thank you thank you foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign thank you foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign good morning please take your seats our program will begin shortly please take your seats our program will begin shortly [Music] okay foreign all right welcome to the games for change Festival the program is about to begin thank you that's like one of those three light colors thank you foreign and now it is our honor to introduce chairman of games for change board Assi Barack good morning I see a lot of familiar faces on behalf of the games for change board of directors welcome to the second day of the festival and I'm delighted to be here in this important Milestone the 20th annual anniversary for the games for change Festival a bit of Applause for the and obviously we're not only celebrating the organization we're celebrating the field and I had the privilege of being the president of cancer change from 2010 to 15. now I'm the chairman and I as I like to say the best decision I ever made was to hire Susanna to to transition and and take the the lead after me um which is to say either front row seat in the organization and Community is exciting journey in the last two decades um yesterday you heard some of the founders the original founders of the organization and how the past and present come together I'd like to offer a complimentary perspective focused on the phenomenal growth of this field as we've seen it since 2004. so I'm sharing my two cents which is two Reflections on on the histories from my modest personal perspective the first one is um is is about the surprising and unpredictable evolution of the medium and those of us who were here from the beginning were almost like invited to turn into amateur anthropologists or historians and try to reflect on what transpired versus our predictions you know what were our expectations and where we ended um so as you hear often when a new medium is being introduced to the world uh creators naturally the first thing that they do is build on the old media that they are so familiar with right so when TV was introduced to the world the first early TV shows behaved like theater they had a static set stage and they didn't figure out yet all the concepts and tools and methods like moving the camera or editing this only came later in the same way when games were change started people spoke about this as interactive documentaries in the first years that that was the whole framework that we worked with and the main Innovation that people talked about was the idea that unlike a documentary here people get the choices they can they have the agency they can make their own journey and change the outcome in the script um however 20 years later if you look at what this genre or sub-genre developed into you would see much more than interactive documentaries and so just a few examples that I wanted to share obviously you know most of them if not all of them who had believed that one day we'll have a FDA approved games that have direct neurological impact and can mitigate ADHD or cognitive decline we thought we'd see citizen science games where a large group of people come together to solve science problems that evaded scientists and invaded the super computers for decades we had imagined with experience XR that is so nuanced and masterful in the search for empathy and generating empathy and we're just at the beginning and all those examples in my mind are coupled by the gift of game making tools they flourish and the idea that we can now introduce people all in all ages but especially young people to this art and and being able to make games with coding but also without coding uh the interesting thing when I think of this first reflection is that it's not only about the diversity of experiences or interfaces of the genre what happened in the last 20 years is that we have a diversity of impact of types of impact from Behavior change to awareness to as we said direct impact on brain cells through games second reflection is about acceptance and maturity when we started off early developers of games for impact and I was one of them an indie developer in the field We Begin addressing serious issues so-called serious issues and by the way the field at the beginning was also called serious games poverty human rights global conflict and we had a lot of Skeptics and naysayers whether it was in the press in the industry in the larger gaming industry that came to us and said you know games are about to escape or about escapism you know players want to escape reality they don't want to engage with reality people came to us and said actually blamed us for taking out the joy and fun out of games you know we're making them too serious people told us the games are about pure joy they're not about you know tragic issues or sad issues or heavy issues and um I think that those assumptions which seemed very obvious to them um in the Judgment of time in the Judgment of this Evolution they're simply very reductive and narrow-minded the community the organization the field have proved that we're just scratching the surface and generally speaking video games only getting stronger they speak to more people to broader ages to more tastes the definition of a gamer is obsolete because there are only few of us who are not playing a game on on a platform one or another right in the Subway or or elsewhere people who grew up with games have become the decision makers of today the policy makers of today and as such we are entering in an era where the possibilities for games are wide open it is now globally accepted this is about the acceptance that video game just like any media that came before them could address anyone at any time and touch any nerve any emotion in any intellectual Pursuit light or dark small or large intimate or public frightening or delightful it's all game and furthermore games will find ways to do this that we never experienced before because this is all about using their unique attributes so if I want to leave you with the one lesson or reflection on you know out of those two points is that Natural Evolution is really fantastic we had it's true that we had many creators and individuals and organizations that helped it's true that we had the backwind of a medium that expanded to 3 billion people however the core of what makes this time so different in 2004 in my mind is really human creativity as long as human creativity is thriving and encouraged we will never be able to predict how the field will look like in 2044 I can make the one prediction it will 100 blow our minds thank you enjoy the day hope to meet you in the Halls all right well thank you all so much for being here with us for the second day of the games for change Festival we've got a great day planned for you with content here at the time Center and with multiple sessions going on I think starting at 11 at the Microsoft building just around the corner and of course at five o'clock we will move into our meet and play sessions so I hope you if you didn't have a chance to check that out yesterday please do and we do have our immersive arcade which is taking um reservations so we have a great system where you can actually book a time for you to try one of the immersive experiences so for our first session of the day I am so excited to get to introduce our very own cheap operating and programs officer Arana Shapiro along with Alex cervello the director of corporate social responsibilities at Verizon uh with a special announcement we are very proud to announce a partnership with Verizon to create content Next Generation content focused on providing teachers administrators and District leaders in the K-12 space with the necessary tools to effectively Implement and leverage gaming and Esports across core content classrooms out I know right awesome Arana and Alex will talk about the partnership and the resources made for the Verizon Innovation Innovative learning HQ platform so please welcome Arana and Alex to the stage [Music] yeah absolutely good morning everyone there's there's no fire um but uh I'm Alex cervello I'm director of corporate social responsibility for Verizon I lead our initiatives related to education and community Chief Operating and programs officer at games for Change and among kind of the day-to-day stuff that games for change I also focus on our programs with a specific focus on all of our learning programs of student and educator-facing programs yeah so um so Susannah made an exciting announcement and we're going to talk a little bit more about it but I think maybe we could just start Alex by you talking a little bit about Verizon's work in the education yeah what you've been up to absolutely so like I said I work within our corporate social responsibility team and my team specifically is um dedicated to Youth and digital inclusion digital inclusion work for us is really addressing the barriers to connectivity and I just want to give some context to all of this before we get into the gaming pieces and some of the digital skills we talk a lot about the digital divide and I want to be clear that this is not something that was caused by the pandemic or started by the pandemic it was something that got a lot more attention because of that we know that there were about seven and a half million students who were unconnected or under connected in 2019 and that number did begin to shrink a bit where we now are at about four and a half million students across the country we're seeing those gaps close mostly for black Hispanic and Native American populations and also for students that are in the lowest income quarter but how that's actually happening is from school districts that are purchasing technology school districts that are purchasing connectivity and how are a majority of school districts doing that they're using Federal pandemic relief funds so what we're really on the verge of is a fiscal cliff where even more students will be unconnected or under connected in the coming years so at Verizon we realized that that device and connectivity Gap cannot be the extent of what we do we need to develop Sustainable Solutions to really ensure that we are building a culture around technology integration thinking about all the stakeholders and not just focusing on providing a device and walking away we wanted to ensure that we were thinking about all those systems and that's what Verizon Innovative learning really is we have our schools program where we provide one-to-one Tech along with Comprehensive professional development to the schools and the district leaders and that's in partnership with digital promise in partnership with Arizona State University and heart of America we build emerging Tech Lab spaces across the country in Verizon Innovative learning schools where we actually pair an elective design thinking curriculum and we also work on HBCU HSI and Community College campuses across the country providing stem enrichment programs so ultimately what we really try to do is think about digital inclusion on a systemic level rather than just the device and connectivity yeah and that's so aligned so well with the work that we do at games for change particularly when we talk think about teachers right and one of the things that um is really important to us at g in g4c learn which is the sort of um little brand within games for change that focuses on the learning is that we really wanted to we had for a long time the student-facing program which did touch teachers and we brought teachers in for a day or two to learn how to teach game design but it was really about the students and one thing that we know is like you know kids we don't have to convince kids that games are good right or that they want to play games but really it's about how do we how do we create a ecosystem within a school where um where lots of people are are thinking about this work and participating in this work and one of the things that we did at game store change was really start to lean into the teacher professional development like how can we really blow that up a little bit to make it a little bit more robust because we know that the transformation of teacher practice is really where we're going to see the transformation of classrooms right so it's again just to your point it's not just the bringing in the tools but how do you use them and that lies with the teacher right whether it's teaching them how to use specific tools or teaching them mindsets that gaming can do but but also just the idea that that kids are going to know things that you might not know and how do you work together I mean so mindset shift right and so I think that that's a place where Verizon and games for change really aligned to come together absolutely um so maybe um you could talk a little bit now like about what it is about gaming like why games and Esports because it could have gone in a lot of different and has not in a lot of different directions right um we are really looking at digital skills more broadly and we have a platform called Verizon Innovative learning HQ where we have lesson plans professional development and immersive learning applications and we look at digital skills that we can um promote on a national level I think about a few things I want to promote digital skills that have multiple points of entry and to me gaming is a perfect example of that right you have something where you can access it from a low technology perspective high technology multiple content areas multiple uh backgrounds teacher abilities Etc I want something where students are able to create I think a term that we hear a lot right now is Tech fatigue and I think we need to be realistic that what we're experiencing is fatigue with passive use of technology and we need to begin thinking about how students are actively engaged in technology and as a teacher one of the things that always excites me about gaming is that there's no right way to do it it's something where you could really Choose Your Own Adventure with that but with that being said one of the things that we've spoken about is when we hear gaming talked about in like a broader education conference perspective we hear about the possibility of gaming the future of gaming we hear about the Arenas full of students the scholarships to college and you have to imagine how alienating that could be for a teacher or District that doesn't even know where to begin so for us what we really thought was the opportunity with games for change was to provide something real provide something where we took advantage of your extensive experience in providing professional development and your extensive experience in this industry to ensure that we were developing a comprehensive Suite of professional development resources some of which are actually live on Verizon Innovative learning HQ today um do you want to talk a bit more about the content that we have available right now yeah so we're really games for change is really exciting like really excited and thankful to Verizon for um the opportunity to do this work it's it's really cool we have started to um populate stuff onto Verizon Innovative learning HQ right now what we have available are six courses um they're in two different collections one collection is focused on District school leaders and one collection is focused on school leaders and the courses um I'll put it up okay the courses um are focused on helping the stakeholders understand how they might be able to leverage games to engage youth in their either schools if they're District leader or in their one school if they're a school leader and it really starts with kind of an overview of what the games and learning field right like what are what are Best Practices um what's the difference between using a game or using game-like learning or using gamification like it really breaks it all down for both the school leader and the district leader and then does the same thing and then there's a course that does the same thing for Esports so what is Esports why might you want to bring Esports to your school what are the opportunities available for Youth and and Educators and um and then and then the last course in each of those collections kind of ties it all together by saying like Okay now you know about games and you know about Esports and how can you make this happen how can you set your District up or your school up for success and one of the things that I love about this project is that you know it wasn't games for change that said oh we think we should do something for school leaders District leaders although I do it was Verizon actually who said like we want to do something for everybody like we want to we want to make sure that all the stakeholders are kind of taken care of and paid attention to and what I think is so amazing and Brilliant about that is that for those of you who have worked in schools or even just because you went to school right you know schools and um it you know what kids want to do can only happen if the teachers want to make it happen What teachers want to do can only happen if the school leaders want to make it happen and what school leaders want to do can only happen if the district leaders may want to make it happen and none of it can happen without everything working together and so there's a kind of Brilliance in trying to level up all these different groups so that they can really make change in their schools yeah absolutely and I think you picked up on two