

One way out of this problem is to emulate everything involved in the entire network. Get all the server and client software functioning again through emulation or modification and POW! back comes the game play. While this might be feasible on a technical level, you have the issue that any significantly networked game or activity probably also had a contemporaneous community associated with it, and a social space within the game program itself that cannot be recovered. This is most striking in MMOs, where the game is essentially an operationalization of a social world. If you recover the whole system, you really don’t get back much of the experience. (For more on this, see The Preserving Virtual Worlds Report, and Henry Lowood’s discussion of “perfect capture” (paywalled here).

The major problem with full network emulation is access to the information necessary to recreate a system or network of systems. Most game servers are proprietary, considered corporate secrets, and will never be distributed in a manner that allows for their emulation. That is not to say that with significant, dedicated reverse engineering effort you can’t create something that imitates a private server, you can. As the work on Nostralius shows, you can even get all the way to potential litigation. But the effort required to emulate networked APIs adds another level of complexity to the preservation task. You can no longer just save a game’s data and expect it to function; you need to save its whole network. From a preservation perspective this is an untenable nightmare. The technical burden is now significantly increased along with storage and reproduction requirements.

Another issue with access is the online distribution systems that supply most games. Whether through Steam, Google Play, PSN Network or iOS, we’ve offloaded management of our game data to cloud services and wall gardens. This is problem since most of these services reserve the right to strip access to content at any time, and to update that content without providing access to previous versions. Without dedicated preservation efforts, and an implicit dependence on tools created for piracy, once an application is gone from these services it will be hard (or impossible) to get back. Remember back in 2007, when everyone was using iPhones as light-sabers? Well if you don’t, I can’t show you it since the original application was removed for IP issues and replaced with a different one. Remember when the Undertaker in Hearthstone was like totally broken? Well I really can’t show you that one (as a playable experience) because it was patched out ages ago. There is now an assumption that older versions of things should not be recoverable in a playable way, since the older version is now obviously deficient and should be forgotten. Like how once they colorized Casablanca, we threw out that crummy black and white version.

The most pressing and least mentioned issue is the scale of the problem as it exists today, and how it will continue into the future. I’ve presented two different preservation objects, the first, according to the standard preservation model, is a non-networked program made for a dedicated, non-networked platform. The second is a highly network contingent object that we don’t really have a viable preservation model for. Obviously there are cases in between these two extremes (and have been for most of the history of games), but overly complex straw men risk becoming real and complicating the argument.

I made a series of graphs to illustrate the problem. (They are highly empirical, as you will see.) The first two are plots of the development of traditional, standard model games vs network contingent ones over the history of games. Until now, or the recent past, the perception has been that things have developed apace. There are a lot of networked games, but also a lot that do not appear to require network access to function (this is probably now untrue, even for singular experiences, but again strawmen!). Both developments are probably following some form of exponential curve, as more of the world gains access to the technical knowledge and tools needed to make games.

And then into the future:

The issue appears when projecting into the future, since the two curves are definitely not the same. In fact, the vast majority of the games that will be made by humanity going forward will be network contingent. This is a simple reflection of our networked society, and the expectations of networked connections that are now built into human experience from childhood. This issue also pans out when you look at the available (albeit slightly problematic) data.

Mobygames, a website that tries to account for all historical games, lists around 55,000 titles in their database. Of those titles, around 20,000 alone are for some form of the Windows operating system. Steam, the popular PC game distribution service has a total of 9,175 games available for play on the current version of the Windows operating system. So roughly half of all the games created for Windows since its inception as an operating system are currently available for Windows 10, network contingent, and distributed through Steam.

The situation gets a bit more ridiculous when you consider mobile distribution platforms. A majority of the applications available through the iOS App Store are games. According to recent numbers from Pocket Gamer there are over 500,000 games available for download to your iPhone. That is, based on the MobyGames numbers, there is an order of magnitude more games on the App Store, right now, then have been created for the entire history of video games. The scale of production is immense, and all of those games do not fit into the previous considerations of game preservation, they are all network contingent. One response is that most of those games are probably crap, and while that might be true, who’s deciding what’s crap and what’s a “legitimate” game? If some young, future world renowned game designer made a bunch of unpopular apps before hitting the big time, we’d probably want those to be preserved, right?

The second two graphs highlight the other important implication, which is that most future games will be disseminated without physical form. I still don’t know of preservation models for network distributed content, and it will soon be the only type of content that is created.

And again, into the future:

The incredible production rates of current games, and the inability to currently preserve them all will lead to a situation where predominantly single player, non-networked games are overrepresented (or in many cases the only representatives) in the playable record. I don’t see a way to actually avoid this situation except to be aware of it. If developers and designers disseminate more information about their development practices, or take on a standardized framework for the free dissemination of historical source code and assets, then those breadcrumbs could help prevent complete loss. You can’t reconstruct an entire loaf from the crumbs, but you can gain a sense of its texture, ingredients, and baking process.

Solutions?

