Project
Tiltfactor

Project Team
Mary Flanagan, Founding Director, Dartmouth College
Sukdith Punjasthikul, Project Manager and Game Designer, Dartmouth College
Max Seidman, Senior Game Designer, Dartmouth College

Project URL
https://tiltfactor.org/

Project Reviewer
Kenzie Gordon, University of Alberta

Project Overview

Mary Flanagan

Founded in 2003 by Mary Flanagan, Tiltfactor is a longstanding project hub that has served as a research platform for dozens of projects related to the digital humanities. Primarily specializing in games and interactive experiences that promote social justice, the research in the lab relies on game design, game studies, social psychology, speculative design and critical theory to address contemporary societal issues such as bias, public health, inequity and prejudice. The games produced as part of the research process have been made available to other research groups, made available on game networks such as Steam, or sold commercially from the project’s offshoot game publishing house.

Tiltfactor is a lab filled with many different research projects, so any description would need to describe our methods and the team. Our team has consisted of undergraduate students, Flanagan, and a mix of staff members depending on funding and project sizes. Gili Freedman and Geoff Kaufman, both social psychologists, served as postdocs in the lab and designed and conducted extensive research studies on each project. We relied on constant playtesting and also employed in-house technical manager Sukie Punjasthitkul and game designer Max Seidman. Danielle Taylor has been our administrator since 2012. Occasionally we have “hired out” when games projects need extra polish for increased public engagement. For each project, we immerse ourselves in the literature pertaining to our research question, then prototype our way to success. We are deeply informed by psychological theories of change and by our respect for the various disciplines and people we encounter.

 Among its many projects, Metadata Games is Tiltfactor’s flagship contribution to the digital humanities community. Metadata Games aimed to harness the power of crowdsourcing to improve access to and organization of digital archives. The project's main goal was to use online games to motivate users to add tags and annotations to digital resources. We designed a variety of mini games focused on tagging images to tackle different crowdsourcing problems and appeal to different audiences. During play, players actively completed tasks including object recognition, picture labeling, word transcription, and content categorization, while actively participating in the games. These contributions aided in the creation and verification of original metadata, which is necessary for efficient searching, sorting, and analysis of massive volumes of data. Through the platform, institutions were matched with games that addressed particular data-related problems; some games were simple, single player activities, while others pitted player against player over a network. As an example, in “Guess What?" players are shown an image and are asked to type a word or phrase that describes the image. These descriptions help to build a searchable database of tags associated with the images. In another game, “Zen Tag,” players were asked to observe everything they could see within an image. With Metadata Games, we investigated how player motivation, game design, crowdsourcing, and natural language techniques could produce more — and higher quality — metadata for more accurate search and improve community engagement. 

 The project attracted the attention of national news outlets, from The Chronicle of Higher Education to public radio and television. From 2012 to 2019, we hosted a Metadata Games server that contained over 45 Collections from 11 Institutions — tens of thousands of media items (images, audio, video) in total — and generated over 167,000 tags. Using games in crowdsourcing was intentionally part of efforts to unlock large digital collections to the public, and to add inclusive and detailed descriptions from diverse viewpoints. The project led to the first gatherings on crowdsourcing across government agencies and foundations, the IMLS National Forum, “Creating a Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries and Archives (CCLA),” that produced a white paper with the state of the art in 2015.

We used similar techniques in crowdsourcing metadata for the Purposeful Gaming initiative in collaboration with the Missouri Botanical Garden. Tiltfactor created two crowdsourcing games in an effort to improve access to books and journals in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). Funded by the Institute of Library Services (IMLS), this project was established in 2013 at the Garden with partners from Harvard University, Cornell University, and The New York Botanical Garden. The games, "Smorball" and "Beanstalk," motivate players to create transcriptions of 15th to mid-19th century texts that constitute the largest open-license source on biodiversity in the world. The games asked players to transcribe small pieces of scanned manuscript pages, and then afterwards reconstituted the pages. After extensive verification, the texts were then forwarded to the libraries that held the related pages, enabling researchers, teachers, and the general public to conduct full-text searches of the material.

 By turning data gathering and creation into an enjoyable and interactive experience, Tiltfactor's crowdsourcing projects have demonstrated the potential of well-designed games to not only benefit researchers by enhancing the discoverability of digital archives, but to also benefit various publics by creating the opportunity to contribute to cultural heritage and learn in the process. In this way, the techniques for collecting good data were also solid ways to increase engagement for public institutions.

 From the general public to policy makers, from the archives to shifting biases about women in science, Tiltfactor has targeted many audiences with their projects. We have been a leading group in the “Games for Change” space, providing solid research and data-driven designs for social impact. 

Project Reviewer

Kenzie Gordon

Founded in 2003 by Mary Flanagan, Tiltfactor is an innovation hub based at Dartmouth College that creates a range of game-based digital humanities and social psychology projects. Over the last two decades, Tiltfactor has created digital, virtual-reality, tabletop, and live-action games on topics as diverse as bystander intervention, virology, and digitizing historical records. One of their most ambitious projects to date is the Metadata Games project, which from 2012 to 2019 collaborated with 45 different collections to conduct crowdsourced tag generation through different game interfaces, eventually generating over 167,000 tags. 

Tiltfactor’s game design practice is guided by social psychology and the Values at Play framework (Flanagan and Nissenbaum, 2014) and conducted by multidisciplinary teams of game designers, social psychologists, artists, and digital humanists. The greatest value of Tiltfactor’s contribution to the field of social impact games and digital humanities is their commitment to academic publications evaluating the success of their games as interventions and documenting their design processes. Their evaluation of their custom-built bystander intervention games Mindflock and Ship Happens, for example, was one of the first social psychology studies on the impact of games on knowledge of gender-based violence to integrate a critical game studies perspective, bridging a major gap between disciplines. More recent games, like Smorball and Beanstalk, are also accessible as source code on Github, creating the potential for other scholars and game designers to adapt their work to similar purposes in other settings. Tiltfactor has also provided classroom guides, peer-reviewed evaluation, and instructions for implementation for many of its projects, making their social impact objectives much more achievable for users. Tiltfactor games have been recognized by numerous indie and social-impact game awards.

Like many digital humanities projects that rely on external digital infrastructure, the inaccessibility of older games due to platform obsolescence, broken links, or loss of support is a challenge for Tiltfactor. Of the 13 digital game projects showcased on their website, only three are currently accessible, and only a portion of the game projects include detailed design documentation or walkthroughs of games that are no longer playable. This limits the potential for other scholars and game designers to learn from and apply their work in different contexts. The games and projects vary significantly in the robustness of their documentation, with Metadata Games providing public access to their source code for the game platform via a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) license, while others are not as well documented or are only described qualitatively in published literature. Adding documentation of these games would help address these concerns.

Tiltfactor is a leader in North America for social impact game development and integration of game design with social sciences methods and robust evaluation, and demonstrates a commendable dedication to recognizing the contributions of its large, multi-disciplinary teams. Tiltfactor’s design projects and corresponding publications provide an excellent model for other research-design partnership projects in the digital humanities and game design, as well as a cautionary tale for the challenges of digital game preservation and access.

References

Flanagan, M., & Nissenbaum, H. (2014). Values at Play in Digital Games. MIT Press.