Tiltfactor at GDC

This year’s Game Development Conference in San Francisco promises to be enjoyable and informative. We are doing a soft-launch of our new beloved tiltfactor.org site (uber exciting!), as well as following lab director Mary Flanagan as she’s speaking at the GDC Education Summit: Monday 10:00-11:00 Room 301, South Hall: http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12198.

(and, just for GDC, we’re donning our new sneak-preview Tiltfactor bling, soon available on our web site!)

We are also bringing student designer E McNeill, winner of the 2009 Imagine Cup game design second place, as he launches his first indie game Auralux. Tiltfactor is also participating in the Game Education Rant at the GDC on Tuesday 4:15- 5:15 Room 301, South Hall.

This is a time every year when the game industry, indie gamers, and some academics get together to look at, investigate, analyze, and celebrate games — as well as become inspired to invent new ones. In past years, we have brought research from the Values at Play project to folks at the conference, sharing our Grow-a-Game cards to those interested in novel brainstorming approaches, or talking about values in games. Since we’re finishing up a book on Values at Play for MIT Press, we’d love to engage you on thinking about the sometimes contradictory values that enter into play when engaged in a game. While at the conference, if you see one of us, we’d also love to chat about our project with the Games for Learning Institute on how designers view learning in games. While at the conference, we’ll hopefully get to check in with the work of Kim Swift, mastermind behind the game Portal, and Erin Robinson, inventor of Puzzle Bots! Instigators of awesomeness indeed!