Okay, so the situation is looking pretty dire, what are some ways to combat this looming preservation quagmire? (It’s also not looming, since it’s already here.)

First is to consider what we are trying to save when we preserve video games. What I thought we were trying to save is the ability to play a historical game at some point in the future. What I’m thinking we need to do is to record the act of play itself. This is the position of James Newman (and probably others). To “record the act of play” is to develop dedicated methodologies to save how people today interact with their games. These methods would involve video capture, textual description, and some means to describe that data for future contextualization and recovery. We probably can’t save all the games on the app store in a playable state, but we could probably record a video of some part of them, along with a player describing the experience. This is a way to hedge against total loss, since there will be at least some historical record of the object aside from its name on a list somewhere (if even that).  The good news here is that YouTube and Twitch are effectively archiving gameplay everyday. The bad news is that we need means to organize and back up those records, since they will only last as long as Google and Amazon consider them profitable or useful.

Second, maybe get the people creating these things to dedicate a little more time to basic preservation activities. Releasing records of development, production processes, and legacy source code would allow other insights to be made about games, and in some cases allow for their recreation or recovery. I know this is a tall order, since the current corporate culture around all software development is to play close to the chest. It would be nice however, if the best advice archivists could offer game developers wasn’t to just steal things from their workplaces.

Third, there needs to be more societal pressure and motivation to legitimate games as cultural production worth saving, a la film, and to create larger institutional structures that fight for preservation activity. I spend some time at film preservation conferences, and it is fairly common that high-level executives from major Hollywood studios attend, speak and participate. This is partly due to the commercial viability of film preservation, since old films can still stock streaming services. But it’s also due to a culture in the film industry itself that understands and appreciates its history, the importance of maintaining that history, and the societal benefits that come from preserving cultural heritage. It would be great for the games industry to realize that as well.

Lastly, everything I’ve discussed regarding game software extends to software in general. And in that area, I think things may be even worse. Games at least form a semi-coherent class of software that can be framed as a cultural production worth saving. I don’t see the same consideration for office software, embedded systems or mobile applications and that’s a shame.

This recent set of studies on digital versus non-digital platforms was a result of our earlier research that was prompted by watching players of games. Players of our digital version of the public health strategy game, POX: Save the People®, were more inclined to respond with localized solutions, rather than looking at the big picture, when compared to the board game with the same mechanics, rules, and conditions of play.

“The overwhelming interest in this set of studies shows us that first, people are hungry to understand the nuances of screens on cognition, even though we’ve had them for so many years,” says Mary Flanagan, director of Tiltfactor. “This research points to the need for more studies to investigate cognition in our digital era, so that we might best design to foster certain types of thinking.”

Christiane Paul’s 632-page A Companion to Digital Art (Wiley 2016) is a definitive guide to Digital Art that spans the evolution, aesthetics, and practices of digital art through essays by leading theorists. Flanagan’s essay, “Critical Play: The Productive Paradox” looks to a series of game-related artworks to offer three propositions on how to interpret game art from a critical play perspective.

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)

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.

• Participants were asked to read a short story by author David Sedaris on either a physical printout (non-digital) or in a PDF on a PC laptop (digital), and were then asked to take a pop-quiz, paper-and-pencil comprehension test. For the abstract questions, on average, participants using the non-digital platform scored higher on inference questions with 66 percent correct, as compared to those using the digital platform, who had 48 percent correct. On the concrete questions, participants using the digital platform scored better with 73 percent correct, as compared to those using the non-digital platform, who had 58 percent correct. (See Study 2; mean scores were translated into percentages by lead author).

• Participants were asked to read a table of information about four, fictitious Japanese car models on either a PC laptop screen or paper print-out, and were then asked to select which car model is superior. Sixty-six percent of the participants using the non-digital platform (printed materials) reported the correct answer, as compared to 43 percent of those using the digital platform. (See Study 3A).

• Triggering a more abstract mindset prior to an information processing task on a digital platform appeared to help facilitate a better performance on tasks that require abstract thinking. Specifically, 48 percent of participants reported the correct answer to the Japanese car judgement task after completing a priming activity intended to activate a high-level of construal in which they were tasked to take on an abstract mindset, as compared to the 30 percent, who answered correctly without the priming activity. (See Study 3B).

The research was conducted by Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor lab, an interdisciplinary innovation studio that designs and studies games for social impact, and was led by Geoff Kaufman, an assistant professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, who was a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Tiltfactor at the time of the study; and Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth and founding director of Tiltfactor.

“There has been a great deal of research on how digital platforms might be affecting attention, distractibility and mindfulness, and these studies build on this work, by focusing on a relatively understudied construct,” said Geoff Kaufman. “Given that psychologists have shown that construal levels can vastly impact outcomes such as self-esteem and goal pursuit, it’s crucial to recognize the role that digitization of information might be having on this important aspect of cognition,” he added.

The study on digital versus non-digital platforms was prompted by earlier research by the co-authors, which revealed that players of the digital version of the public health strategy game, POX: Save the People®, were more inclined to respond with localized solutions, rather than looking at the big picture.