important ways that we sort of do all of our work within Verizon Innovative learning one is that we never work in a silo we always leverage experts like games for change or Arizona State University or digital promise or New York City media lab with our applications to um really think about are we addressing the most pressing need in this space right now and we also try to bring in the voices from students that we work with teachers that we work with we have advisory panels of them so I think that that's really critical for us and then what you also picked up on is Direct Services to students are something that we see a lot of we see a lot of photo opportunities where you're providing something to a student and giving it and those are all well-intentioned and important but if we want to make systemic change if we want to actually see gaming or any other digital skill really become part of the culture of a district we need to be addressing all those stakeholders I really love in your professional development courses that you have on Verizon Innovative learning HQ just even the very simple guide of let's talk about how you get buy-in from all these different stakeholders and how do you actually have this conversation with parents you're bored your superintendent because for any of us who have been in a district you have a well-intentioned educator maybe some really incredible students but you're trying to convince I.T why do you need firewalls taken down you're trying to convince a principal why they should be giving you Club access to run an Esports Club all those conversations are such big barriers for a lot of schools so I appreciate you building out those supports yeah so what Alex is referring to is in the both the school leader and the district leader PD we we have a kind of activity where we help guide participants through creating an elevator pitch based on whoever Their audience is and I I the reason why I thought this was such an important thing to include is because in my work you know I've been doing um working in the games and learning space for about 15 years 16 years now and I still have to convince people right I still have to like I still get a little nervous when I'm like games and I'm like oh no they're gonna you know like if they're not gonna take me seriously so I think I think it's really important to be able to deliver your message in a way that um is impactful but also can rely heavily on data because there is a lot of data out there which is also in the course and um and it's not a skill that everyone has to be able to do that and so it's it's I think it was an important piece of it and I yeah I agree and I think you also did a great job of demonstrating that there are a lot of things that districts are already doing around game-based learning gamified learning that I think is critical as well maybe we can talk a little bit about what's coming next in this in this because right now you have district and school year PD by the end of the summer we're going to have a teacher course for educators around using games that'll be a little bit more in depth than the district and school leader like really the hot the nuts and bolts of it and how do you do it in the classroom um and then you can stay tuned for like a whole bunch of stuff that's coming we have a career in college readiness curriculum or a path what kind of Pathways curriculum we have a video series that's going to be launching called voices from the field which is going to have interviews of all the kind of industry experts and it and and we're just really really excited about it and yeah yeah we are too and I think it was important to us to create a big variety of resources that schools can use just because we know that so many schools are at different points in their journey in implementing gaming and Esports um so we're excited to see those resources come and I think that once we see them in use we'll probably realize oh actually schools need this as well and we'll begin to develop even more and you know possibly find other opportunities there um yeah so while we have you here I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about the other you mentioned them a little bit at the beginning but the other things that are happening on on the platform and how the case for change stuff kind of integrates and fits into it all yeah absolutely so um Verizon Innovative learning HQ which you can access if you go to those QR codes um it is a platform that houses essentially we for 10 years have been in schools through our schools program our Labs program our stem Achievers program and we realized that there was an opportunity to take all this professional development that we've developed all these lesson plans that we developed that we've perfected over the course of 10 years and make them available to anyone that wanted to use them so for instance our entire lab curriculum that was developed by Arizona State University um who's also here and you can hear them talk more about some of the resources they've created all of their curriculum they created as part of the lab program is available for free to anyone to access all the professional learning that is aligned with micro credentials from digital promise is available for free and you can earn a micro credential from digital promise for free um but so that was one piece we wanted to make sure that all of our best practices were available but the second piece was that we also had an opportunity with New York City media lab where we developed a series of edtech applications and we wanted to make those freely available for anyone and what we saw as an opportunity as well is while the started as some of these apps started as virtual reality apps that required headsets we saw an opportunity to actually democratize access to them and begin creating web-based experiences so we're in the process of building that out so that some of these actually are web-based and device agnostic so that anyone can access some of those experiences but really this entire site is around giving Educators giving School leaders giving informal Educators the tools needed to really effectively integrate technology and I think gaming is an area that we really had a gap it's something that we saw a lot of interest in so we were really excited at the opportunity to build this together we were too so and so what's what's next like where's the platform going what's the Future Vision what's yeah um I think we have a significant uh amount of content on the site and I think that one thing that we're constantly doing is getting as much user feedback as possible about what is um working what are things that we need to uh embed even further one of my big initiatives is I really want to make the site as accessible to everyone as possible so ensuring that there are as few barriers to that so when we look at things like for instance some of our applications you have to think about every time you have to download something or every time you have to go to another site it creates a barrier where there might have to be something that needs to be whitelisted within a district Etc so thinking about that user experience to make it all embedded in there we've built out a lot more of the single sign-on capacity so teachers can access it with Microsoft Google classlink clever all those are available for any teacher to access but we're constantly just really looking at user feedback to take advantage of that it's um for those of you who are interested it really isn't easy it is an easy sign I'm not advertising for but it's an easy sign-on process and um the courses are free and available which I think is is so amazing um you know I really what I really am super excited about is the idea that the the that games and games for and games for learning can be kind of spread wide um do you want to talk a little bit about the reach yeah okay so the I do want to just touch on the sign on piece because I think there's an important distinction to make here as well I think that whenever we talk about corporate platforms and education there's always a little bit of hesitance of like do I really want to put my information on there and I think that there's an important piece to understand that one we align with the privacy policy within Verizon but also since it's a corporate social responsibility initiative we maintain all that data within our own platform that plot that data is never shared to the business it is never used to send out promotions on Verizon um services or devices and I think that's an important distinction that this is not a uh a sales pitch but secondly when we talk about the reach our goal is to reach 10 million youth with digital skills training by 2030. um as of the end of 2022 we have reached 3.1 million students through all of our initiatives so we've made a significant amount of progress I think that gaming is really an opportunity where there are a lot of schools who are looking for resources and I think that um it's really going to help us in reaching even more students with high quality technology integration so Aranda I'm curious um as we think about our entire Suite of services that we've that we're creating for Esports and gaming what does success look like to you um you know I think success it's interesting the success indicator for me with this kind of work has been the same has been consistent almost through the entirety of my time working in games and learning I think what I'm really like hopeful for and excited about is the idea that you that games um will be something that's kind of accepted as as an integral part of teaching and learning um you know I believe deeply in the power of play like I talk a lot about the power of play I was a when I started I was a I taught very young children not very but first and second graders and you know you watch those kids make sense of the world and they're playing like that is just how human beings make sense of the world and you see that it's so natural like even like you have a young you have a young childhood yeah right like you watched everything that they learn as they play like they're they're trying things they're playing with it and um and I um and that gets lost in in middle school and high school it's actually looked at it it's frowned upon so I think the more we can kind send this out into the world the more we can back it up with data the success sort of looks like people saying like oh I have found a small way to bring this into my classroom or a small way to bring this into my school or a big way to bring this in like I think the the what I'm excited about is that it's broken down in a way that I think there's something for everybody like if you wanna if you want to play a game in your classroom we can help you figure out how to do that successfully if you want to transform your curriculum we can help you figure out how to do that successfully if you want to run an Esports tournament we can help you figure out how to do that successfully like I think and I think success looks like um adoption but I don't but I'm I don't think it needs to be uniform adoption right and I think that that's really such a powerful thing about the way we've structured this and I I think also an understanding of what it is and what it isn't yeah um I think it's similar to what we face with immersive learning when we talk about immersive learning in education I think there are some who assume that that means you walk into a classroom you put on a VR headset and you never look up and that's just not the case at all um and we also don't want it to be a one-time 10-minute experience and then you never go back to it again um but there is a wide range of what it can look like within that um and I think similarly with gaming we have the same um when I think of success for this program I want to see a district on the stage I want to see a district talk about how they used our resources to actually help them develop an Esports program um and and really look at it from a few different perspectives and I think that would also be incredibly helpful for us as we continue to build out this program absolutely um we are just about out of time I'm wondering if you want to yeah we have some Verizon is is a huge supporter of this Festival but also and also we're highlighting a lot of the work that games for change has done with Verizon but also the work that Alex has mentioned during this talk at the festival in these sessions so yeah so we have a panel coming up uh later today at the Microsoft building on exploring Esports and gaming and K-12 Educational Systems uh Nick Matula for my team at Verizon will be presenting along with some of our partners at Arizona State University um as well as games for change on what we are really building there and I'm excited for you to see that from a partner perspective as well um later on today Arizona State University and our partners at current studios are actually leading a workshop where we're looking at the Verizon Innovative learning lab online which is an experience that we built out on Verizon Innovative learning HQ really built out of us realizing that there was a need to democratize that access to emerging technology and I'm so thrilled for the work that they put into at that and also that it's not edutainment but it's actually an experience that lines up with standards and is really well thought out from that perspective and then tomorrow um our partners at New York City media lab will actually be doing some uh displays of our immersive K-12 Ed Tech applications so you can actually experience those there and see some of what that immersive education experience looks like on Verizon Innovative learning HQ okay yeah so hopefully you all will check out some of these sessions and um we can thank Alex for sitting down with me to talk a little bit about the programs thank you [Applause] so it's my honor to introduce a great friend of games for Change and someone who I admire deeply Leo lebe is a g4c board member and also Global head of YouTube it's not the first time Leo has graced our stage and he always delivers and inspires and sometimes draws out a few tears in us his keynote talk will take a look at how Community is a key change agent in gaming and how can it can guide us towards a beautiful tomorrow so please join me in welcoming Leola [Applause] [Music] all right how's everybody doing good yes ready rock and roll been a great day so far it's exciting to be back here at uh games for Change and um I don't know I have some I have some remarks some words gonna watch a bunch of videos just kind of hang out together and talk a lot about uh community so I'm glad everybody's doing well it's exciting to be here celebrating 20 years of games for change thank you so much to Susanna and Aussie and the whole crew you guys are amazing but I'll give you I know we're doing lots of rounds of Applause we should keep keeping them up we'll do more so I'm Leo I'm the global head of gaming at YouTube I've been in the games industry for over two decades so a long time I started the industry I had hair and no children now I've got three children and a dog and no hair so you know what what are you gonna do but I love every single minute of it and I've actually had the opportunity as Susanna mentioned to come here um to games for Change and speak over the preceding years and every single time I've had this opportunity I've told a variety of stories so I'm going to tell a a different sort of a story today but I wanted to really put it all together so in 2019 I gave a talk called Bill to get a better games community I went through several different examples of people using the power of games to drive positive change in their communities people like Luol I think I see them in the room Liz luau here he's in the room someplace on um as well as Sadia Bashir and Steve Spahn from ablegamers I've been hanging out with with Mark here as well today from ablegamers but these are all people doing incredible things leveraging the power of games to drive positive change in their communities that that was 2019. then in 2020 we were all at home and then the global Camp pandemic happened took over every facet of almost every facet of most people's lives and that year I gave a talk called games Can Heal the World and we talked about the games industry and various projects that were happening to really help as much as possible with this with the terrible pandemic that was impacting so many lives and it was really really successful I mean multiple millions of dollars raised communities engaged people who had Joy brought into their lives in a magical and amazing way that I think only games can do um in uh 2021 I actually didn't make it to the festival but I know that the opening days talks were about how gaming communities can help with diplomacy and Inspire kids to solve The World's Toughest problems and then I came back in 2022 just last year I was on this stage and gave a talk called change matters games matter and you matter and what we did is we went on a journey of really exploring how the world of games manifests and creates manifests and creates opportunities for people all around the world and how we all have an important role to play how every single person in this room matters we all have value and we all have the opportunity to contribute to a better and more positive future but here's the thing each talk may have looked or acted as a separate entity but in the reality they were all about just one