User:Jchan3580/sandbox

Today, along with my friend Matt, researched information about Mary Flanagan, a modern day digital media artist and educator who pushes the boundaries of interdisciplinary study and creates works that aim to provoke an audience reaction. One area of focus that was extremely interesting to us that we came across while studying is her company, Tiltfactor. This company is a game design lab which creates games, both digital and board game versions, to catalyze social change. I thought that this was an extremely interesting way to make her point in the world, and I began to try out some of the online games myself.

One of the first games I tried out was called Layoff. This is a description from Tiltfactor's website about this game: "Developed by Tiltfactor Lab and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Game Design and Development program, LAYOFF is a casual game that also offers researchers an examination of how empathy operates in a game based on a time of crisis. Both friends and strangers face tough times in an unstable economy. In the game, players play from the side of management needing to cut jobs. Players match types of workers in groups in order to lay the workers off and increase workforce efficiency. Who do you empathize with and why?" At first, I was first skeptical at how this game could be made to evoke social change. This was a simple, tetris-like game where you had to swap positions of various businessmen in order to match their suit colors. Whenever you hovered over one of these business men, you were presented with a short description of his situation, and promptly fired him once matching him with other business-people.

Another game I played was a typing game. This was called beanstalk. In order to win the game, you simply had to type the word presented on the screen, or pass. Every word correctly typed will grow the beanstalk, while every incorrectly typed word will shorten the beanstalk. However, the interesting part of the game was that each word was not digital text, but a snapshot of a part of an ancient library text. This game was meant to help librarians discover which words were still readable, and aggregates this user input. I thought that this was such an ingenious way to combine technology and ancient history. When a certain word had too many passes, then Tiltfactor will recognize that and find out which book was linked that that word. Then it would know that some of the text in the book was unreadable and the library would have to try and recover that ancient text.

In addition to her contributions at Tiltfactor, I research some of her art works. One in particular that caught my attention was [domestic] done in 2003. This uses a software engine that is normally found in violent first-person shooter video games and reconstructs a remembered childhood space where a dramatic event has taken place, a house fire. The viewer is able to traverse this 3D space and shoot "coping devices" in order to contain this fire. These devices prevent the spread of this fire, which threatens to consume both the world and the viewer. I believe that this work of art attempts to connect the gap between the emotions associated with physical memory, particularly a traumatic event, and the space of that memory. By placing the viewer inside his/her traumatic memory, do the same emotions get brought to life? Does narrative have a large role in computer games, and if they do, to what extent can we physically "see" memory?

These questions are good ones to further explore, and I will be certain to think about them as I head off to bed tonight. Mary Flanagan is perhaps the first artist that I have learned about in this class which seems to be creating artwork that I can enjoy, and that I see as having a large purpose in this world - which makes me excited for all the cool artists I can continue to encounter over the rest of the semester.