The lab is in full swing with several projects: Metadata Games, a game exploring biodiversity, and some games for health– right now, HIV games and games to combat sexual assault. Interns this summer are: Max Seidman, Alicia Driscoll, and visiting for the summer from USC, Mike Ayoob. Folks working with us this summer include Playmatics, Cecile Williams, Robinson Tryon, Vanessa Moy, and Sukdith Punjasthitkul. Welcome!
and…Finally! After 7 years, we have Tiltfactor bling! Soon available on our web site.
The 2010 Summer courses at Dartmouth have begun: Virtual Cinema, which is an exploration of Machinima practices as well as a hands-on studio course in game-related movie making, and Games and Playculture, a theory seminar on play.
Visitors to the classes include designer and theorist Celia Pearce, designer Tracy Fullerton, machinima maker Claus-Dieter Schulz, senior level designer Zach Wilson, screenwriter Lisa Dethridge, and Hugh Hancock of Strange Company (machinima). A very exciting term in a very beautiful New Hampshire/Vermont summer (rainbow spotted today! reminding me of the students’ beloved game…)
A recent article highlights Dartmouth College’s rather unusual approach to game design by basing the process in humanistic thinking. Influenced by Professor Mary Flanagan’s commitment to social change design and human values through the Values at Play project, the students enrolled in Dartmouth’s games courses bring their eclectic backgrounds to the design process to make unique games. Currently in the works at the lab: games for pressing healthcare issues, a game on sustainability and biodiversity, metadata games, and research with the Games for Learning Institute, focusing on the links between industry designers’ everyday knowledge and popular learning theories.
We at Tiltfactor send out a tribute to Canadian game inventor Chris Haney, one of the designers of Trivial Pursuit. We’d also like to those who have come before us to enrich our games, especially those at Dartmouth: Thomas Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, inventors of the BASIC programming language, invented at Dartmouth College in 1964; Richard Tait, Dartmouth Alum and inventor of Cranium; Steve Russell, one of the students behind the game Spacewar! at MIT, finished his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College in 1958; John Donahoe (a really nice guy), with Ebay and Skype; and Ernest Everett Just, a distinguished African American biologist who graduated from Dartmouth in 1907, Dr. George Stibitz, faculty and inventor of the first digital computer in 1940, and those who, in 1956, created the field of artificial intelligence research at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for decades!
Thanks!
(We’d love to learn about those we’re missing! email us at info@tiltfactor.org!)