thing which is what I'm here to talk about today which is building community and the importance of communities I think you've all probably heard that word a lot so far throughout the festival and you're going to hear it more and more and more and it's something that's just core to the nature of what we do in core to the to the overall power of games so I'm going to be talking about that today as well we want to acknowledge that we all have a role to play in deciding what our community is going to be like for us as well as for future Generations so last year believe it I will click the slides eventually don't worry you're also going to watch a lot of video in this presentation can't be from YouTube and not show a lot of videos so don't worry it's not just all Leo talking there's a bunch of Leo talking bits but then there's lots of amazing video here as well so last year we announced that there we had over 500 million logged in viewers coming to the YouTube Every Community every day to watch gaming content that's a massive audience and a massive community and they're watching everything that you can possibly imagine from Minecraft to Roblox to um any literally any game that you can think of and that's every single day um I'm going to talk some more stats later about the size of this community and how they're interacting on YouTube as well but a great example of building Community around the game is of course Mario and while the world was watching the release of the Super Mario Brothers movie um YouTube also celebrated the Mario Gaming Community which passed a hundred billion games uh sorry 100 billion views on YouTube and so what we wanted to do was highlight and feature the Mario community members inside of the celebration which was then part of the YouTube blog and then also on the YouTube homepage and of course the Mario Community is one of the mo the oldest and most impassioned communities on the platform with content dating back to the earliest days of YouTube itself so why don't we watch a little uh Mario video the mustache the hat and 100 billion views oh it's me Mario [Music] ISO how did we get to 100 billion views well we can go back to some of the earliest Mario videos I remember seeing [Music] speedruns were huge back then too oh my God and today more speed runs of Mario are uploaded than any other game series [Music] Beyond speed runs over 2 million channels have uploaded Mario videos and someone uploads a new one every 20 seconds so it's like my entire life is Mario right today we're making Mario's favorite dish spaghetti bolognese and getting to 100 billion views wouldn't be possible without Japan in 2010 our very own hikokan one of the country's biggest creators scored his first viral hit beatboxing the theme we all grew up with [Music] over 60 of all Mario Maker views come from Japan [Applause] but it's not just big in Japan this game has blown my mind in 20 seconds all right let's try out this beautiful level we made and creators all over the world rally around the game we lovingly fight over yeah look at me go dude I'm good I'm good dude he got to 100 billion views because it's more than just a game Metro Super Mario art [Music] it's Mario hat Mario has these overalls there you have your wonderful Mario mustache then your Mario [Music] thank you [Music] we celebrate Mario in infinite ways all right let's go I got Mario painted on mileage let's make some boba and there she is all finished and with over 2 000 channels dedicated to the Mario Universe we're 100 billion views and growing what this is cool so when you combine the Mario games we love to play oh my God that's mine is there we go this feels nice to the pizza party the Mario characters who we pretend to be I spotted Mario the Mario universe that we wish we lived in it's me we get all of us and the magic we make every day [Applause] [Music] and that's how we got to 100 billion views I think I think my favorite part of that video is when they're like it's a me yeah you and a you and a you like I love it and really wanted to show you're gonna see like some long videos yes but like that shows games impacting every single area of people's lives whatever they're passionate about whatever they get excited about we saw cooking we saw dancing we saw music we saw map we saw art like it goes on and on and on and I know with everyone that's here today this resonates with you and maybe you're you're here and so you know more than anyone else but it's always great to get that magical reminder of just what games can do and I would say perhaps there is no better example of uh Community than Mario although I might have one at least for me anyways um but I'll start here with another incredible stat this is about Community this Gaming Community on YouTube over 120 billion hours of gaming content were watched in the last year another thing that I wanted a video I wanted to highlight and by the way if everybody's curious like I've got a lot more serious crazy stuff to talk about in a little bit so don't worry I'll get all dark and depressing but you know we got to start with the fun stuff um for sure but we focused on May 4th 2023 does anybody know what May 4th actually is May the 4th be with you yes Star Wars day and oh thank you and yes I appreciate that my kids call me Vader um but you know as part of the the May the 4th 2023 celebration uh we took the opportunity to also celebrate the Star Wars community so for somebody like me and my family like everyone's like oh is there a better example than Mario maybe it's Star Wars I don't really know but of course there's generations of fans and enthusiasts and then we know that Star Wars is going to continue to inspire generations to come so this is a little bit of a shorter video but why don't we take a look at some Star Wars Community celebration foreign [Music] [Music] that was cool um I truly hope you enjoyed this epic outing backstory of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic our protagonist is continuously haunted by visions of Darth Revan I can't believe they're using music from Revenge of the Sith like this is hitting home oh after playing this game I was like when I play this game I am calcast so I decided that I wanted to meet my first ever cosplay [Music] I think we are all very excited for the new Star Wars Jedi Survivor battle droids what let's go and May the force be with you and May the force be with you may the fourth be with you hey girl so may the fourth be with everybody here in this room as well um I just I mean I love these videos and I just love how they show off these communities coming together I played a lot of Jedi Survivor myself I played a lot of Star Wars games and it's something that you know I just think really resonates and again is a testament uh to the what the the power of games can do to bring people together so and of course it's always fun to be able to play a Star Wars video at a conference you know but one of the most exciting things to me about the videos that we've watched so far and hopefully everybody has noticed is the fact that they're so Global and gaming is something that of course transcends transcends languages and borders and I recently did an interview with expansion a Spanish language news magazine in Mexico and as part of this interview we announced some interesting stats so did you know that 64 of Mexicans who consume YouTube prefer the experience in Worlds offered by video games so of people who are watching YouTube like they prefer to tune in and watch the video game content also 57 of Mexican surveyed by YouTube think that video games are much more visually attractive than movies we've heard a lot about the games industry it's bigger than movies it's bigger than the biggest entertainment industry in the world Etc but we're seeing it more and more um and even like these smaller populations and Pockets around the world and I think it's important to continue to emphasize the role that video games plays in everybody's lives and what they're tuning into and what they're interested in Google also recently announced programs where we're going to be training game developers students content creators Esports athletes in Saudi Arabia the training is actually going to be held in partnership with entities such as the ministry of communication Information Technology Center for digital entrepreneurship the game Founders program the ignite initiative as well as the Saudi Esports Federation as part of this program we're going to be doing something that we call Google days so we're going to be inviting University students to learn from the company's gaming experts and partners from around the games industry and what we want to do is host training programs with over 250 students from alasa Jetta Riyadh to mom like you name it starting this September in partnership with code we've also done a workshop specifically around Esports Federation and The Gamers eight conference for 50 Saudi based creators and Esports players as well so we're talking about gaming content Channel optimization how do you develop an audience on YouTube how to grow engagement with your gaming Community Etc so we're doing our best as with all of you here to really bring and highlight the influence of gaming around the world we're also hosting a special what they call an animal uh batala session so part of this is YouTube's patala program to empower female creators as well and in jumping over to the UK for a moment we ran a very interesting study that shows that the gaming community and gaming itself is something that enhances all aspects of a person's life we talked about either earlier when I said you know change matters games matters you matter and we all have something important to say we all have value to bring to the table but also of course extends into the world of employment and jobs um so according to a survey by census-wide 70 of the recruiters in the UK said that they've seen more young people under 25 years old listing gaming as a hobby on their uh CVS in the last five years um than they had previously and that's I think that's really really exciting and gamers are starting to feel good enough about their hobby that they're willing to list it on their resumes I mean if that's not a testament for how far gaming has come then I really don't know what is where you can actually you know for whatever game you're playing and for whatever levels you're solving people are recognizing that you're building skills that are relatable to the workplace and that is phenomenal um in the same survey it gets even better though and then the same survey by census-wide 56 of Recruiters in the UK say that they're more likely to hire someone who's a gamer and who could talk about the skills that they've developed gaming so once again another plus up into the gaming column for getting jobs and they said communication eagerness to learn good time management the ability to take initiative were some of the most useful skills to look for they look for when hiring somebody for an entry level role and those are all things that you're learning while playing games so jumping back over to the UAE and Saudi Arabia for a second this idea about job skills being important is reinforced even more when we learn that more than eight out of every 10 Recruiters in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are more likely to hire somebody who's a gamer and can even speak about the skills that they acquired through games so we're in the middle of a movement here and something that again maybe everybody in this room already knows but is really I think Transcendent and gaming moving into another sphere altogether where it's being recognized as something that adds value to every aspect of your lives especially your employment I actually I published an article in op-ed in wired last week and they ended with a thought that I think is at the center of the capability and the potential of community and gaming and this is this is what I wrote unless there's a conscious effort to tackle prevailing stereotypes around gaming there's a risk that the skills and experiences of a diverse and active portion of the population will be overlooked or dismissed and by creating an environment that is more open to welcoming an activity that is very much part of the popular culture and welcoming it back into the world of work we can unlock unlock the untapped potential of gamers so that's a lot um it's a lot of stuff we know that gaming builds Community we know that gaming impacts the every single area of people's lives we know that gaming can be a great platform for building unique skills as people enter into the jobs Market it all starts and is centered around this idea of community and why people game and why people game together that's a lot I know I just kind of threw a bunch of numbers and facts at y'all I wasn't even changing the slide so you've been staring at this thing going like what's going on Leo's going to be changing this no no no I really wasn't um but as a closing and this is I think there's perhaps no better example of community than what the world saw around the Minecraft creator technoblade is anybody in the audience familiar with technoblade yeah yes there you go technoblade Never Dies so as I started working on this I really wanted to share the story of technoblade with y'all and I kept trying to think of a way to make the following video shorter or tell a different version of the story but I failed every single time so instead I really you know would love to to share this video with you it's it's rather long but it's extraordinarily important and it's important to take the time to be educated and inspired and go deep on understanding exactly how impactful a Gaming Community can be so this is going to be a video that Stills tells the story of uh technoblade a Minecraft Youtuber who had an incredible impact on his community and still does uh to this day so um I'll come back and say thank you after this but please enjoy and learn from the incredible story of technoblade search the phrase the phrase and you'll find tens of thousands of videos that have over 100 million Collective views they all refer to the late technoblade a 23 year old Minecraft creator who won Legions or fans thanks to his gaming Talent humor and courageous life story it was talented and also very entertaining you would just make you smile and laugh he was so much more than just a content creator so much more than just a Minecraft Youtuber Never Dies [Music] but to understand the evolution of the phrase which has now become a phenomenon we have to go back to October of 2013 when the then 14 year old technoblade uploaded the first video to his namesake Channel Hey guys I'd just like to preface this video with an explanation of what goes on because when I am concentrated I don't talk at all and as the teenager grew so too did you get drawn in by his magnetic humor and exceptional gameplay and I'm already only getting by by the skin of my teeth and teeth don't even have skin that's how you know it's messed up in 2017 we find the first mention on YouTube of what would become the iconic phrase the one rule of SkyWars technoblade Never Dies subscribe to technoblade and as technoblade absolutely dominated Minecraft don't mind me just obliterating this poor player the seemingly literal phrase gain traction among his fast-growing fandom no blade Never Dies and he wouldn't he wouldn't no one was doing what he was doing he was unmatched he even amazed his fans by beating Minecraft on Hardcore Mode using a steering wheel oh wait it's just straight up right here look at this I've got my own figurine now I'm like Batman on August 8 2019 technoblade surpassed 1 million subscribers and received his gold play button well guys we did it one million subscribers I am now officially a big boy the next year he was invited to join dream SMP which features some of the world's best players it was here his offsided refrain would become synonymous with his gameplay technoblade Never Dies never questioned me again Chad iron armor no helmet doesn't matter I do not die the live streams grew even beyond the game itself by inspiring art based on the mostly improvised plot lines of the roleplay themed server I have a gags and I'll put it through your teeth and later that year came a now legendary duel YouTube Superstar Mr Beast challenged technoblade and dream SMP founder dream to a head-to-head Battle Royale with the winner emerging as YouTube's Supreme Minecraft champion [Music] over the following months technoblade's channel rocketed to over 8 million subscribers at which time his growing Legion of supporters turned what was a Creator's catchphrase into a fandom's rallying cry perpetuating the slogan technoblade Never Dies across social media and YouTube comments and even fan art then suddenly in June of 2021 technically vanished [Music] so what had become of Minecraft's greatest player well he returned to update his fans in the widely viewed video where I've been the reason my art hurts is because I have cancer I feel a bit silly talking about this with the Minecraft in the background techno believe revealed he had been diagnosed with sarcoma a rare form of cancer the video logged over 15 million views with over 50 000 dimensions of his iconic refrain technoblade Never Dies popping up across social media [Music] fans had reimagined the mantra for a new chapter in the story of technoblade repeating it in support of the Beloved Minecraft creator and technoblade made sure to