“Compared to the widespread acceptance of digital devices, as evidenced by millions of apps, ubiquitous smartphones, and the distribution of iPads in schools, surprisingly few studies exist about how digital tools affect our understanding – our cognition. Knowing the affordances of digital technologies can help us design better software,” said Mary Flanagan. “Sometimes, it is beneficial to foster abstract thinking, and as we know more, we can design to overcome the tendencies – or deficits –inherent in digital devices,” added Flanagan.

Co-authors Geoff Kaufman at gfk@cs.cmu.edu and Mary Flanagan at Mary.Flanagan@dartmouth.edu are available to comment. Kaufman will present the study’s findings at CHI ’16 on May 10.

###

About Tiltfactor
Tiltfactor Laboratory, a leading research and design studio based at Dartmouth College, is dedicated to understanding how games can be used to generate new knowledge. Tiltfactor designs, studies, and launches games, across a variety of platforms, that use core psychological principles and strategies to promote learning and impact players’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Founded and led by Dr. Mary Flanagan, Tiltfactor uses its unique design methodology, Critical Play, to incorporate fundamental human values and psychological principles to promote pro-social values such as cooperation, perspective taking, empathy, and civic engagement. Follow the lab @tiltfactor on Twitter.

Broadcast studios: Dartmouth has TV and radio studios available for interviews. For more information, visit: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~opa/radio-tv-studios/

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.

The focus of the project is to build a reverse correlation software package of the type used in cognitive neuroscience. Images will be captured, saved and processed for future use on a local server, and users will contribute input via tablets. Much prior work exists in Matlab and R, so examples of individual parts of such a system are easy to find. Experience with R a plus, as an existing open source tool is written in R, but expertise is likely not required. The software needs to be built before August 2016.

To read more about reverse correlation and prior software developed, check out Columbia University’s Ron Dotisch’s shared software available at http://ron.dotsch.org/rcicr/.

Send a resume/examples/inquiries to the Tiltfactor laboratory, Dartmouth College (http://www.tiltfactor.org): developer@tiltfactor.org.


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.

Let me know what you think … and if you see the relationship to four of Shakespeare’s plays.

I don’t actually have the list of attendees – I’d like to sent everyone a note, but it will have to wait! – but two people I knew beforehand participated and ten others joined in, with some people from Babycastles also participating and helping out. (Special thanks to Lauren Gardner for hosting!) I was very glad that the group was diverse in terms of gender, race, background, interests … also, pleased that this time around we had more people who were genuinely new to programming. I’ve done similar workshops before, prior to the publication of Exploratory Programming, and often there are folks who have had some programming classes and done some programming projects before. I’m glad to help such people as they re-start work with code, but I tried to make sure this time that there was no crypto-prerequisite suggested; the session really was for those wanting to program but lacking background.

Of course we dealt with programming as culturally situated and meaningful within art, poetry, writing, and inquiry. We used the historical Memory Slam examples that I prepared a few years ago for another event in Lower Manhattan.

Because the book is out and registration for the workshop included a copy of it, I didn’t feel the need to go through particular code examples that are in there. I was able to frame the whole idea of programming and focus on a few early specifics in both JavaScript and Python – showing that code is just editing a text file; that there’s a difference between code and data (and parameters, too); and that error messages can be helpful rather than frustrating. We did work with specific code, but didn’t cover specific code discussions in the book or the exercises in there. The book is for use in a classroom, but also for individual learners, to allow people to continue their work as programmers formally and informally.

Many people introducing a new book will have book parties, with or without readings, that draw a much larger crowd that this event did. But, as Brian Eno said about the Velvet Underground’s first album, not many people bought it but all the people who did started a band. I hope everyone who participated in this modest event at Babycastles goes on to start a band, by developing a programming practice engaged with the arts and humanities.

Update: I should have mentioned – we’ll have a similar workshop on May 15 at the School for Poetic Computation!

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’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.

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.

Allison Parrish, top bot maker, spoke about how the most interesting Twitter bots, rather than beign spammy and harmful or full of delightful utility, are enacing a critique of the banal corporate system that Twitter has carefully been shaped into by its makers (and compliant users). Allison showed her and other’s work; The theoretical basis for her discussion was Iain Borden’s “Another Pavement, Another Beach: Skateboarding and the Performative Critique of Architecture.” Read over Allison’s slides (with notes) to see the argument as she makes it:

Daniel Temkin introduced the group to esoteric programming languages, including several that he created and a few classics. He brought copies of a chapbook for people in the audience, too. We got a view of this programming-language creation activity generally – why people devise these projects, what they tell us about computing, and what they tell us about language – and learned some about Temkin’s own practice as an esolang developer. Take a look at Daniel’s slides and notes for the devious details:

Finally, interactive fiction author Emily Short reviewed some of the classic problems of interactive fiction and how consideration has moved from the level of naïve physics to models of the social worlds – again, with reference to her own IF development and that of others. One example she presented early on was the challenge of responding to the IF command “look at my feet.” Although my first interactive fiction, Winchester’s Nightmare (1999) was not very remarkable generally, I’m pleased to note that it does at least offer a reasonable reply to this command:

That was done by creating numerous objects of class “BodyPart” (or some similar name) which just generate error messages. Not sure if it was a tremendous breakthrough. But I think there is something to the idea of gently encouraging the interactor to o play within particular boundaries.

