tiltfactor » THE LAB

 

What is Tiltfactor?


The Tiltfactor™ Laboratory is a conceptual design lab that researches, designs, launches, and publishes games and interactive experiences related to technology and human values.

We are a human-centered laboratory that asks the big, important questions about where our technology is heading, and how we might improve it. Looking at gender and technology, empathy in games, novel educational methods, while influencing design processes to be more humanist in nature —focusing on human values and concerns—Tiltfactor is the place to think about how technology is meaningful and how it can be designed for a more just, equitable, and innovative society.

Tiltfactor is the first academic center to focus on critical play– a method of using games and play to investigate issues and ideas. Our mission is to research and develop software and playful art that creates rewarding, compelling, and socially responsible interactions, with a focus on innovative game design for social change. We are interested in the processes through which designers imbue their games with moral, social, and political values, whether intentionally or inadvertently, and the corollary processes through which these values are interpreted by players. Our approach involves extensive cross-disciplinary work among the Humanities, Social Sciences, the Arts, and the Sciences.

We research and create computer games, board games, card games, and urban games that integrate social causes or humanistic inquiry into their aims. Since our origins as the first academic game lab in New York City, Tiltfactor has evolved to take on a range of game and software initiatives. Now located at Dartmouth College, Tiltfactor work is supported in part by the research with the National Endowment for the Humanities, Microsoft Research, and the National Science Foundation. We develop games for health, social issues and educational initiatives. We prioritize research with the creative game design process: Values at Play investigates how designers can be more intentional about the ways in which they integrate human values into their game-based systems. Our team creates and tests a values-based college curriculum and develops novel games which integrates values. POX: Save the People® harnesses the power of chance and the pleasure of board games to take on immunization. The team’s digital game LAYOFF attracted over 1 million players in its first week of release and educated players about the financial crisis. Our board game VEXATA helps middle school students learn to “read” game mechanics and develop a game literacy with values in mind. The urban games PHOTOPOLIS, Massively Multiplayer Soba and Massively Multiplayer MuShu explore how players can envision and document how human values manifest in everyday life across cultures, with players in New York, Beijing, and Shanghai. The Adventures of Josie True™ is a web-based game to help middle school girls in science + math curricular areas. The RAPUNSEL/Peeps™ games project is an NSF-Funded research project to develop learning games for computer programming.

Who is Tiltfactor?

Dr. Mary Flanagan, founding director of the lab, is an innovator focused on how people create and use technology. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts, humanities, and sciences reflect a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. Known for her theories on playculture, activist design, and critical play, Flanagan has achieved international acclaim for her novel interdisciplinary games, artwork, and theoretical writing, her commitment to theory/practice research, and contributions to social justice design arenas. She is particularly interested in exploring issues of equity and authorship in technological environments and reworking commonly understood paradigms to provide collective strategies for social change. In 2003, Flanagan created Tiltfactor as a rigorous theory/practice laboratory devoted to the investigation and creation of games and play. At Tiltfactor, researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software that fosters a joyful commitment to humanistic principles, learning, and fun. She is also the creator of “The Adventures of Josie True,” the first web-based adventure game for girls. As a scholar interested in how human values, gender, and culture are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include the recent Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. As an artist, her internationally exhibited work ranges from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College. http://www.maryflanagan.com

 

Zara Downs is Tiltfactor’s in-house designer. She has a graphic art and interface design background with a longtime interest in game design. Zara holds a B.F.A. in visual communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

Sukie Punjasthitkul is Tiltfactor’s project manager. Formerly a researcher at Dartmouth Medical School’s Interactive Media Lab, Sukie has a diverse background that includes video and audio editing, compositing, media encoding, web production, tech support and repair, Q&A, and system administration. He’s interested in the cultural effects and implications of digital media, methods of play and game culture, and media preservation. Sukie has a MS in Evaluative Clinical Sciences from Dartmouth College. He thinks old technology is still useful.

 

Geoff Kaufman is Tiltfactor’s postdoctoral researcher. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in psychology from Ohio State University, and a B.A. in psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on how the mental simulation of characters’ experiences in fictional narratives, virtual worlds, or games can change individuals’ self-concepts, attitudes, behaviors, and emotions. He is particularly interested in how such experiences can build interpersonal understanding and empathy, reduce stereotypes and prejudice, and inspire higher levels of social consciousness. In his free time, Geoff enjoys watching Italian and Japanese horror films, following pro tennis, and playing the euphonium.

 

Max Seidman is an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College studying engineering with a focus in invention and design. He is acutely interested in all forms of games and game culture, including playing games, designing games, and thinking critically about games. As a student, Max designed The Source, among other games. As an intern with Tiltfactor, he helped design and produce Pox and Metadata games. Hailing from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Max stands a whopping 6′ 20″ and is made of pure radiation. In his spare time he enjoys medieval fencing and writing about himself in the third person.

 

Robinson Tryon is a programmer by day and a well known Hanover fixture by night. When the sun goes down, Robinson hits the streets with his a cappella stylings of some of the 70s greatest hits. The summer inspires him to sing upbeat disco numbers from the likes of the Bee Gees and Donna Summer while winter is a more introspective time and gives way to songs by Carly Simon and The Carpenters.

