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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/)

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/)

This app developed for the iOS environment is a reworking of a video work titled Unicode (2012) which “shows all displayable characters in the unicode range 0 - 65536 (49571 characters). One character per frame.” The video lasts about 33 minutes and has a sound component which he didn’t use for the app. The app adds a simple user interface which allows speeding up or slowing down the character display, shaking for random access to the characters, and an interactive function that uses the touchscreen interface and the accelerometer. This is a conceptual work which allows us to appreciate the rich palette of characters and symbols written languages from around the world offer and can be accessed when encoded in the Unicode standard.

(Source: ELC 3)

To Montréal” was first written using pen and paper while paddling a packraft from Toronto to Montréal. It was subsequently written into an Android app with hope of monetization. The hope proved futile, but did lead to experimentation with alternative formats. These are the results of those experiments: An app, a movie, a web page, and a portable wifi book.

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. 

News Wheel, 2016 is an iOS app that explores the poetics of ever changing news headlines. It begins as a static disk divided into nine sections each representing a different news source. Tapping anywhere on the screen causes the wheel to spin. Another tap stops the wheel and suddenly a headline in one of nine pre-selected colors appears on the screen. This playful interface invites users to start and stop the wheel eventually filling the screen with a collage of current headlines. Individual words can be deleted and repositioned so users can create their own poems from this content. In addition, dragging one's finger across the screen creates an animated chain of fragmented and poetic text derived from today's headline news. News Wheel is a creative and poetic way to view, juxtapose and interpret world events. (Source: http://www.jodyzellen.com/newswheeltalk/)

Time Jitters, 2014 begins with images collected in Without A Trace and uses them as the foundation for a series of animations. It has been presented as single channel projection, as part of an installation and is also an iOS app.

It is overly simplistic to state that my digital poems come entirely from building/discovering interfaces. Any artist’s creative practice is a merging/melding mix of fluid events and inspirations. But with all my digital poems there is one commonality, the emphasis on interface. Rarely do I even reuse interfaces, and when I do it is only as one section of a larger work. This continual drive to create new ways to rethink the structure, organization and interactive functionality of my digital poems comes from a variety of internal influences. Most importantly is how these interfaces are not just vessels for content, they are poems in themselves. In the same way digital poetry might be best defined by the experience, rather than a description. Or similar to a digital poet and their works being described by the events and stories surrounding the creation and building process, an interface is the life, the body, and a poetic construction in itself. And through the artist performance I will explore/perform numerous of my interfaces, discussing/reading from them, eluding to how they were made, their inspirations and my thoughts on how they could be reused by other poets. But how is this a performance? This will not just be your typical reading and/or artist talks. While nearly all my digital poetry/fiction performances are highly theatric and, dare I say, engaging, I want to involve the audience more than I have in the past. Therefore, I will be shifting from interface to interface based on the audience’s commands. On the screen will be a series of titled links, around 20 total. The audience will choose which the title I read from. They can change those numbers at any time, and as often as they want. Choosing the links will happen via an ipad, being passed around the audience. The camera from the tablet will also be projected on the large screen in a small corner box. Then as the audience member changes the work, I will start reading it. And much like many of my works, the performance will be highly interactive, engaging, strange and a bit chaotic, driven, in part, by the audience’s commands. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)