share his new Journey with his audience touching millions in the process I've maxed out the pity Factor dude the one the only way it could get worse is if I was still bald but I've been off chemo so my hair actually grew back and his supporters rallied around him with competitions and fundraisers hey we hit the goal [Music] through technoblade's efforts over a million dollars has been raised for the sarcoma Foundation of America tragically technoblade would succumb to his illness on June 30th 2022 a final video appeared on technoblade's YouTube channel hi I'm technoblade's dad he wrote a message and he asked me to read it to all of you hello everyone technoblade here if you're watching this I am dead thank you all for supporting my content over the years if I had another hundred lives I think I would choose to be technoblade again every single time the outpour both his friends and supporters responded in disbelief and anger but they'd find creative outlets for their pain Skyblock teaches us that no matter how ridiculous the odds may seem within us resides the power to overcome these challenges and Achieve Something Beautiful one day we'll look back at where we started and be amazed by how far we've come [Music] and technoblade's signature slogan evolved into its final form repeated in tribute to the enduring Legacy of the great Minecraft player in the first days after his passing technoblade's final video amassed over 125 000 comments with the phrase technoblade Never Dies since his death an average of 300 new videos with technoblade never dies in the title are uploaded every day [Music] it's as if the Gaming Community is keeping the memory of technoblade alive so that he remains among them even if only in spirit before his passing technoblade unlocked all of his unlisted earlier videos creating a time capsule of his life on YouTube so with the immortal phrase technoblade lives on he lives on in over 900 videos that continue to bring smiles to faces he lives on within the gaming community that he was a part of and that continues to support cancer research in his name and he lives on each time someone uploads their first Minecraft video to YouTube inspired by the gameplay the humor and the charm of their favorite gamer [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I can I can kind of not think of a better example there maybe there are no better examples of the power of community than technoblade so we'll end it there but I just really wanted to emphasize Community is everything Community is how we find each other a community is how we have the opportunity to change the future of this world that we live in so I encourage everybody continue to find your tribe find your community help them be positive in bringing people in and not pushing people out um but you know maybe the within this is very simply technoblade Never Dies thanks [Applause] get your tissues out or put them away I guess if you use them already all right um we I'm very excited once I find my notes to talk about this next session um so this next session outlines the growing number of queer games and their ability to build new worlds and destroyed old ones this panel will feature associate professor of game design at SUNY hostas akuni hostas Juno Moro multi-disciplinary game designer Jude Pinto associate professor in the school of art media and Technology at Parsons School of Design Colleen Macklin and moderated by boo booberg an associate professor in the department of film and media studies at the University of California in Irvine together they will explore the capacity of video games to imagine what new possibilities might come into being after the world we know has ended please welcome our panel [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] hi everyone welcome I'm Beau rueberg here on stage with me are Colleen Macklin General Morrow and Jude Pinto Welcome to our panel with an easy breezy topic to start you off the day the future of queer games and the apocalypse um thanks very much to games for change for having us and especially to Lindsay Grace who helped this session come to life the structure of this panel is going to go like this I'll speak for a few minutes just to get us oriented and then I'll introduce my co-panelists then they'll each speak about their own game design projects for about five minutes and then I'll have some questions to spark a kind of group conversation between us so here's me I'm Dr Bo ruberg I am a professor of film and media studies at the University of California Irvine my research generally is on gender and sexuality in Tech but my specialty is in queer video games so kind of LGBT issues in video games um my work has two sides so there's a theoretical side where I'm looking at how video games have this immense queer potential that goes beyond LGBT representation on screen but there's also a community side where I am working with queer and trans indie game designers these are folks who are making Scrappy experimental games that are by and for and about queer people so these are not empathy games for straight cisgender players these are queer games so what about the apocalypse let me kind of walk you through the situation we find ourselves in today we are living in apocalyptic times our lives are marked by constant threats of climate crisis Global pandemic and a rise in reactionary anti-diversity politics that undermine our very right to exist as LGBT people games are the medium of the Apocalypse there is a huge number of games that are set during or after the end of the world that includes AAA video games but also smaller video games and analog games games allow us to imagine and also to play with otherwise unimaginable changes to our world unfortunately the relationship between queerness and the Apocalypse in games has often been problematic so we see this especially in AAA games where queerness itself as per is portrayed as apocalyptic um queer people or queer desires are often shown as being the thing that destroys the world even when people aren't destructive queer people aren't destructive in these games their lives in the post-apocalypse are shown as Bleak and full of pain however over the last few years we're seeing an important change queer and trans designers have begun reclaiming the Apocalypse more and more indie games are embracing the idea that queerness might just be so powerful that it can destroy the world as we know it a world dominated by racism capitalist exploitation and CIS heteropatriarchy at the same time queer and trans designers are offering these provocative visions of the post-apocalypse they're exploring what comes after The World's End the new queer worlds that might take shape in society's ruin many of these worlds are filled with queer Joy games are this immensely powerful platform for World building for dreaming up new worlds and bringing them to life through play but these queer apocalyptic games are showing us something different they're showing us that games are also vital for unbuilding the world and rebuilding it in new ways and that leaves me personally with a set of questions that I think are crucial for anyone who is invested in making or teaching or supporting games for change what happens if we stop trying to make the world better through games and instead use games to help us end the world at least the world as we live it today what happens if we stop designing for incremental steps towards social good and instead understand games as playgrounds for social upheaval what is the role of play at the end of the world this is a question that feels all the more pressing and all the more personal for queer people and others who are marginalized and disenfranchised what kinds of play can we play once the world we live in a world that is actively trying to destroy us has itself been destroyed so with those questions in mind I'm going to pass things to my co-panelists let me first introduce them first up we have Jude Pinto Jude Pinto is a multi-disciplinary game designer artist and composer based in Brooklyn New York after graduating with an MFA from the NYU Game Center their thesis project titled punch cyberspace investigator was accepted into the game Center's incubator program today Jude is excited to discuss the intentional ways they designed and destroyed the world of City B in Ponch next we have junamaro Juno is a multi-disciplinary artist independent game designer photographer and educator she's also an associate professor of game design at CUNY hostos where she has been developing the first public game design program in New York City she earned her MFA in design and Technology from Parsons Mario has presented games and spoken at sites like South by Southwest GDC and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and then finally we have Colleen Macklin Colleen is a game designer and an associate professor in the school of art media and Technology at Parsons School of Design she is the founder and co-director of pet lab design research lab that develops games for experimental learning and social engagement she's also a member of the game design Collective local number 12 and the co-author of two books on game design so with that I'm going to pass things to Jude [Applause] hey all my name is Jude and I'm going to talk about making and breaking cyber dystopia in my game punch cyberspace investigator Ponch has been an amalgamation of thought experiments since maybe about 2018 that it only really became a game when it was my thesis at the NYU game center and later as Bo said picked up by the game center incubator so I'm in this weird place right now where the demo really doesn't get across the depth of the world and I'm on Hiatus while I gather some more funding so I'm really honored to be here today with my fellow panelists to talk about my work to talk about our work together and to spark some conversation about queer apocalypse but in terms of cyber dystopia we must start with the internet which on the internet no one knows you're a dog uh this comic was published in Times magazine in 1993 which was the same year that the internet became publicly accessible and the response to this was huge because it very simply presented this mind-blowing idea that identity could be so easily manipulated in cyberspace that you could be anything even a dog and nobody would know those silly sort of tongue-in-cheek this concept inspired a lot of very interesting early queer utopian thought about the internet the notion that cyberspace was this de-centered radically Democratic space where you could be anything and you could escape the constraints of the material world so how did we get from here to here short answer the capitalist machine if we want to you know delve into it and think about it if cyberspace is a living product of the material world then it can't really be liberated from the material world's constraints without some radical Reckoning and somehow since 1993 we're back to where we started we're inching towards this apparent utopian vision of a free cyber Dimension except it's being packaged and sold to us and they're also asking us to conveniently ignore the biases of those who control the means of its production so that's where this Story begins there's a world like ours and a climate crisis like ours which inspires its wealthiest leaders to create a new home to protect the working class a place named City B Generations later its inhabitants body and mind have been transported to City B and have forgotten the world Beyond Family Ties Are severed and ancestry lost city B reflects a class gated Material World in which its inhabitants have never even known so that's the setting of Ponch cyberspace investigator the game follows a masked woman named panch and her hacker allies who conspire to unearth and archive City Bees Sinister past while also grappling with their own so from the beginning I wanted to make a cyber dystopian game that resonated with lesbians of color but in particular those like me who feel a variety of complex forces between their home here on Stolen land and the home in which raised their parents and their ancestors so that's a pretty hefty task which I thought it made sense to kind of start with some rules here so the first half of these are really to say that I don't think that dystopia has to I don't think the world has to crumble in one particular way I think that people like us can still experience Joy even in the end times from a more values perspective of course this game can't be written by one person if it involves a lot of sprawling identities and specifically indigenous futurism so I have a responsibility to confer with other people when it came to building City B itself I purposely used 3D blocks or sought out totally free 3D assets to really hit home that this is a reproducible world however everything 2D here is totally original from the people to the signs to the things that people create while this city is lifeless it really is the people here that bring it to life and each block is its own sort of micro community that really reflects the communities for which it houses now the people of City B can only survive through building community and finding family because everybody is poor and it's just you can't make it on your own here a lot of people wear masks to declare allegiance to protect their personal identities but also to look cool kind of similarly to how one might do with a profile picture or a logo so when it comes to playing the game you have to break it panch has this unique ability to turn the player's perspective into a desktop space which allows for some really interesting ways to manipulate and literally hack into the world but in other parts of the game involve things that we might traditionally think are bugs so collider mishaps are clipping through 3D objects because when you break past the bounds of the level you get to see all of its flaws you get to see that the ground doesn't end or the buildings don't end where the ground ends they actually continue and it's in these flaws where a lot of important answers lie but do these answers mean the end I always thought that if I don't want to bury my gaze I can't bury their world either so the Hope here is to create a dystopian story instead of instead of just a simple happy ending thinking about something that's more hopeful there is a world Beyond City B but a new world doesn't have to be a perfect place that Rises From the Ashes of the old it can be a demolition ground where we prepare to repurpose the rubble thank you so much [Applause] okay sorry I was waiting for this [Applause] how are y'all doing today good good I'm anxious so uh and I think it's I think it's important for me to say that usually uh I don't know helps helps me feel better by saying explicitly that I'm anxious rather than just looking anxious um and so yeah I was gonna I've made several games about doing laundry and because I hate laundry and so I was going to talk about one of them and but first I want to talk about uh the apocalypse right when we think about the apocalypse we usually think about something situated in the future um not usually the present not usually the past and so I would ask people to think about the apocalypse as something not just potentially in the future but something that's happening uh simultaneously in other places in our own lives in the past you know we can have a world in which the apocalypse is now for people living in Uganda or Saudi Arabia while you know we're just looking at the Apocalypse in the near future something to look forward to and so also thinking about the apocalypse as something that is also deeply personal so we all have our own beginnings and ends especially if you're a queer person and so that's something I wanted to think about as well and so the game I was going to talk about is called conspiracy theories about myself and so like I said I'll have a lot of anxiety specifically social anxiety um like I'm very sweaty right now just so you know I was bullied and shamed a lot when I was growing up both at school and at home and that was really hard I internalized a lot of that and so I ended up making this game when I was dealing with a lot of those feelings all at once and so it's based on a personal experience of mine and so it starts off in my boyfriend at the time's apartment and so we start off in in dialogue and I start helping them to take their laundry to the laundromat which is always something I love and so as we're walking to the laundromat um I ended up hearing someone yell out hey mister to me and I'm trans and it ended up being a former student of mine I hadn't seen in several years since before I transitioned so you know kind of close my eyes take a breath and turn around and you know we exchange an awkward hug and we talked for a few minutes and I I couldn't help but think the whole time I was wondering what he thought did he think I was weird or freaked did he lose respect for me how did he feel and I kind of really struggled to get back to the apartment after we dropped off the laundry it was a time when a lot of people would stare at me in the street and so I could feel that weight of all of those eyes on me and so I decided to make a representation of that experience in which it's a very menacing world it's very loud it's I mean it's high contrast but certain ability is low so it's hard to actually see things everyone is staring at you with these like Cyclops eyes which is you know no one wants to be looked at by Cyclops so I