creative language

Tiltfactor is delighted to be able to share some design methods with the public. Developed as part of the Values at Play project, the Grow-A-Game cards are widely in use in both K-12 and University classrooms. Using Grow-A-Game, groups of people brainstorm novel game ideas wich prioritize human values. While no prior game design experience is necessary, both experienced designers and those new to the field will have fun making games. In response to consumer demand, our team has created three distinct sets of the cards, with each version designed specifically to meet the needs of a particular user group. Apprentice, designed for 10+ beginners, as well as educators to use in classrooms and after school programs, focusing on digital game examples; Classic, designed for general users or those without much experience with digital games who are interested in exploring values-conscious design; Expert, geared toward advanced students for expert designers. This version is intended to complement more conventional brainstorming methods and without example games to modify. (Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/grow-a-game/)

Stupid Robot looks at everything but understands nothing. Can you help? Teach it as much as you can about the image. As it learns, it’ll want to know longer and longer words!
Stupid Robot is a quick and easy browser game that asks players to describe an image they are shown with particular lengths of words. The more word slots they fill, the smarter the robot gets.
Stupid Robot shows players images from libraries’ digital collections, and simply by playing players contribute data to these libraries and make the images they “tag” more accessible to the world.

Libraries and museums across the world have millions digital media artifacts, such as audio, video, and images that have no tags. Without tags (also known as metadata) describing their content, these artifacts are unsearchable and virtually unusable. Unfortunately, metadata is time consuming and expensive to generate, and many institutions can’t afford to tag their collections. Stupid Robot is part of the Metadata Games project, a free and open source suite of crowdsourcing games built to collect metadata with the public’s help. Playing Stupid Robot sends tags back to the institutions from which the images are drawn, allowing them to be more accessible to everyone: to the institutions, to researchers, and to the public. Play Stupid Robot, save digital media artifacts from oblivion.

(Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/stupid-robot/)

Do you have a green thumb? Test your skills as the victor of vines by typing the words shown on the screen, and grow your beanstalk from a tiny tendril to massive cloudscraper in this calming, zen-like typing game. Beanstalk is a quick and easy browser game that asks players to type the word they are shown on the screen. By presenting players with words from books of libraries’ scanned digital collections, Beanstalk collects transcriptions that are sent back to the libraries that the words come from. The more words players type correctly, the faster the beanstalk grows, and the more contributions are made to libraries’ and museums’ collections. Get to the top of the “High Score” leaderboard by correctly transcribing the most words, and declare yourself the victor of vines! Beanstalk tackles a major challenge for digital libraries: full-text searching of digitized material is significantly hampered by poor output from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. When first scanned, the pages of digitized books and journals are merely image files, making the pages unsearchable and virtually unusable. While OCR converts page images to searchable, machine encoded text, historic literature is difficult for OCR to accurately render because of its tendency to have varying fonts, typesetting, and layouts. Beanstalk presents players with phrases from scanned pages from cultural heritage institutions. After much verification, the words players type are sent to the libraries that store the corresponding pages, allowing those pages to be searched and data mined and ultimately making historic literature more usable for institutions, scholars, educators, and the public. Play Beanstalk, save scanned books from digital oblivion. (Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/beanstalk/)

You’re the head coach of the Eugene Melonballers, an up-and-coming team in the International Smorball Federation. Can you coach your team to victory, helping them win the coveted Dalahäst Trophy and bring glory home to Eugene?
Smorball is a challenging browser game that asks players to correctly type the words they see on the screen–punctuation and all. The more words they type correctly, the quicker opposing teams are defeated, and the closer the Eugene Melonballers get to the Dalahäst Trophy.

Smorball tackles a major challenge for digital libraries: full-text searching of digitized material is significantly hampered by poor output from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. When first scanned, the pages of digitized books and journals are merely image files, making the pages unsearchable and virtually unusable. While OCR converts page images to searchable, machine encoded text, historic literature is difficult for OCR to accurately render because of its tendency to have varying fonts, typesetting, and layouts.
Smorball presents players with phrases from scanned pages from cultural heritage institutions. After much verification, the words players type are sent to the libraries that store the corresponding pages, allowing those pages to be searched and data mined and ultimately making historic literature more usable for institutions, scholars, educators, and the public.
Play Smorball, save scanned books from digital oblivion.

(Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/smorball/)

anna anthropy’s The Hunt for the Gay Planet is a text-based Twine game that uses the medium of Twine to comment more broadly and bitingly on the status of queer representation in videogames. The work takes its premise from a mainstream online roleplaying game, Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, which in 2013 announced they were expanding their romance options in-game to include homosexual options, but only on a single planet in the galaxy. anthropy satirizes this decision with this beautifully retro piece, in which the player is invited to gradually explore the galaxy (looking under rocks and in caves) in search of a lesbian romance. The game serves as a powerful example of Twine’s potential as a platform for commenting on and engaging with AAA gaming, as Twine builds on the traditions of hypertext to allow for complex decision management and choice-driven experience design. (Source: ELC 3's Editorial Statement)

Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive is a Twine game that invites the reader to become physically involved through marking up their own body with symbols throughout play.
As a Twine game, the work relies primarily on text and audio along with backgrounds of shifting colors to draw the player into a disturbing science fiction landscape. The game opens with a level of customization that invites the player to become connected and even embedded into the game, choosing their month of birth, element, and eye color.
As the player becomes a servant to a monstrous larval queen, the stage is set for a dystopia of dream-like and vivid yet mundane violence. After playing, the reader has a tangible record of their own choices and identity beliefs in the drawings on one’s skin.
It's inspired by mob violence, trash struggle, C-PTSD, and child abuse. It's also inspired by friendship between trash girls. In most media there’s an unspoken belief that feminine lifeforms can't survive on their own, can't have spaces of their own, can’t have relationships of their own. The author try to go against this with basically everything she make.

(Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=with-those-we-love-a…)

Sherwood Rise is the world's first augmented novel. It's an Augmented Reality (AR) transmedia interactive graphic novel/ game, told over 4 days through a range of media and formats: printed newspapers, AR on mobile phones, emails, hacker websites, blogs, sound, music, graphic novels and illustrations.

Inspired by the current financial crisis, and the Occupy movement, the story is based on the traditional Robin Hood tale. The traditional tale of peasant revolt and dissent is brought up to date, and adapted for AR and transmedia. In our adaptation, austerity is imposed on the poor by a privileged elite, but resisted by a gang of hacker outlaw terrorists called the 'Merry Men'.

Each day you receive a newspaper (via email) which you interact with via AR. Your interaction (how much you support the establishment or the Merry Men) updates a database, which then determines the version of newspaper you receive the next day. My intention was to make a physical book interactive, and in this way explore the future of the book.

The project explores the future of the book and transmedia storytelling:

• It's a story told in a range of media on multiple platforms
• It expands a traditional printed story, adds additional layers of story through AR
• It adds augmented digital artefacts onto a printed story.

The objectives of the project are:

• To add virtual elements to the real world page by combining mobile device/ new media technology and the book
• To use mobile device based AR and transmedia, in novel and artistic ways to expand a narrative
• In creative and artistic ways to raise awareness and stimulate thought about financial fraud, corruption, austerity, politics
• To produce a book which is part static and part dynamic, and altered by the reader's behaviour
• To challenge power relations of news using AR.

My research interests for this project included:

• AR activism, challenging authority, privilege and power
• The politics of AR and storytelling/ news, contested content, critiquing ways that news is reported, revealing the "truth"
• Aesthetic, artistic, cultural and sociopolitical uses of AR and transmedia stories
• Revealing hidden stories within a fiction
• Many voices in a story - simultaneous multiple viewpoints
• Documenting the process and experience of designing, adapting and building a transmedia story from the ground up
• The reader experience - reading and navigating an AR transmedia book, moving from paper to screen, the disjointed reading experience
• Exploring aesthetic possibilities of AR, graphic novels and illustrations on mobile devices.

Sherwood Rise - the story begins here
Please note that since the AR software "Junaio" is no longer available (since 2015), then the project doesn't run anymore.

This was a research collaboration between Dave Miller (concept, code and drawings) and Dave Moorhead (screenwriter). This was a post-doc research project funded by the University of Bedfordshire, as part of the UNESCO Future of the Book project.

Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s Icarus Needs is part of a series of works in which Goodbrey draws on the dual aesthetics of comics and classic video games. Built in Flash, the piece is strongly visual and provides a world of panels to explore. The player moves Icarus through the panels using standard keyboard controls, encountering dream-like objects (such as an oversized telephone) and hitting many dead ends and simple item-based puzzles that block progression out of the dream. The game as dream metaphor is explored fully (as one fragment of text warns, “Don’t fall asleep playing video games”) and creates a compelling world of flat 2D visuals in different monochromatic palettes. Icarus Needs is a hypercomic adventure game staring everyone's favourite mentally unhinged cartoonist, Icarus Creeps. (Source: ELC 3)

The goal of the game is to find his girlfriend, save her and escape the game. He need's to complete different tasks to do so. The tasks are puzzles that Icarus needs to solve, and when a mission is given is either by Icarus himself or another character. He communicates trough talking bubbles. 

Dwarf Fortress is a complex, text-based computer game that has been in development by Tarn and Zach Adams since 2002. The game begins by first procedurally generating an expansive, dynamic world in which players attempt to guide an exponentially increasing colony of temperamental dwarves to build and manage within an ever expanding fortress. The task is made difficult by both the unpredictable and emergent behaviors of the simulation as well as by the anachronistic and arduous interface: a screen full of ASCII characters recalling the personal computers of the early 1980s. Inspired by games like Rogue (1980) and Sim City (1989), the stark textual interface contrasts with the game's complexity as Dwarf Fortress can easily consume all available processing power of a contemporary computer. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux have suggested that "[i]n rejecting the conventions of standard game design and traditional narrative storytelling, Dwarf Fortress produces textual inscriptions that not only mark one horizon of human experience but recall forms of historical writing that depart from human-centered and teleological modes of history." The way in which Dwarf Fortress generates a flattened narrative landscape in which no moment is prioritized over another is reminiscent of medieval literary forms of writing such as the annal, chronicle, and calendar. While the game's textual output may or may not aggregate into narrative coherence, a dedicated community of players have delighted in not only playing the game to observe its effects, but they have also translated these nonhuman narratives into legible (if absurd) stories as a means of inscribing a history of play that is notoriously difficult and governed by the game's tagline "Losing is Fun."

(Source: ELC 3)