digital game

POX: SAVE THE PEOPLE® is a cooperative board game that challenges 1–4 players to stop the spread of a deadly disease. Not only is the game fun, but through play, players understand group immunity and the need to vaccinate. Many public health groups need to better promote immunizations in order to continue to prevent vaccine preventable diseases. Vaccinations against deadly diseases such as diphtheria, polio, and whooping cough were standard public health measures: kids today don’t worry about getting polio, for example. Due to suspicions about vaccines and links to other diseases, more parents refuse to immunize their children, which could lead to a national health crisis. Parents have misconceptions about vaccination. For example, some parents believe that vaccines are no longer necessary. This belief may stem from the idea that children develop immunity to diseases automatically through time, which is simply not true; these myths can lead to disaster. For example, whooping cough has reemerged in the United States. As the percentage of people vaccinated against whooping cough has decreased, the U.S. has lost “herd immunity” to whooping cough, thus allowing ways for contagion to spread among the populace. (Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/pox/)

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/)

Pintando textos -Painting texts- is a digital game, an experiment that has more to do of visual than based on writing. Its objective is to transform a text into a pointillist painting of colors, assigning each letter a determinate color.