if you if you like relaxing stressful wholesome games I don't recommend playing it it's very stressful not not fun generally and so it looks a little bit like this so you actually um it's not a VR game it looks like it but you have two separate eyes and you actually control each eye independently and so you can see my my glasses framed you can see my bangs I'm holding up my phone and as you walk everyone is staring at you and yet it's also like really hard to see where you're going and so you have to kind of coordinate your two eyes to look in the same direction while avoiding the Gaze of strangers in order to make it home if you end up making eye contact with people you start crying which is how I felt and then eventually make it home or or to the apartment and in real life I just I cried for a very long time then I could I couldn't speak at all I couldn't say anything I couldn't describe what I was feeling or anything um I was feeling this unbelievable shame that I felt so I mean I felt I felt shame about having shame nothing bad had even happened in this experience I mean the student was looking down at my chest that was like the only thing that felt awkward but I was crushed by it I just couldn't do anything and so this whole experience was just informed by you know my awful experiences as a child growing up and so since I couldn't speak about it I was crushed by Shane I decided to make a game about it instead and that was my way of voicing that um and so by creating this kind of terrible world it's a manifestation of my inner World kind of internalized internalized transphobia it allowed me to kind of destroy it and the power that it held over me and allowed me to talk about it as well and so I think it's important to be able to tell stories like that um you know you can you can not only build sympathy from players but also you can build community with people with similar marginalized backgrounds you know you can connect with other people making awesome work about queer games and making queer games and you can move towards building something new and better by relieving ourselves of all of that baggage of the past and so I think it's important to say things out loud because then you can kind of relieve yourself of the power that those things hold over you so thank you [Applause] wow I I have to play these I'm really excited um [Music] I'm Colleen Macklin I teach at Parsons School of Design uh Juno is an Alum of our program and uh I'm currently uh making some games uh but right now I guess I'll talk a bit about uh things I've done in the past I do have a chapter in Bose book queer game studies and I think uh oh there we go that's uh so I make games for entertainment with my company local number 12. um we're almost all of us University professors uh and making games is sort of our side gig I guess uh but I make games with Eric Zimmerman and John Sharp and Eric also teaches at the game center so we're all like a Happy New York City family and we're welcoming Bo from the West Coast and as Beau mentioned I've written a few books uh co-authored them with my colleague John um on the ideas of failure and iteration failure is actually a really interesting theme that I think runs through uh the queer apocalypse and that idea and then um also as Bo mentioned I uh run a research lab at Parsons called pet lab which primarily designs games to explain complex systems and also to engage folks socially in social justice causes and and forms of activism so right now I'm working on a series of games that I call machine unlearning and so you all know chat GPT probably um you know chat TPT is the most Norm core piece of technology I've ever engaged with uh you know everything you talk about with chat GPT is fairly it's almost as if you put something through a filter and it responded with like the uh statistically most likely result I've found conversations with chat GPT to be incredibly boring but there's other folks who are doing really interesting things with machine learning Janelle Shane's AI weirdness which is a really fun and funny uh Twitter account looking at how these systems can actually present back to us a really skewed and strange view of our world and so that's really what the machine unlearning series is kind of about it's about taking these systems that are designed to take away all of our jobs and to do work um towards a towards a goal in the most common denominator way and trying to find ways to uh I guess rewild them you know this is like uh Concepts and ideas are domesticated through these systems I think because they really literally are looking at the most likely word to come after the next word in the sentence these large language models and so I've done you know I've got two prototypes I've got uh Cloud Theory uh and I don't know what this next one's going to be called but we're right now calling it parking lot rave party I'm working with some of my students on these projects and then I'm not sure what the third one will be but it will probably also include bananas um and uh just briefly Cloud theory is a game where you just look at clouds in fact you don't even um ultimately need a controller to play this game you can just look and listen and I'm really interested in how one can create ambient forms of agency can take away what we imagine to be gold like games are so damn goal oriented why do we why do we always have to have a goal in a game uh why do we have to have challenges in a game can't we just kind of fall asleep while playing can't we just kind of take a break uh from all of this goal-oriented productivity focused activity um and can we take these what one calls large learning large language models and actually make them a little more ethical can we uh you know make them more carbon friendly uh and so we're creating these little language models using open source GPT based tools that emit far far less carbon than chat gbt or some of these more advanced tools that sound plausible but also extremely boring so this is a line every time you play this game you get different uh responses you can speak to different characters right now in the game we have a philosopher uh largely based off we take open source data so we're not stealing books that are written by creators who are alive and making a living off of that um yeah so this is trained on Bertrand Russell it's trained on some shower thoughts it's trained on some weird writing I did a friend's a friend of mine gave me her Diaries uh and uh it kind of mashes all that together to create some really interesting responses to these different shapes that are seen in clouds uh and then uh the next uh game that I've just started this summer uh is a rave party it's reusing uh a lot of models I think Jude was mentioning the idea that anyone can make these things right I'm reusing objects and models from David O'Reilly who is a an illustrator really inspires me uh and a game designer and uh animator and so this is all reusing those tools that have been released uh Open Source by him uh this is inspired by a colleague of mine Mackenzie work who teaches at our University she just recently released a book in the practices series called raving which is about the trans Rave scene in New York City and her experience is transitioning while finding this world that was accepting and amazing but also had interesting Reflections on the troubling times we do live in um but I love this quote and the book itself is just the best um so I like to think about these things using three you know as academics we have to make everything into three for some reason uh my magic game design number is always five but this is three uh systems worlds and agencies so that's a way you might be able to think about well how do you start a project maybe I'll start with the system I want to make something that's real crunchy and difficult and challenging or maybe I'll start with what the player gets to do agencies forms of of agency or maybe I'll begin with by imagining a world which includes a sort of narrative so I'm really interested in taking those ideas through these projects to think about idleness you know refusal to work to think about querying AI systems how might one do that we're currently trying to degender open source texts from like the 1800s and that's not easy and also ambient forms of agency meaning just sit back relax and enjoy instead of trying to strive towards goal all the time but thank you very much thank you okay thanks everyone for those wonderful presentations so we're going to shift now to the part of the the panel where we have a kind of group conversation about our work together um so I'm going to start us off with a question this might be a question that you found yourselves asking over the last few years or maybe people asked you this I know people ask me this a lot which is um In This Moment historically that can feel apocalyptic in lots of different ways and I really appreciate you bringing up you know in other contexts too and other cultural National contexts why make games and I know a lot of folks in the pandemic went through this existential crisis themselves as game makers why do we do this now um and especially as queer folks so I wonder if you could speak to that why do you make games in this present moment you want to start I can start um so I think we should make games because the world is burning I think it's really important um I think that without our voices as queer people um without that in the public then we cannot survive I think that queer identities cannot survive without those voices and so we see politicians kind of capitalizing on that recognizing that recognizing that queer survival and queer reproduction to be a little provocative depends on those voices being out there and so you see things like don't say gay you see them going after children and so I think that it's really important to do that while we can because you know in a few years we may have a situation like we have in Russia where there are laws against you know promoting homosexuality and things like that so I think it's vital that we actually make games while we can to speak out while we can to get those in front of other people and so you know I think that we as a community are obviously fatigued by Barry argaze and you know all of these like kind of focus on negativity and things like that but I think it's important to recognize that those kinds of things are often a building block towards you know things that come with more nuance and things that can emphasize things like queer joy and stuff like that and so I think it was Randall Park who directed shortcomings who talks about how it was important for uh and uh tour Cummings is depicts nuanced Asian-American characters and so he said it was important for the presence of a TV show like fresh off the boat for something like beef to happen which has a lot more nuance and it's not so much from the outside and so I think it's important to take those steps even if it's you know whatever we can right now while we can use that fire as fuel and yeah heck yeah I mean I think you know that is it's so important to remember that lives are uh in the balance here they're in danger here in this country um and that games are I think a fantastic way to share experiences and to communicate uh ways of being um and you know I think Jack halberstam and the queer art of failure looks at Pixar films as a space where uh queerness and anti-capitalist ideas are explored under the surface I guess and I'm just really interested in how games can provide a space for messages that isn't always detected by everyone you know in a way it's like a special language that we have and then also I I make games because I like the other people that make them I just really like to spend time if I'm gonna have to work for a living I'm going to want to work with people like this and people that I really enjoy talking to and and um being friends with I mean I think you know I think that's a really important thing to do in your life is to surround yourself with community yeah I I believe that um making games really is all about Community you think about uh like when you were talking about your game I've absolutely experienced that before as well uh you know eyes on you and uh when you're in that moment and you're experiencing it you feel so totally alone and then I mean to play a game is often uh it can be a private experience so to be able to you know sit in your room open up hio or something and find such an experience that really deeply resonates with you and to not feel the pressure of even having uh if you're overwhelmed you don't have to talk about it you get to just see that there is somebody out there you get to literally see through their eyes and realize that you're not alone but you also have the potential to create things like that as well yeah you know I was I was how your games build worlds but I think you're talking about community and I think there's World building that happens there too when you build community in games and through games and around games and I wonder maybe just to expand on that how you've built Community or how Community has been important to you in your own game design practice especially queer community okay so uh I think it's like really like the sense of community and uh kind of like partnership in community and identity and having like shared experiences shared struggles is like really vital for me personally um I know that having people like play test my games who understand the experiences having people you know read through my drafts to tell me what they think and really have an insight into the perspective has been really vital so I think that you know we have a strong sense of community in you know queer games and like without that connectedness that like kind of you know we have chosen family we have all kinds of like queer Concepts around community and how important it is and so I think that's really vital for making games and we end up having a really Vibrant Community as a result absolutely when uh when I began my MFA at the game center that was the first time I'd ever been surrounded by uh so many game designers and uh I learned a lot about myself I learned a lot about what exists in the world uh being able to work with other people to make games talk about them to play them uh I mean you get to open up a whole lot of conversations that you wouldn't have otherwise just because the act of playing can be very freeing and then also when you think deeply about like what you want to say you think about the limitations of your own experience uh you know you get to if you get to work on something that you don't necessarily share the experience with you get to learn a lot about that person as well and you know over time it will inform your own approach to uh to life to creating uh to art yeah you can't make games by yourself right like I mean I guess you can but if you if if anyone picks it up and plays it you soon realize that all your Genius ideas are are terrible at least in the beginning and you and and you're in dialogue constantly with um not only people who might be play testing or playing your games but also uh the systems that oftentimes act in unruly ways that you didn't anticipate and I just really like the idea that we're kind of coexisting in these communities with each other but also open to strangeness and unexpectedness and to Minds that don't work like ours and those could be human minds but they can also be constructed minds and and to me that's so exciting I really want to push against some of the ways that we think uh and be open to difference yeah and I'll see even for me too as an academic community and queer Community has been immensely important like I you know if there are any other academics in the room I started this work about uh 11 years ago or so and I felt like the only person in any given room in academic spaces who was interested in queerness and games and working on a conference which was called the queerness and games conference which ran from 2011 2018 changed like deeply changed my life and because it would bring together hundreds of queer academics but also designers and activists and artists and just being in a space where we would like take over a building for a weekend entirely surrounded by fellow queer folks who are deeply invested in games like showed me that there were people who this work was for and people who could support it so it's absolutely changed the course of my career and my personal life I mean shout out but I went to one of the early conferences and I broke my foot and uh you know it was the best experience I ever had having broken my foot I was laid up you know and I couldn't come to the conference but everyone brought me food and at the end all the folks from the conference came and like uh signed a card drew a card for me and surrounded me and it was the best feeling ever so it's not just about like these professional communities we all become really deeply invested in each other as humans too is the best best the best breaking of my foot I could ever have I think it's a very it's a realist transition to thinking about attention here like I started out being like let's use games to destroy the world right um but we're also talking about joy and togetherness and community and I think that that is it feels like a contradiction but it's something that comes up in a lot of your work each individually and other work we're seeing of queer folks making apocalyptic games