Emily’s slides (offering many other insights) may be posted in a bit – she is still traveling. I’ll link them here, if so.

I had a trio of questions for each pair of presenters, and we had time for questions from the audience, too. The three main presenters each had really great, compact presentations that gave a critical survey of these insurgent areas, and we managed to see a bit of how they speak to each other, too. This session, and getting to talk with these three during and outside of it, certainly made SXSW Interactive worth the trip for me.

There’s an audio recording of the event that’s available, too.

Welcome Gili!

Our former Post Doc Dr. Geoff Kaufman continues to be fabulous in his new post at Carnegie Mellon as Assistant Professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute! Rock on!

The game design position is for one of the founding faculty of the new BA in Art & Design: Games & Playable Media. The ideal applicant is a designer with experience pushing games in new directions, working with innovative design and technology approaches. This position is in the Arts division.

The Teaching Professor position is a bit unusual, so some explanation may help. This position has a higher teaching load than is normal in our School of Engineering (more akin to arts and humanities teaching expectations). It also means that the faculty member’s professional activity does not need to be what is normally expected in engineering — it could focus on game making, or software studies, or generative artwork, or many other practices. The person in this position will be a full member of the UCSC academic senate, will have full voting rights in the Computational Media department, and will have security of employment like traditional faculty. Letters of reference must be received by February 23rd, so if you’re interested it’s time to start the wheels in motion.

We’ve been talking about player psychology to nudge us toward a better world for years and years. Journalists have even called this “social engineering.” That’s interesting, because games are intricate designed systems and typically, though not always, they are social. So social engineering may be an apt term for games in general, and not simply games that try to effect positive change.

Our research in bias is pushing ahead with thinking about implicit bias and stereotype threat. After the release of our recent paper “A psychologically “embedded” approach to designing games for prosocial causes,” which garnered national attention in the media, we’re currently working with digital and non-digital narratives to understand how these could help alleviate bias. And oooh, we have some really interesting data.

We’re also working on the prevention of sexual assault.

Currently we’re cooking up prototypes and heavily involving the student team who is really shining (three of the five featured above).

With games aplenty, two papers at CHI’16, and our games getting to players all over the planet, it couldn’t be a better January at Tilt! Happy 2016!

Awards

This year, to date, Tiltfactor garnered much recognition!

Smorball and its ‘Best Serious Game’ award

1. In September, the Tiltfactor team won the “Best Serious Game Award” for our transcription game Smorball at the Boston Festival of Indie Games. Read all about it! Our computers were constantly filled, as players loved the game and fiercely competed to top each others’ high scores! Check out the complete list of awards at the festival.
2. MONARCH, the new board game, was an IndieCade Festival Finalist.
3. In March, Mary won the Higher Education Video Game Alliance Award for Advancing Theory and Research.
4. Monarch was ranked #2 game at the popular Gen Con. See Mary interviewed about the game from the booth! in French, via Ludivox.
5. Of course there’s you, the reader of our update. Gracias! Takk! Danke, etc  for checking it out!!

New Games

This year we released SIX NEW GAMES!!

• Gut Check, a card game designed to encourage players to use all of the information available to them when seeking health care. The game aims to illustrate how publicly accessible health pricing and quality data lead to higher quality outcomes at reduced prices.  (With Digital Mill and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)
• Bill of Health, a board game designed to illustrate the concept of capitated payments for health care in the U.S. health care system, and this payment model’s positive effects on health care quality and costs. (With Digital Mill and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)
• Awkward Moment at Work, our card game of awkward work situations is a new game for adults prone to awkwardness. Fun for the whole family and work friends too, with research forthcoming!
• Smorball, a browser game in which players coach their team, the Eugene Melonballers, to victory in the International Smorball Federation all the while transcribing books for the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
• Beanstalk, zen-like a browser game in which players type words both to grow their beanstalks and to transcribe books for the Biodiversity Heritage Library
• MONARCH, the board game  where you play as sisters vying for the crown. Technically Monarch is not a Tiltfactor game, but many Tiltfactorites were involved. It’s the hit of the season (along with Buffalo, Awkward Moment, and Awkward Moment at Work!)

For being able to be so productive, we must say arigato to the Universe!

Other News

Geoff Kaufman, our good friend and astute collaborator, was recruited away to become an Assistant Professor in the HCI Institute, Carnegie Mellon. Mazel tov!

We launched the CrowdConsortium.org, and co-organized and launched “Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Across the Disciplines,” supported by two government agencies (IMLS and NEH), one private foundation (Sloan), and co-organized by Andrea Wiggins and Neil Fraistat of the U of Maryland. The event, also known as #CrowdCon, was documented in massively detailed, freely available proceedings. 