 


Sharang Biswas, Janet Kim, Jasmine Kumalah, Andrea McClave, Viviana Ramos, and Cote Theriault, Yoon Ji Kim are our 2012 Winter Interns.



AFFILIATES + ADVISORS

Ruth Catlow is an artist and co-director of furtherfield.org. She works with a range of digital and network media as well as sculpture, writing, music and drawing. She has exhibits in the streets and other public spaces, in galleries and on the Internet. Most of the works connect with specific (often unsuspecting) audiences in a specific condition, i.e. on their way to work, shopping, taking the kids to school etc. Some of the works intersect strangely with dominant and pre-established genres in the mass media such as pornography on the Internet. In this way, Ruth communicates her intimate and often raw perception of love, sex, community, responsibility and freedom.

Gonzalo Frasca is a games researcher and games maker and runs ludology.org. His writing on activist gaming is known internationally. Currently, he is based in Uruguay. Gonzalo was a videogame designer at the Cartoon Network in Atlanta, Georgia.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a digital media writer, artist, and scholar who teaches at UC-Santa Cruz. His work has been presented by galleries, art festivals, scientific conferences, DVD magazines, and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. He has edited the books The New Media Reader (2003) and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004), both from MIT Press. He has taught writing for digital media in Brown University’s Literary Arts program, New York University’s Graduate Film and Television program, and the Summer Literary Seminars of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Tracy Fullerton M.F.A., is a game designer, educator and writer with over a decade of professional experience. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television, where she serves as Co-Director of the new Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab. Tracy is the author of Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping and Playtesting Games, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.

Prior to joining the USC faculty, she was President and founder of the interactive television game developer, Spiderdance, Inc. Spiderdance’s games included NBC’s Weakest Link, MTV’s webRIOT, The WB’s No Boundaries, History Channel’s History IQ, Sony Game Show Network’s Inquizition and TBS’s Cyber Bond. Before starting Spiderdance, Tracy was a founding member of the New York design firm R/GA Interactive. As a producer and creative director, she created games and interactive products for clients including Sony, Intel, Microsoft, AdAge, Ticketmaster, Compaq, and Warner Bros. among many others. Notable projects include Sony’s Multiplayer Jeopardy! and Multiplayer Wheel of Fortune and MSN’s NetWits, the first multiplayer online game show.

Chris Egert is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Interactive Games and Media and a member of the Collaborative Multimedia Experience group at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His research interests include: computer mediated communication, computer supported cooperative work, computer supported collaborative learning, web technology design and implementation, computer science education, operating systems design and implementation, distributed systems, desktop virtual reality, behavior-based robotics and agents, embedded systems, and computer-human interaction.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Culture & Communication, Computer Science at New York University, and Senior Fellow, Information Law Institute, NYU School of Law. She conducts research in the social, ethical, and political dimensions of information and communications technology. Her scholarly publications span the topics of privacy, property rights, electronic publication, accountability, the use of computers in education, and values in the design of computer and information systems. Her research on values in design, security, and privacy have been supported through grants from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Nissenbaum’s books include Emotion and Focus, Computers, Ethics and Social Values (coedited with D.J. Johnson), and Academy and the Internet (co-edited with Monroe Prince). She is a co-founding editor of the journal, Ethics and Information Technology.

Celia Pearce is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech in the Department of Literature, Communication, and Culture. She is formerly the Arts Research Manager and Associate Director of the Game Culture & Technology Lab and for the UC Irvine division of Cal-(IT)2 (California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology), University of California Irvine. She has spent the past twenty+ years as game designer, artist, researcher, teacher and author. Her publications include The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution (Macmillan), as well as numerous other articles on interactive media, game design and culture.

Katie Salen is a game designer, Parsons professor, and the Director of the Institute for Play in New York. She has done game design work for clients such as Microsoft, SIGGRAPH, the Hewlett Foundation, XMediaLab, the Design Institute, gameLab, and mememe Productions. Co-author (with Eric Zimmerman) of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press 2004), as well as the forthcoming Rules of Play Reader (MIT Press 2005), she is also member of Playground, a design team focused on large-scale, experimental, real-world games and a former core-team member of gameLab. Katie recently partnered with screenwriter and director Hampton Fancher (Minus Man; Bladerunner) on a project for the XEN division of Microsoft to develop an animated storytelling experience distributed through Xbox Live. She has also helped curate programs at the Lincoln Center, Cinematexas, ZKM, Exploding Cinema, and the Walker Art Center on machinima, the practice of creating animated films using game engines. She has lectured and published extensively on game design and game culture both nationally and internationally.

FRIENDS + ALUMS

 Shaun Akhtar, James Bachhuber, Jonathan Belman, Dorothy Bennett, Alice Bonvicini, Jack Bowman, Francisca Caporali, Joyce Cho, Matthew Cloyd, Fabio Ernesto Corredor, Jim Diamond, Michelle Earhart, Angela Ferraiolo, Heidi Gamer, Jennifer Jacobs, Dylan Leavitt, Suyin Looui, Lesley Lopez, Anna Lotko, Katie Lukas, Brian Mayzak, Robert McAvinue, E McNeill, Jarah Moesch, Erika Murillo,  Nicole Newman, Mehta Punjasthitkul,  Brendan Scully, Sydney Thomashaw, Dana Venerable, Linden Vongsathorn, and Cecile Williams. We’re proud!