I I wonder if that speaks to you like if you find yourself wanting to build worlds destroy worlds what do we do with the destruction and the joy together it's a very good question and I think it's part of what maybe is hard to translate to folks who have not had similar experiences like why would you want to burn down the world and also talk about how exciting and joyful the post-apocalypse will be um and it seems like that's it's present in each of your games in some way it makes me think a lot about just the notion of protest you know how people come together uh and you know to challenge the structures and the goal oftentimes is to destroy them and uh but I think in destroying uh there really is we have to think about what comes afterwards as well so I think that's where the the kind of like building comes in we can we can build we can destroy we can build again uh we can sort of alchemize the future but I think uh you know we can't we can't move forward unless we do so together and um you know when things reach uh you know the world that we live in right now uh some you know there are often times you can't just live in the structure and hope to change it from the inside out you have to destroy it and you can't do that by yourself yeah we all live in in different worlds already right um and in some of those worlds you know I feel pretty safe and in others not so much and I think that that's a big part of it I think that you know what Jude is bringing up is that we're already building and destroying worlds within our own social groups and um you know in different ways so you know why not rebuild or or or or unbuild in the way that we want and try it out there's no better form than games because right they're iterative and failure is is good failure is how we actually progress um so I already think that games within them and as as Bo's already written about games are inherently queer in that sense right so yeah and I just um I love fire um burning things and um I I made another game which is called blood broker which is uh is a human sacrifice management simulator nice in which you have to sacrifice humans consensually it's it's inspired at least thematically inspired by the movie Apocalypto and you have to uh from above you wage these influence campaigns to convince people of the benefits of being sacrificed um and I think it's I'm maybe more of a Critic maybe more of a negative person maybe I like to destroy worlds more than build them and you know maybe I can critique all the awful things in our society and hopefully someone will play that it'll resonate with them and maybe they're more of a Creator a Visionary someone who is less fire focused and you know can actually come up with something better or a solution to some of the problems we have in our society so yeah fire is fun I like to destroy things maybe maybe things will be built as a result I don't know I really love how this idea of building worlds and destroying them is different across your work right thinking about how Junior game you've built a city but then you also glitch through the walls of the city right you're kind of breaking the limits of the game I wonder about clouds too right clouds are kind of a whole world above us but then they dissipate and go away um I wonder if this this you know speaks to you like do you find joy in that act of destroying the worlds that you're building through your games aside from setting them on fire which I love I mean I really want to make games that make no sense like to me destroying meaning is part of the activity of destroying worlds like you know we make sense of the world like sense making is part of that you know uh my colleagues at Parsons are designers and they're all trying to make things make sense and work better and I'm like well what if we actually don't do that what if we Embrace nonsense and if we uh open ourselves up to not promoting certain forms of meaning but rather enabling others to create that meaning themselves and when we see a shape in a cloud all we're doing is is we're we're seeing that right um and I think that that's to me the most beautiful thing about being human right we can all uh make our own little worlds and they can either make sense or not and that's okay yeah it's it's so interesting to hear your perspective on that because uh I feel like work the way that we approach our work is kind of two sides of the same coin which is uh when I started working on my game I was really inspired by the watermelon woman by Cheryl Daniel which was you know creating history uh you know feeling like there's something missing uh and doing the research and imagining like really imagining what it would be like uh to be um you know to be a black woman actress who's also a lesbian and like you know the beginning of uh of actors really picking up in the U.S so uh you know I was really inspired by that and I was particularly like I really wanted to see Noir uh Center flawed lesbians that looked like me so I really wanted to like address those experiences and there's a lot of joy in like building that um but you know it's not simply just uh you know it's anything I mean it is literally a dystopia so it's not something that's just like throwing a blanket over the problem it's being like we can be uh the villains the heroes in this story we can build the world and destroy it and also be like very flawed and we could be sexy and gross and weird in the process as well gonna be sexy and weird and gross that's amazing um so we have just a couple minutes and I wanted to ask one last question which is unfair to ask you quickly but if you have a quick response so I know we have folks in the audience who work in education who work in industry for whom this is maybe not the kind of game making that they're used to talking about or teaching do you have anything that you'd like to put in people's ears like any kind of takeaway message for them if they are you know teaching folks to make games or putting funding towards games what should they take from this don't try to Define games stop it you know I'm like an elder here and I came up at the time when everyone was trying to Define what a game is and I think that that can be used to exclude and I would say be good with things not be in games but even though they're games yeah really you took the words out of my mouth yeah no no really uh I think the most fun I've had making games is uh you know accepting that there are things that I don't understand and maybe shouldn't and like really leaning into that so uh yeah leaning into things that are strange and non-traditional and just making sense of it for yourself not trying to meet some sort of expectation of what it should be and I'm going to Echo that as well um I think that it's important just to make things make things that resonate with you make things that feel right um whether they're games or not I mean they can be games they can be game like it doesn't really matter whether they are aren't you know the important thing is making and making constantly making again trying things differently and getting that out there and I think my last thing would be to say that queer games are so much more than empathy right this has not been a conversation about making games so that straight answers people can understand what it's like to be queer this has been about the games that speak to us personally and our communities and queer games are about that first and foremost so thank you so much to my co-panelists thank you for listening we appreciate it [Applause] at this time we will take a short break please come back to the theater in 10 minutes for the continuation of our program please come back in 10 minutes for the continuation of our program thank you silence oh okay all right now design thank you foreign I really really good I don't know here is foreign foreign please make your way back to the theater the program is about to be resume please your make your way back to the theater the program is about to resume I am and no one could ever know good morning games for change my name is Devin young I'm games for change's new Chief creative and strategy officer and this morning I'm delighted to bring to the stage the developer of Tara nil a game that's being featured in the immersive arcade downstairs and is nominated for awards tonight at the awards Gala and so Dominic gavlowski Jonathan Hao Yoon and Sam Alfred the developers of free lives will be joined by John fashion game producer for Netflix for a conversation around the process of developing the game please enjoy [Applause] [Music] [Music] I do love that music it's very invigorating when you come out here to that well good morning everyone my name is John fashion pronouns are he him and I am a producer at Netflix games on the external games team and today with us we have Sam Alfred Dominique goblovski and Jonathan halyoon from free lives and we're going to be talking to you about Tara nil today so um let's dive in if you want to go a little introduction of who you are and what you do first um I'm Sam I was the lead designer on teranol um Dominique I'm the managing director of free lives I'm Jonathan I was the lead artist in Fair now welcome thank you for joining us and they've come all the way from South Africa today so if we can give them a round of applause for that now if you don't know taranil is actually a reverse City Builder game so rather than building up a city you're restoring a wasteland to a pristine environment it's actually available down in the arcade to play today if you haven't played it yet but it's also available on Steam and Netflix games and if you're using it on Netflix games you can use it on your mobile device um yeah so let's dive in uh sorry about that let me get my notes up real quick cool so um taranil was a bit of a departure from what free lives typically does so if you're not aware free lives is known for games like broforce and another a fun one called genital jousting that's a good one um so what was the inspiration behind the concept of terranel and at what point in the process did you decide to incorporate real world sustainability issues um so yeah free lives has a has a has an interesting way of working where we we have a whole lot of different teams at our studio and and the teams are kind of self uh determining um and uh and teranil was started from a game Jam um and we wanted to make a game that was taking inspiration from strategy games and city builders but was about building nature instead of building cities and so that very early version of terranol was was very explicitly that um and and you you had this this cool gameplay Loop um and and your goal was to build nature rather than to increase population or increase currency or anything like that um but pretty quickly we realized that because we were making such a significant departure from traditional strategy games we couldn't use many of the Mainstays of the genre or the common practices in the design and that left us in the Lurch a little bit we had to come up with another source of inspiration uh and uh and in many ways throughout the design of the game not just at the beginning but nature and the natural world provided um that inspiration so the the very first time this happened was in the original prototype of terranil we had this idea of water and Greenery but we realized that nature is not it's not homogeneous you can't you can't homogenize all of the natural world all of Flora into Greenery and um to say nothing of fauna so maybe what we should be trying to do was to expand on the intricacies of the natural world and um and so biodiversity became the second focus of uh of of of the game of the gameplay Loop and um we had a we have a a floral Kingdom as we call it in Cape Town where we where we're from called feinbos and feinbos has a really unique property that um it needs to burn to germinate uh so so plants will get pollinated and and sometimes wait years until they are burned to release their seeds and so we decided to take inspiration from this this wonderful natural process on our doorstep and create a mechanic inspired by Fame boss in the game yeah and that's a really fun mechanic too in the game you wouldn't think that you know to restore this environment you have to actually burn part of it down instead of amazing to see that in the game and it's really great that you included that from from your home um yeah but another thing I want to talk about I know that Tara nil's been through a bunch of iterations designs and everything but the final the final release product kind of took an industrial approach uh to how it's shown in the game with the art style and everything um if you haven't played the game it's very relaxing a lot of ASMR in it I actually well I was producing it for Netflix I played it a lot to relax at the end of a long day um so why why did you choose the approach of industrial means of restoring an environment rather than creating something that's more of an Escapist like cozy game like Cottage core or something like that Jonathan yeah I originally did take a cozy game um and I actually really like a lot of those designs still um but when we tested it with our players we had the pixel art prototype that had a more industrial feel and then we had my shiny new art um and uh and the the response was kind of mixed um and one of the players wrote a very very well well reasoned blog post about it about how how climate change is this industrial-sized problem and that's a solve it requires industrial sized Solutions and so that if if we tried to show that uh there's a sort of cozy cottage core aesthetic it would make it more about individual responsibility which seems like a bit of a red herring and so that that resonated a lot with them and I was like okay that that makes sense to me too I guess I'll pack away my nice crazy buildings um but then we kept we kept the Cozy aesthetic for for the environment so we wanted that to be Lush that's great and I love that concept of an industrial size problems means an industrial size solution so that's really great to hear thank you um the game was developed over quite a long time started before the pandemic continued during the pandemic and it was released this year I'm just curious um Jonathan I know we had chatted about this um before but what inspired you to work on this game yeah um so I was already having a lot of climate anxiety I felt really helpless and here here I am making video games and what is there that I can do about anything and it was also during the pandemic um so there was a compounded anxiety and I felt I felt really useless um and then and then I played Sam's prototype and uh even in its janky prototype form with with its pixel art and the the music was like I think it was a generated midi thing um so you know it wasn't because of the Aesthetics it just still felt so powerful to be able to to feel as if I was somehow able to make a difference even if it was in this this um sort of Escapist world um and I was also aware of there's um there's work by a futurist uh whose name is Monica bielskite she writes about something she calls protopian Futures and it's about how um she she stole how there was just so much dystopian work in the world and that it was almost it was almost forcing a lot of our thinking into assuming that a better dystopian future was going to exist and there was kind of a responsibility of creative people to to put out more things that were hopeful and more things that were that were showing some solutions to problems um and so I I really wanted that like that hopeful feeling I really wanted to to try and find ways of helping other people to feel um feel uplifted and feel as if there is hope and so part of that was in the art style trying to have things feel like painterly and Lush feel as if you had stepped into a ghibli-inspired movie um and then some of that was through musical choices and to have really hopeful music um to have uh to have sound effects that are that are physically based or physically inspired um so you if you're panning around this world you hear little Crooks or frogs and the and waterfalls and the Rumble of Thunder before it rains um so these are all things that we wanted to do to try and help people to uh to relieve their anxiety and to be able to find um find ways to to go back to to being useful people instead of scared yeah we are like we we get questions all the time about what happened why is the world like this like what is the story and and we even had discussions in the beginning of the development about do we do we expand on that and for us it was just it was it was more important to talk about the future and give our players a sense of agency and and the ability to do something than it was to like browbeat them with oh this is what went wrong or yeah exactly yeah I think that's a really great way to approach this and inspire people to do change in their everyday lives right like we already know that the world is a very rough place right now for many reasons not just environmental and I think if you were to provide that backstory it might overwhelm the player and if you know the goal is really to kind of ease some of that climate anxiety and inspire people to do change in their lives I think you accomplished it by not providing that backstory yeah and then yeah and then another thing that you mentioned too about the music before we go on to some of the production type stuff um you mentioned the music in it and um uh one of the things