Julia Weber made a video impression of life in the lab this year too. Check it out:

Tiltfactor – A Video Portrait

Salamat po to everyone!

Research Papers

We published on a bunch of our important study findings – if you haven’t read it yet, we recommend taking a look at “A psychologically “embedded” approach to designing games for prosocial causes.”  It contains tons of research on how Buffalo and Awkward Moment fight biases!

Kaufman, G., & Flanagan, M. (2015). “A psychologically “embedded” approach to designing games for prosocial causes.” Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 9(3), article 1. doi: 10.5817/CP2015-3-5
Prosocial games often utilize a direct, explicit approach to engage players with serious real-life scenarios and present information about key societal issues, but this approach may limit a game’s persuasive impact–particularly when the apparent aims of the game trigger players’ psychological defenses or reduce players’ potential engagement. In contrast, the “Embedded Design” approach that we introduce here offers effective, evidence-based strategies for  delivering persuasive content. This paper provides an in-depth exploration of two key Embedded Design strategies: (1) intermixing: combining “on-topic” and “off-topic” game content in order to make the focal message or theme less obvious and more accessible and (2) obfuscating: using game genres or framing devices that direct players’ attention or expectations away from the game’s true aims.

Kaufman, G., Flanagan, M., and Seidman, M. (2015). Creating Stealth Game Interventions for Attitude and Behavior Change:  An “Embedded Design” Model” Digital Games Research Association 2015, Lunenberg Germany
Persuasive games tackling serious issues in a literal, explicit fashion are far less likely to succeed in changing attitudes or behaviors than are games that take the more “stealthy” approach of embedding persuasive messages within a game’s content or context. The “Embedded Design” model, developed by the design and research team at Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College, offers novel, evidence-based strategies for including persuasive content in a game in ways that circumvent players’ psychological defenses, trigger a more receptive mindset for internalizing a game’s intended message, and do so without sacrificing players’ enjoyment or the game’s inherent replayability. Such techniques promise to revolutionize the repertoire of techniques that game developers should consider in broaching and presenting serious topics in games. Three original “Embedded Design” strategies are presented in this paper.

Kaufman G., Flanagan M., Seidman M., and Wien, S. “‘RePlay Health’: An Experiential Role-Playing Sport for Modeling Healthcare Decisions, Policies, and Outcomes.” Games for Health Journal, 4(4), 2015. doi:10.1089/g4h.2014.0134.
This article presents the empirical investigation of a novel role-playing sport, the “RePlay Health” game (www.replayhealth.com/), which was inspired by computer simulation of healthcare dynamics. The game immerses players in a fictional world in which they take on the role of characters who are prone to behavioral and environmental risk factors. In a randomized experiment testing the efficacy of the game, active players (as compared with spectators) reported significantly higher scores in subjective ranking of several health policies modeled by the game. After gameplay, players were also significantly more likely to understand health systemically by identifying environmental and systemic factors in health problems. See more http://www.tiltfarg/role-playing-game-to-change-ideas-on-public-health/.

Manzo, C., Kaufman, G., Punjasthitkul, S., & Flanagan, M. “‘By the People, For the People’: Assessing the Value of Crowdsourced, User-Generated Metadata.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9(1), 2015.
With the growing volume of user-generated classification systems arising from media tagging-based platforms (such as Flickr and Tumblr) and the advent of new crowdsourcing platforms for cultural heritage collections, determining the value and usability of crowdsourced, “folksonomic,” or user-generated, keywords for libraries, museums and other cultural heritage organizations becomes increasingly essential. This study builds on prior work investigating the value and accuracy of folksonomies. Analysis showed that 88% of participant-provided tags were judged to be accurate, and that both tagging patterns and accuracy levels did not significantly differ between groups of professional librarians and non-library participants. These findings illustrate the value of folksonomies for enhancing “findability,” or the ease with which a patron can access materials, and could significantly impact the way libraries and other cultural heritage organizations conceptualize the tasks of searching and classification.

Press

With the release of Monarch and our new paper on Buffalo and Awkward Moment, there have been a ton of articles about the work!

Stoelker, Tom. “Building Bridges Between Tech and the Humanities.” Fordham News, 8 May 2015.

Staff, “Best Games to play This Thanksgiving,” Ars Technica, 21 Nov 2015

Francis, Bryant. “How Monarch redefines what winning means in strategy games.”Gamasutra.

Gan, Vicky. “The Anti-Stereotype Party Game,” The Atlantic CITYLAB, 27 October 2015,

Wilson, Mark. “A Simple Card Game Designed To Rewrite Gender And Racial Stereotypes: The Neatest Thing? It’s Been Proven to Work.” Fast Company, 28 Oct 2015.

Shapiro, Lila. “This Game Can Make People Less Prejudiced. Here’s How.” The Huffington Post, 28 October 2015.

