We’re taking a moment to reflect on the lab’s move to Dartmouth. First, we found some press to share if you’d like to chart our progress with us! In an upcoming post, we’ll review all of our new games. It has been a lot of fun setting up camp at Dartmouth and we’re thankful for the support and enthusiasm around us. Thanks to colleagues near and far, friends, advisory board, the administration at our home institution, our emerging program, staff, interns, and STUDENTS!
Go Tilt!

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Barber, Bonnie. “A Humanist Approach to Game Design.” Dartmouth Now, June 5, 2010

In 18 minutes, TEDx tackles issues, By Linday Brewer Published on Monday, April 19, 2010

Profs. discuss ‘digital humanities’, By Annie Jones Published on Monday, May 17 2010

“Games provide insight into society, culture, Flanagan says” By Conor Galligan Published on Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Digital Humanities professor to open new game lab at College, By Marielle Battistoni Published on Thursday, September 25, 2008

Pearce gives lecture on video games, Published on Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Prof. discusses text-based games, By Robert Szypko Published on Thursday, February 12, 2009

‘Digital humanities’ merges art, technology, philosophy, By Brittany Coombs Published on Wednesday, February 18, 2009

College professor designs online video game ‘Layoff’, By Erin Jaeger Published on Tuesday, March 31, 2009

[Eric] Zimmerman discusses future of game design, By Jamila Ma Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Mobile exhibit space to arrive on campus, By Alex Duckles Published on Wednesday, July 1, 2009

National / International:
Sullivan, Adam. “Can Videogames Help Kids?” WCAX.com (Print and Video) 29 September 2009

Gondek, Chris. “Mary Flanagan Talks Radical Game Design.” MIT Podcast, October 2009

Abbott, Michael. “Interview with Mary Flanagan.” Brainy Gamer Podcast – Episode 23. 6 May 2009.

Beja, Marc. “Labeling Library Archives Is a Game at Dartmouth College.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. August 25, 2009

All Business. “Dartmouth Humanities Professor Awarded Grant to Design Internet Game that will Assist Libraries with Archival Data Tagging.” Via States News Service, Thursday, September 3 2009;

Elder, Robert K. “Save money, not your conscience: Online video game personalizes layoffs, poses difficult choices about cutting positions.” The Chicago Tribune, 23 March 2009

Smith, Lauren. “Dartmouth professor’s “Layoff” depicts today’s recession in video game format.” College News, 19 March 2009.

Abrams, Stephanie. “‘Layoff’ Game Gives Players Points For Job Cuts“ CBS2, 22 March 2009

Kneale, Klaus. “The Weekly Layoff Report: This Is Not A Game.” Forbes, 20 March 2009

Molina, Brad. “Play Layoff the Game!” USA Today, 18 March 2009

Wired Campus, Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 March 2009

McWhertor, Michael. “Layoffs the Videogame is Depressing Fun.” Kotaku, 16 March 2009

Heibel, S. “Layoff Game: Biting Satire Permeates Challenging Online Play,” Hispanic Business 19 March, 2009

Takahashi, Dean. “Layoff game meant as salve for corporate doublespeak,” Venture Beat March 17 2009

Perman, C. “Layoffs The Videogame-There’s Got To Be A Pony In Here Somewhere,” cNBC 20 March 2009.

Boomer, Kim. “Be the Boss: Play the Layoff Game,” WQAD, 20 March, 2009.

Downs, Martin. “Video Games Designed for Better World.” A1, 10 September 2008. Valley News, NH

Downs, Martin. “”Social Activist’ with a Joystick.” 11 September 2008. Concord Monitor, NH

Brooks, David. “New endowed humanities professor at Dartmouth has got game.” 9 September 2008, Nashua Telegraph, NH

There have been a variety of recent news reports on the relationship between computer ownership and education patterns around the world. The NY Times article from 9 July 2010, Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality, is one of the many articles discussing the recent studies by economists about class, income, computers, and academic achievement. Duke researchers just released a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper called “Scaling the Digital Divide.” It examined the introduction of broadband internet service from 2000-2005 in North Carolina. Their study examined the simultaneous effects on middle school testing scores in that period. Unfortunately, there were lower math scores as broadband was introduced, and after several broadband providers appeared to serve an area, there was a decrease in reading scores.

The study ultimately suggests that home computers and Internet access may have a negative effect for those already poor, and can contribute to widening academic achievement gaps between groups. Indeed, a study with middle schoolers and free laptops in Texas noted “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.”

What happens to game designers when they don’t know the “right” answers?

This is especially important in situations where designers need to somehow verify crowdsourcing data. What data can we obtain with the resources we have?

Well, what do we have?

1) In the case of our Metadata Games project for Archives, we have a huge collection of photographs.

2) Users who might want to interact with these photographs, and the user accounts they create.

3) The competitive relationships between players that might be fostered within our games.

4) The relationships between tags based upon how often they appear in images together.

5) Eventually, defined groups of associated images based on the tags that they share.

Sounds great, but what don’t we have?

We don’t know the right answers, the correct tags for any of the photos we’re asking people to tag. This is kind of a big deal, because games usually involve the user solving something the system already knows! We have no way of checking whether a user’s input is correct, so we’ll have to use the competitive relationships between users to prevent false entries.

How? By giving players a VETO button, allowing the crowd to moderate itself by disagreeing with the entries of their peers.

In single player situations we’ll be completely unable to check if entries are correct.

But it turns out our entries don’t even have to be correct. At least, not all of them. With the patterns that emerge from massive quantities of tags, we can quickly tell which entries are valid by keeping track of how many times they have been agreed upon and how many times they have haven’t been flagged. A picture tagged with the word “Dog” a thousand times and “cat” once is probably a dog. Ideally the tag “cat” will have been flagged as incorrect by someone…

In his work “Metadataing The Image”, Lev Manovich explains how automation helps humans manage an otherwise overwhelming amount of information:

“What is important in this paradigm –- and this applies for computer media in general – is that storage media became active. That is, the operations of searching, sorting, filtering, indexing and classifying which before were the strict domain of human intelligence, become automated. A human viewer no longer needs to go through hundreds of hours of video surveillance to locate the part where something happens – a software program can do this automatically, and much more quickly. Similarly, a human listener no longer needs to go through years of audio recordings to locate the important conversation with a particular person – software can do this quickly. It can also locate all other conversations with the same person, or other conversations where his name was mentioned, and so on.”

So this means that all we really need to do is to prompt users for semi-specific information and  give players a way to flag or reinforce previously existing tags.

In order to avoid the stray “cat” tag, our users should be rewarded for entering tags that are approved of by others later on. How can we get people to 1) care about whether their tags are approved by people they know and 2) invest in contributing/editing our network of tags over a long period of time?

Well Facebook seems like a pretty solid option for us if we stay away from annoying tendencies of some FB games.

Approving / flagging tags on a given photo might be a slow process to build rewards for, but so are many popular facebook games! If we keep track of who enters what tag and reward them for user approvals of said tag later on, then we can grant experience points over time. Experience grants users levels and level progressions can be broadcast to friends on facebook as a form of social reward for playing our game over an extended period.

So we’ll need to mobilize human players to filter out their own bad tags over extended periods of time. The question now is how to promote the experience in such a way that users WANT to become a part of the information salvation process. Isn’t it more fun to be bad?