I love about this game is it contextually in certain points the music will change and just was that was that something difficult to implement or was that you know it was it was it relatively so it was something that we that we wanted to do our initial thing was that we're starting from a desolate Wasteland let's have desolate music yeah and so we asked our composer he's a French composer named Medan um he composed uh the first track for the Wasteland and then we tested it with uh with our colleagues and some of them were just like this is so depressing like I don't actually play anymore yeah um so we realized okay we we have to turn some of that back uh across the board the music is hopeful but that when you start in the Wasteland it's more subdued uh there it's it feels it feels empty but not depressing and that as you continue playing we'd start layering other tracks over there was a there's a whole music system that we wrote that tries to queue up the right tracks for different scenarios um it had to undergo some some iterations too as everything in games you see but we're quite happy with the result yeah it's really it's really amazing music um I'd love to hear uh you know just the soundtrack on repeat you know um yeah I'd love to shift over to some production type stuff and kind of talk about um some of the things you did with the team Dominique um during development I know that you partnered with the endangered Wildlife trust and you did that to kind of um learn a little bit more about what you know what what you were using as inspiration in the game can you tell us a little bit about that partnership and some of the things you've learned yeah I mean I think the the main thing was that when we started development on the game we really wanted the you know whatever Revenue the game produced that's a portion of that to be donated to an entity that's actually making a difference in line with the whole idea that you know we're these individuals we work at a game Studio feeling quite crippled about how much of an impact can we actually make rather support people who do this for a living and who are the experts in making a difference but we had some criterias we wanted to admit you know one was non-governmental non-profits um worked in renewable energy worked in habitat preservation understood biodiversity you know the sort of the way the game is quite holistic in its approach to how you restore the Wasteland to a thriving ecosystem we wanted to work with an entity that sort of worked in a similar way and it was a lot harder to find than we actually thought we spent months looking and then kind of oddly out of you know by pureco incidents I just I phoned up a friend of mine a guy I grew up with but it just kind of not spoken to in a really long time but he's uh he's a pretty big deal conservationist he he's a recipient of the whitlers award by Princess Anne David Attenborough had done a short film on him and so I phoned him up and I was I was like this is what we're doing with this game and we're looking for an entity and he was like whoa well I've just started working as head of conservation for the endangered Wildlife trust and he sent me their deck and they do they do all of it everything we were looking for and they operate from like north of Tanzania right down to like the sort of Northern parts of of southern Africa as well of our country um and they deal in Rural Community Education um you know livestock education co-development with solar Farms you know because you know a lot of these renewable companies they come in and they just like laid on solar panels and don't really give any mind to are they interfering with birds migratory paths or any nesting grounds and breeding grounds of different types of species within you know that biome they don't so they work now with these companies do the research for them and then give them advice and procure land that will be the best place to put wind turbines to put solar panels and then they also work in habitat preservation biodiversity and endangered species protection um we learned that developing terrinal and then talking to the ewt that unlike terranol real world conservation it's so complicated it is so complicated yeah which is what kind of I mean we haven't brought them out yet but we will soon as so that's what sort of motivated us to then do a series of short little short films where the ewt Learned us their conservationists for the day and we were like okay right so there's the burning of the waste burning of of the fame boss internal explain to people why this is actually important how it works and then it's a short little explainer video from an actual conservationist that deals in grasslands and fan Wars explaining why this mechanic of the game has to happen but then also them telling us how we are really simplifying things yeah yeah well and yeah it's great to kind of hear those differences between real life and you know the heightened reality of the game but just as you're talking like it's still that that concept of burning something down to renew it like I think we can apply that in our lives almost like sometimes you know you're feeling down you're feeling anxious about the world and you just realize I need to start over and you know you don't obviously want to burn yourself down right but you um you can kind of use that as a way to like spin it to the positive and think about how you can take action so kind of talking about that and this can be to anyone maybe Dominique if you want to start but what do you hope to inspire real world action from people who play the game I mean I think you know as you know Jonah was saying earlier it's like that that weight of the feeling that you're personally responsible for solving this problem it's a it's not going to happen you know um you know when we were discussing amongst ourselves is that like if you really wanted to do something it would be who you vote for you make these these larger legislative decisions that that would make a real difference but I think you know for example supporting experts believing experts when they tell you what needs to happen and and and and and you know whether it be donating your time or money um or information I think that's basically what you can do anything bad I I guess with with terenol we it's not it's not an educational game per se it has loads of elements that were drawn from real life conservation inspiration but as Dom's already said we oversimplified things in many cases but I guess what we would hope is that Terry Mill has the effect on on on our players that they want to go and read further they want to be inspired they want to um realized that hey maybe there's there's something here that I could be interested in maybe there's a career Here For Me Maybe um I can learn more deeply that's great and I you know when I was working on the game um to come out on our platform I actually did do a little bit of looking into things because you've included so much of your Homeland South Africa in the game um like I'm probably gonna butcher this pronunciation apologies but finbos right um like I didn't know what that was and yeah I'm sorry um yeah so um kind of wrapping it up here I just wanted to talk a little bit more about sustainability in terms of human sustainability because sustainability means a lot in the environment but how did how does that translate into sustainability for game development and just putting all of your soul and effort into this Dominique yeah well I mean I think that's something that free lives is very acutely aware of is the treatment of their of their employees you know we so for example you know after Tara no wrapped development we were like guys go go go on holiday go find your souls go reconnect with your families you know and and giving them the time that they need to do that very frustrating for our players but that's the thing is that you know you know the the the fans are like what's happening now it's going we're like they're on holiday we will reply to you when they get back and they are feeling you know good and happy to be back at work you know we we have we have big attention to Wellness within the studio you know so we have a chef that tricks everybody a healthy meal every single day we if you want to go and leave go and leave you know don't feel like oh you've got to count like do I get this it's like if you need a break take a break um yoga classes we have yoga classes we have art classes um if you're feeling like you need some help with your mental health you know the company will more than happily pay for you to go and see somebody it's like we really want to look after the people that work there because that is sustainable work practice that's the burnt our team is is not worth anything to anybody you know and you want people to feel Joy in their work and look forward to coming to work especially if it's a creative Endeavor that you're collectively undertaking as a team yeah that's beautiful and you know working in the games industry myself for 10 years now that I love to hear Studios that do that that really put you know your team's health first because it really shows in the game if you're just burnt out and crunching all the time but um that's about it for our time wrapping up though I just love to say thank you so much to you the entire free lives team our wonderful Partners at devolver digital and thank you for joining us today we are down at the arcade down below and after the talk um Sam Dominique and Jonathan will be down there for a little bit if you have any questions that you'd like to go ask them either about the game or about what they learned along the way um they'll be more than happy to catch up with you down there thank you again for the time and thank you for having us thank you [Applause] I'm excited to introduce our next speaker a valued partner of games for change nandini Chatterjee Singh she's a senior National program officer for unesco's Institute of education for peace and sustainability in her presentation nandini will discuss the penetrative power of Sky children of light in developing pro-social behavior and Adolescence please join me in welcoming nandini [Applause] [Music] given that I got a 10 minute slot I changed around the abstract a little bit and want to talk to you a little more about what the Institute does okay and we are into building Kinder brains okay when most young children win the make a wish contest they either ask for a trip to Disneyland or a visit to NASA or something as Grand as that but 13 year old Abrahim who was born with a rare blood disorder which required a bone marrow transplant actually asked for and wished for that prize money to feed the Homeless in his neighborhood that was one of the five million stories of kindness that we collected last year which are showcased on our website and that brings me to the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of education for peace and sustainable development UNESCO mgip and we are in the business of building kind of brains so why should we be kind okay if you look at the structure of the human brain and the way it's been wired you actually find that there is a lot of Cortex brain tissue that is devoted to being social emotional and kind in comparison there is very little tissue devoted to learning to read but what we've also come to know is that kindness enables us to make friends to resolve conflicts uh create safe spaces and most importantly ensure human well-being at a time and at a conference where we've been talking so much about loneliness and well-being it's well worth to think that it might just be good enough to be kind and that will help well-being but most importantly kindness is fundamental to Being Human it goes across races across countries and so maybe it's worthwhile to think that does it help if we can just train ourselves to be kind but whoever thought that you could train to be kind okay and that's some of the interesting findings that have come out from Neuroscience research in the last 20 years that show that the brain can be wired and rewired to be kind so we are born to be kind but that kindness is not nurtured unfortunately we end up nurturing our kids to be more competitive okay but even if we are able to nurture or in cases where there isn't enough kindness by building competencies we can actually encourage children to be kind and what might these competencies be they belong to various social and emotional skills which at mgip we put under the framework called the EMC square framework where we focus on building empathy mindfulness compassion and critical inquiries okay and these are some of the skills which lead to kind behaviors too and so where do games come into this entire picture what digital games do is they have great playgrounds and places where you can build emotion kindness mindfulness they're great places for storytelling empathy and compassion too but what we want is these games should be actually able to train the brain so can we assume that by playing these games it's enough to build these competencies we want to make sure that that learning sticks if two kids are playing that game they do actually take away the learnings that they encounter during the game to build those competencies of empathy which they are naturally expressing as they navigate the game so how do we make sure that learning actually happens and I know we talk a lot about educational games but this is where we try and do things a little differently we look at games created for entertainment but once which have a great narrative or a story which acts as the hook the hook which brings the player in to actually play the game on that game we intertwine and create a course and so we call these game based courses by picking pause points as you navigate the game we bring the re the learner to a platform which is our learning platform where we introduce them to the ideas that they have just gone through that they have navigated as they played the game that allows us to guide them allows children to be exposed to multimodal learning allows dialogue but most importantly makes learning explicit and deliberate something what the teacher does in the classroom but now a game-based course does okay and in that's how we create game-based courses which we think will actually be great to create these competencies so is this just talk or have we been able to test this is actually happens and so I'm going to talk to you very briefly about three courses that we created one which was built around bury me my love which was called identity in crisis okay so it's about 13 years who's navigating Syria to Europe and you're playing the role of her husband as she navigates this but along the way we pause learners to explore ideas of migration why that happens how there's a sense loss of belonging and how does a loss of identity for her and in turn how the player needs to be empathetic mindful compassionate to be able to navigate this and through that you understand you make players understand the refugee crisis and migration that is happening across the world and examine their own attitudes towards towards such refugees who might be sitting in their own surroundings and that's why being UNESCO kind of comes into play because these are important stories that UNESCO is bringing to for and seeking to build global citizenship and so during the pandemic we ran a research study with uh children in UAE and in India about 300 kids about 150 each participated in this study and they actually took the game based course we conducted free and post assessments to see whether there was actually any learning okay and we did see significant learning in both awareness of migration and refugees as well as respect towards other cultures and interestingly an increase in compassion from others only in females and so a possible explanation was that the protagonist is a female herself and whether there was a greater resonance with her and that as a consequence led to an increase in compassion you will also notice that the error bars are quite wide in each of the increases that we see even despite the significance so there's a lot of variation in all this learning which also brings to four that even when we use game-based courses there are individual differences that come up which makes it more important that we conduct these studies even more rigorously but it opened up for the first time a window where you can actually have games in the classroom facilitated by a teacher to bring in and discuss ideas about Civic understanding as well as social and emotional learning another course that we created was around gree on of loss and love and that actually got a lot of traction during the pandemic when people grieved as they lost loved ones and you'll be amazed at the age group of the kids and even adults who took this course most recently we've designed becoming us which is based on Sky okay it's a course we've just created okay and uh if there's anybody in the audience who has school students who'd like to participate to be part of this research I'd be only too happy to discuss that and that actually talks about trust and how important it is in building societies okay how do people learn to cooperate and how this actually runs through the animal kingdom too but it's fundamental to the building of our societies and in an age where there is so much mistrust this is probably needs to come back into the conversation so all of these are hosted on our platform which is