Nauert, Rick. “Right Games Can Reduce Stereotypes & Social Bias,” Psych Central, 27 October 2015

Clark Flory, Tracy. “Sexist Stereotypes Defied With Smart Game Design, Study Shows.” Vocative. 26 October 2015,

Кузнецов, Даниил. “Игры признали эффективным,” N + 1, 26 Oct 2015,

Smith, Steve. “Dartmouth College Researchers Say Newly Designed Game Will Reduce Social Bias And Spread Diversity.” Medical Daily, 27 Oct 2015

Medical Press, “Study illustrates how game design can reduce stereotypes and social biases.” 26 Oct 2015
For more press coverage from the year, visit  http://www.tiltfactor.org/press/. You’ll love it. Asante!

In Development

We have several projects going on in the lab, including using games and interactive narratives to improve the STEM climate for women in University settings with collaborators Geoff Kaufman at CMU and Melanie Green University at Buffalo; sexual assault bystander intervention games with collaborators at UNH. We also have several papers coming out about digital reading vs analog reading, controversial games, and more. Stay tuned. We give a big spasibo to the students working on our current projects!

A Simple Request

As we celebrate the end of a great 2015, we have one request. Research shows that being grateful isn’t just a feel good emotion. Being grateful actually fends off anxiety and stress! So help us and help yourself by writing a review of one of our games, sharing our research, or telling someone who might not have heard of Tiltfactor about our work. Like us on Facebook. Say hi on Twitter.

We’d love to hear from you. Sukria!

Close

Our team has a lot to be thankful for! We’ve been able to do good in the world and involve amazing people along the way. We have special thanks for our 2015 students, who have contributed so much to many many aspects of the lab’s research– from data collection to story writing, from prototypes to videos and beyond. Merci!
Toda, wado, miigwech, pilamaya ye’, and thanks to all!

~The Tiltfactor Team

…and if you, like us, are geeking out on Thanking, check out this nice piece on NPR about gratitude and heart health— amazing research linking the body and the state of our minds.

Our Friends

A final ‘thank you’ to all current interns, staff, and friends for 2015! 谢谢 Xie Xie!

Core Team and Projects Team 2015

Mary Flanagan
Danielle Taylor
Max Seidman
Sukie Punjasthitkul
Farooq Ahmed
Amanda McCormick
Naomi Clark
Sarah Ettinger
Jennifer Estaris
Edward del Rosario
Geoff Kaufman
Kate Adams
Matt Catlow

Our Collaborators, Connectors, and Funders!

Toni Pizza
Melanie Green
Sharyn Potter
Jane Stapleton
Ross Virginia
Ben Sawyer
Trevor Owens
Brett Bobley
Perry Collins
Andrea Wiggins
Neil Fraistat
Claire Knowles
Manish Mishra
Paul Barr
Scott Renton
Gavin Willshaw
Trish Rose-Sandler
William Ulate
Mike Lichtenberg

If we failed to name you specifically in this missive, we hope you know that you have our gratitude.
a href=”http://www.tiltfactor.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/bd315465-03e9-4b63-92f3-489ce005074a.png”>
Play Digital Games

Want to play some games now? Head over to the Tiltfactor site and play games like Smorball!
 

Our Awesome Student Team

Shivang Sethi (Presidential Scholar)
Luisa Vasquez (WISP+beyond)
Savannah Liu (WISP+beyond)
Jordan Hall
Nikita Shaiva
Shelley Garg
Felicia Teter
Jenny Yeoh-Wang
Jesus Moreno
Simone Wien
Sara Holston
Emma Marsano (WISP)
Julia Weber
Marco Barragan
John Montgomery
Eun “Jinny” Seo
Royce Park

Partners, Liaisons, and Supporters:

The Good Toy Group
UncommonGoods.com
Amazon.com
Pub Services Inc
ACD Distribution
Montshire Museum
Kickstarter friends
The Uncommons
IndieCade
Black Moon Games
Lebanon Salt Hill
Dartmouth Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity
Marbles the Brain Store
Dora Maar Foundation
The Sloan Foundation
The IMLS
The NEH
The NSF
The NIJ

Special thanks also to Dartmouth College in general, and specifically: Amy Olson and the Office of Communications, The Neukom Institute, and the Dean’s Innovation Fund.

 
Get Tabletop Games

Looking for a good gift for family that will reduce their biases? Or are you just itching to play MONARCH? Find the games on Amazon.com!

The award winning  game design and research laboratory at Dartmouth College, Tiltfactor (http://www.tiltfactor.org) has an opening for a full-time postdoctoral research position in social psychology to begin January or August 2016. The Tiltfactor team designs, creates, and studies games for social impact. The postdoctoral researcher will design and conduct formal empirical studies, primarily on games.

The lab’s previous games include board games, card games, sports, and digital games. A suite of games addressed gender bias in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), such as the lab’s party games Awkward Moment, Awkward Moment at Work, and Buffalo The Name Dropping Game. Currently, we are working on a National Science Foundation-funded project that uses “interactive text adventures” to improve the classroom climate for underrepresented students in STEM classrooms.  Other current projects focus on topics ranging from counteracting climate change to modeling effective bystander interventions in cases of potential sexual assault.

The lab is a fun, challenging, dynamic workplace, and the range of activities prepares the postdoc well for both leadership and faculty positions. We involve a significant number of talented and bright undergraduate students and the position should be considered one of mentorship as well.

The researcher’s work will include informal playtests and focus groups with games in development; quick, tactical assessments of a particular game’s efficacy and impact; as well as longitudinal studies testing the long-term effects of a game on players’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. In addition, the researcher will participate closely with the exciting work of the design team to ensure the conception and execution of the lab’s game interventions are informed by relevant theory and current research findings from psychology and related fields, and contribute novel research questions about games and their impact.

The postdoc will conduct research on games that address (and change) gender/racial biases and stereotypes, prevent sexual violence, and improve health. This is a unique opportunity for a candidate with a completed PhD whose passions are aligned.

I’m happy to announce that UC Santa Cruz is currently searching for four jobs in areas of computational media (and we expect to announce two more soon). Two of the currently-advertised positions are in Engineering and two are in Arts.

Engineering

Generative Methods – Assistant Professor

Work with the Computational Media faculty (Katherine Isbister, Arnav Jhala, Sri Kurniawan, Michael Mateas, Marilyn Walker, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Jim Whitehead), staff, and students to bring together innovative technology research with practices of design and interpretation. Applicants should have an established research record in one or more aspects of generative methods, including (but not limited to): procedural content generation for games (levels, art assets, non-player character AI, virtual worlds, etc.), procedural generation of complete games or game-like experiences, computational creativity, procedural computer graphics techniques, mixed initiative creativity support systems, artificial life and artificial life based media experiences, computational cinematography, computational arts and crafts, parametric design, generative music for games or computational media experiences, procedural generation of language or narrative in media experiences.

https://recruit.ucsc.edu/apply/JPF00317

Creative Director – MS in Games and Playable Media

Work with the CM faculty, MS Program Director Michael “MJ” John (formerly of GlassLab, EA, Sony), and MS staff to run a boutique degree program offering small classes where you can deeply engage students and their aspirations, and can have a strong impact on their creative and professional development. The Creative Director is expected to continue actively doing creative work in games, and have an active presence in the broad field.

http://games.soe.ucsc.edu/creative-director-wanted-games-masters-program

Arts

Program Director – Associate Professor

The Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program seeks a tenured faculty member who will also serve as the DANM Program Director. Work with faculty from across the Arts (and across campus) and with program staff to guide this interdisciplinary graduate program into its second decade. We seek an established creative practitioner and/or scholar with an active research profile, international reputation, and extensive record of exhibition, performance, and/or publication. We welcome candidates with research expertise from a wide range of areas in digital arts and new media.

https://recruit.ucsc.edu/apply/JPF00322

History of Digital Media – Assistant Professor

The History of Art and Visual Culture Department seeks a tenure-track Assistant Professor with expertise in the history and theory of one or more of the following areas: Internet culture, video games, digital imaging and design, social media, and related applications. Priority will be placed on hiring an interdisciplinary scholar who attends to the visual culture of digital media and analytically examines the social and historical contexts of its emergence. We welcome applications from scholars who specialize in any national or geographic area.

https://recruit.ucsc.edu/apply/JPF00299

Through embedded game design, an intended persuasive message is incorporated into the overall game’s content, mechanics, or context of play—rather than making the message overt to the players.

For the study, the researchers used two party card games created at Tiltfactor and funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation to challenge gender stereotypes and implicit bias in STEM: Awkward Moment^™, which challenges players to react to funny, embarrassing, and stressful situations; and Buffalo: The Name-dropping Game^™, which asks players to name real or fictional examples who fit the game’s unexpected combinations of attributes. A unique feature of these games is that they do not mention their ability to change players’ biases.

Kaufman says that, “Designers of social impact interventions, including games, must be mindful of people’s natural psychological resistance to any activity they perceive is attempting to alter the way they think or feel about an issue. This may be particularly true in the design of persuasive games, which, to be effective, should ideally be intrinsically engaging, re-playable experiences, ones that people will be motivated to return to again and again.”

Awkward Moment reflects the embedded design of ‘intermixing:’ cards that address situations involving bias against girls in STEM or a lack of gender equity are interspersed with cards that do not address these situations. Kaufman and Flanagan found that the game was “successful at strengthening youth players’ associations between women and science and inspiring more assertive responses to multiple forms of social bias.” Participants who played just one round of Awkward Moment matched a woman with the “scientist” job title 58% of the time, 33% more than a control group who did not play any game and 40% more than a group who played a neutral game that did not include cards references incidents of gender bias.

Flanagan says that “Our work reveals that strategically embedding psychological techniques in a game’s design both enhances the game’s impact and provides a transformative player experience.”

Buffalo: The Name-dropping Game was also designed to reduce social stereotypes and biases by expanding players’ mental representation of numerous social categories. The study examined how the game affected players’ representations of social categories and prejudice, as well as their motivation to control their own biases. It revealed that Buffalo gameplay effectively promoted broader and more inclusive perceptions of social groups, even after playing the game just one time, and raised players’ concerns about their own potential biases, as compared to baseline scores observed in a no-game comparison condition.

After playing Buffalo, students showed increased ‘social identity complexity,’ which is a measurement that predicts intergroup tolerance, as well as increased scores on a measure of “universal orientation,” reflecting lower prejudice and a more complex view of the inclusivity and diversity of their world.

The studies with Awkward Moment and Buffalo demonstrate the ability of games to decrease players’ social biases and promote more egalitarian, diversity-embracing mindsets—if the games are designed to do so.

To turn to more contemporary references, it seems to me that the film is a conflation of Gravity, Moon, and Apollo 13. Which is fine with me – I’m all about movies that mash up, reference, and reinvent other movies. Film A = film B + film C + film D can be a nice equation. Romeo and Juliet with modern street gangs, or with modern street gangs and fast cutting, or with zombies. But in any case film A needs to do something innovative by combining elements from these other movies, or, at the very least, it needs to do the same things that B and C and D did, but better.

For one perspective The Martian, Gravity, Moon, and Apollo 13 are all basically escape-the-room puzzles, just with larger and smaller rooms and solved on-screen for you. They are all narratives about problem-solving and the virtues of being clever. Now, sometimes there are problems that can be solved by science and engineering, just as sometimes there are problems that can be solved without science and engineering. You bump into someone on the street; you say “sorry,” acknowledging them and your mistake and keeping society from deteriorating a tiny bit. Didn’t really need science there – even social science. But most major, significant problems involve both to some extent.

The Martian, however, is a parody of problem solving. By glorifying its brand of problem solving as something quintessentially American (but with global appeal), it suggests that we should narrow our understanding of how to think when things get difficult. There are plenty of things one can pick at in the film, but its model of problem solving is why I hate it.

First, The Martian presents its big, complex problem – one that engages the interest of mass audiences across the Earth, in different cities – as a “pure science” problem. I will do science to it, and it will be solved. Although international relations and tensions, along with congressional funding for the space program, are all a very explicit part of the film, they are rapidly glossed over when it comes to problem solving, so that a purely engineering approach is all that is needed to triumph. Being a Martian colonist and being a pirate in “international waters” are invoked as time-filling jokes by the protagonist, but there’s no hint that colonialism and international relations might be real issues – in the latter case, even within the film’s fictional world. There are no international issues, though. Those in the Chinese space program just shrug and say that of course they’ll help out, since they’re scientists. Any political or cultural difficulties that might arise are left unmentioned. Even Gravity involved one astronaut sacrificing himself for another instead of solving an engineering problem to cheat death. That film also presented the cultural (rather than purely technical) challenge of entering a space station where the controls were all in another language. In Moon, an unethical corporation was central to the situation. In The Martian there’s none of this complexity. Solving problems is just about making the right calculations.

Second, problem solving in The Martian is always a solo flight. In the case of Mark Watley, left alone and initially without communication capability on Mars, of course he’s going to start off solving problems alone, and it makes sense to showcase his individualistic ability to survive and prevail. But while collaborative problem solving was central Apollo 13 (based, remember, on real life), the people back home on Earth, even though they have the ability to work with one another to solve problems, never do. We just hear a snarky remark about how they tell him to drill through the roof of the rover and jump on it until it breaks open. Consider the socially inept mega-genius Rich Purnell, the JPL scientist whose insight is critical to NASA’s rescue attempt. Purnell communes only with the supercomputer as he figures out his ingenious plan. He uses other people only to represent Earth and Mars as he produces one of the film’s many exciting astrodynamical visualizations using everyday objects. Purnell even stops himself from talking to anyone else about his idea several times. There’s approximately one case of someone saying “that gives me an idea!” in response to something someone else said, and no instances in which people are shown working out problems together. Please. Moon essentially has only one character and even that movie has people working together to solve problems.

Sure, this Robinson Crusoe in space; I don’t expect the main character to be dealing with international relations, thinking as a team, or doing much more, for his part, than being an individual scientist. But the film has a lot of other characters, and none of them solve problems except by doing science to them, without reference to society, culture, politics, or language. None of them think about problems together.

Consider just the most “scientific” sorts of problems that are important to us today (such as climate change, water quality, disease from AIDS through cholera and ebola) without even getting into such important issues as war in the Middle East, mass and police killings, and the drug war. I submit that to make progress on these problems, and certainly the other ones, it is essential to consider social and cultural issues, and it is also essential for people to work together. For instance, a scientist decades ago can develop a drug that today helps those who have AIDS, then the company that produces it can raise the price 5000%. This is not a problem to which science can simply be done. Of course, engineering is in many cases essential to better water quality, but the civic and social contexts are important as well.

The Martian really didn’t have to insist that reductionism and solitary thought are the only ways to solve problems, even with its focus. If you’re looking for an escape-the-room movie, allow me to suggest Gravity, Moon, or Apollo 13.