framerspace.com it's gdpr compliant it's free all the courses are free at the end of the course every learner gets a certificate from UNESCO and we are now beginning to use the learning at the back at the back end to also build in some AI into the platform so feel free to sample uh and explore the platform for other courses too so that's where I'd like to end and leave you with one message in a world where you can be anything please be kind thank you [Applause] all right um please join me in welcoming head of social impact at Riot games Jeff Pearl back to the stage as he discussed how his company utilizes the United Nations sustainable development goals to inform overall impact strategy and fundraising efforts in support of causes cause areas that appeal to their Global player audience here's Jeffrey hi everybody as previously mentioned my name is Jeffrey Burrell and I am head of social impact at Riot games I want to talk a little bit today about how we're utilizing the United Nations sdgs to drive player value wherever they are and so a little bit of background on if this is working potentially um okay so I'll just do a little song and dance number until uh that works there we go perfect thank you so a little bit of background on me is I joined Riot about nine years ago very long years ago um but I absolutely love my job um I have never been in the games industry before this but I've been like a lifelong gamer and as soon as I am done with this talk I will be reading the Diablo 4 patch notes so if you have any uh way to to condense that for me I hear they are quite long um and as I said I I really love my job because we're able to have the unique privilege my team and I to touch all parts of the company not just with the games itself but with Esports with other forms of entertainment with our community and we're also able to do that globally and so I'm here to talk about how some of our values based approach can really Drive meaningful impact not only like I said with the communities that we serve we're in about 26 27 now regions around the world um but also how we can serve the players and so prior to uh Riot I was at the Gates Foundation in Seattle and during that time I really understand the importance of both understanding the problem that you're trying to solve but then even more importantly on who you're trying to solve it for so I'm going to walk you through a little bit on uh what I'm calling an outside in strategy and as some of you may know our company goal is to become the most uh player focused game company in the world and that extends both in and out of the game and I think everybody here can agree that without a very core dedicated very passionate and yes sometimes opinionated group of players none of us would be at this conference the the power of our players and the global Community is something that only other Industries could dream about so when I joined Riot I was asked to create a very player-centric approach how can we serve our communities in ways that matter to them um and so I stared at a whiteboard for about five months just waiting for inspiration to strike any day now uh and then I started to really dive into some of the great research that we've all been exposed to here at this conference already and really deeply starting to understand how and why video games can have a unique and meaningful impact directly in the lives of our players and how we can move that needle and so we came up with our social impact pillars uh these are areas that we think after a lot of research we could actually have unique and meaningful uh impact into the world and as you can see we have education citizenship opportunity and our latest one is sustainability um and it's not on the slide but each of these have various sub goals theories of change Associated budgets portfolio analysis all the Glorious documentation you could want but I'm going to save you from all that today but this is still what I would call an inside out approach this is taking what we care about and wanting to engage with the world on the issues that we think are meaningful and resonant and yes there's a strong space for this this is where most and I think how a lot of companies should show up and engage with the world we can't be everything to everybody but there's always a question in the back of my mind which was what's the other Road what's the path that we don't travel we know what we care about very well but what do our players care about how do we engage them on these issues and then to make matters worse is how do we do this globally because as you can imagine talking about values across cultures and across regions is particularly difficult because what matters to us here in New York is very different than those in Brazil versus Japan versus the Middle East and so how do we start to engage and understand on that and what insights are we missing and where would we even begin now we teased it a little bit with the intro to this talk but we needed a framework a glorious colorful framework and yes it was the United Nations sustainable development goals and so we found this really great solution in that we wanted to use the sdgs as a model for understanding our player values and and we really wanted to know what they cared about and why and in particular how we could engage with them on these issues locally and so it allow us a way to communicate across borders and across languages to develop a Common Language with what our players are caring about and on areas that are doing good in the world and so here's a refresher to anyone who could use one is this is the United Nations sustainable development goals it's essentially as I heard earlier today the world's to-do list we're about halfway there there's still a lot of progress to be done so please uh look into these if you haven't already because there's some amazing work being done that we can all support and we found that these sdgs were not only broad enough to be used globally but also specific enough that we could hone in on what particular issues uh mattered in each of the regions that we are in and once we had this then we're like well how do we then start to understand how our players relate to them what do we even do how do you start to engage with this um and it might not have been the most robust strategy but we decided to ask them um and see if they would tell us and so let's dive into some of the research look at my glorious methodology for those of you who have like doubled into statistics or or dipped your toes here's a little bit about what who and how we started to engage and we surveyed players all over the world um and used this data to understand you know like I said how they're starting to identify these issues in their own regions and this created really deep ways for us to understand that hyper local impact is different per region than on a global level because what we might think about here when we talk about some of those higher level ideas could show up very differently in all of these regions and so we didn't want to just pick one issue and push it out to them we wanted to engage with them and see where these Trends were developing over time so without further Ado behold data uh this is some of the data from our two previous surveys we did one in 2019 2021 and we're looking to do a refresh very soon um and these were the top results across the globe you can see quality education and job training is number one year over year and so this was very important globally we had good health and mental well-being show up in the top two again over our last two years no poverty inclusive and uh sustainable employment opportunities strong human rights gender equality and so on but I have one very major caveat with all of you in that this is our data for our population your mileage may vary given the genre given who you're engaging with given your own particular players don't take this as all value for what players care about globally it's not it's only indicative of kind of like our unique audience so I just needed to clarify that please use this adapt it do what you will with it but don't assume that it's a monolith for all gamer culture but what was really interesting with this was this is what we saw globally and then we could dive into what we would actually see regionally and so going back one slide we saw that quality education and drop training was one of the top three values globally but in Brazil it was massive this is by far what they really cared about and wanted to engage with and this was a trend that we saw growing year over year so in 2016 17 and 19 we saw that poverty was starting to Trend or that um education was their top rated quality but in 2017 and 19 we saw a pretty significant jump in no poverty now this is reflective of of course the world that we're in but this was also pretty indicative of even though this might be oops this might be number two it's a growing area so how could we look to address this in that local market continuing on we can see some of the differences in Europe so here my darker bars are Europe West a lot of the European Western uh countries and then we have the European nordics these are based on our servers but we're just kind of conflating the data a little bit for ease of understanding and so here we can see some of the differences as well and again quality education and job training good health and well-being but for the first time we saw that EU players have become way more environmentally conscious and we saw a combating climate change and Environmental Conservation appearing for the top five for the first time across Europe so this is cool right this is giving us like an ability to understand engage with our players on local matters that matter to them but now we get into the really cool stuff we've done this for a couple times now so we know that those categories are so broad we actually wanted to double click what do they really mean when we ask them these and so some of the ones that we see over and over we decided to ask our players again now when you said health and well-being what do they really mean and when we asked them that we became really surprised but also then not surprised is that players overwhelmingly chose mental health as the issue that was most important to them but what was fascinating for this was that this was global data even in areas where there was still such a high stigma around it they weren't willing to talk about it with their parents they weren't willing to talk about it with their schools or classmates but for some reason they were willing to disclose that yeah mental health is an issue that I really want to help get addressed and then when we cross reference this information with the who data and more we realize that it's not a gamer issue it's just a young person issue you know 90 of the the world's uh young people play some sort of games and it's not it's just young people around the world and they're needing help and they're needing support and so this was some of the ideas that we thought we could really lean on and then the problem was you know how do we actually utilize this so they have really the sdgs have really informed how we can create unique and meaningful impact hyper serving our players on these local issues but it's one thing to then understand this and it's another to be able to act on it I absolutely love cheeseburgers but I cannot have cheeseburgers every day I have to have a quinoa salad sometimes according to my wife but now we have to act on these things and so how do we actually apply the results and one campaign that I wanted to share is what we called our Sentinels of light campaign a few years ago we actually invited players to submit ideas directly to us on ways that they or local nonprofits are engaging with their local communities on these issues they had to select some of the sdgs that they were addressing with this and then would share with us examples data stories video Etc on ways that either they are engaging with their local communities or they're working with this non-profit that is and we were able to select 10 or 30 non-profits across 18 countries and I'm very proud We hit all six continents I'm sorry Antarctica we will get you next time and we gave them all ten thousand dollar general operating support Grant we just wanted to support the great things that they were doing already we chose 11 cause areas through the sdgs and had over 19 000 player submissions for these local initiatives we are very very proud of that because that was a way to also then connect local non-profits to others in that region that they might not necessarily have known about before and one more example I just wanted to share is our annual player voting campaign I really got to get better at naming these things I'm not super good at marketing um but essentially what we do is we will invite players to purchase an item to support a charity pool online uh every year so the standard buy this item goes to a non-profit of their choice but what we do is we actually pool all of the money that we raise annually and at the end of the year we utilize the research from the sdgs and understanding what our players care about to identify and select three hyper local non-profits that are actually addressing the issues in that region so for example in Brazil we knew that we had to find something regarding sustain or like deep education initiatives we knew that we needed to do something regarding uh no poverty and so we looked at how we could help the favelas we looked at uh countering tuberculosis and the breakouts that were happening there so we did this with all of our regions around the world and then the players in those regions are able to vote on which one of the three non-profits is making the most amount of difference in their own mind so the winning organization quote unquote got 50 of that donation pool and the other two got 25 percent each but all of them got tremendous amounts of intention engagement and interaction from our Global player base and wanting to learn more wanting to engage and one of my favorites was I heard a story from one of our non-profit partners that they saw a huge spike in Google search engine queries because a lot of folks hadn't heard of them and then that actually maintained and they saw a huge amount of people signing up wanting to continue to donate and to share with some of that and so you know we we do this uh hopefully knock on wood every year uh last year we raised and distributed roughly 6.2 million dollars across 83 ngos in 28 countries 770 000 players participated and we got a lot of uh Impressions like I said kind of sharing some of that sunlight for some non-profits that might fly under the radar so learnings this is the big one take a picture uh what worked was the outside in approach like I said whether you're leading a company whether you're a part of something just keeping in mind that what you personally might care about is is deeply meaningful and and really can drive a lot and that's what guides me but it's also important to listen to those who we're trying to help and serve as well and so understanding and laying them be part of the conversation and letting that inform your decision making is absolutely Paramount and then framing locally makes a world of difference I I thought that was pretty clever um but uh if you do frame things locally there's a lot of research out there that shows it actually connects people more closely to the mission it aligns them and says oh this isn't just something that's happening online this is something that's happening in my own backyard and we saw high amounts of Engagement and resonance with that and then lastly stronger affinity and higher engagement going local in this example actually had a lot of intangible benefits for example I mentioned Brazil and there was several non-endemic media that don't even cover uh video games but they caught wind of this campaign because of some of the nonprofits that we were supporting and we just got a ton of earned media worth a couple hundreds of thousands of dollars just talking about it and saying it was you know cool um and so that's that's pretty neat you know when we're able to kind of like break the boundaries uh Beyond just games and into kind of like the the general uh conversation uh with folks in Brazil but if there's anything I want you to take away from the talk it's it's this is that players and we all know this have an absolutely allergic reaction to anything that is perceived as inauthentic if you're coming in and you're like hey kiddos hey Gamers you know and and kind of coming in uh everybody in our our culture can see that coming a mile away so it's really really important to be authentic and to spark a sense of Pride and collaboration with your community you can't just like force your ideas with them and say this is what we're going to do you have to invite them to conversation co-develop and find out what it is that we can do to actually build together because they're the ones who are going to be the Agents of change beyond what any company could ever do and so with that I wanted to say thank you and happy to take any questions that you may have [Applause] sure so the question was was if I'm going to just paraphrase that a little bit it was uh Worthy sdgs is this type of research this type of insight applicable to not only other game studios but then Industries Beyond and then how would that append eventually change once the sdgs are sort of towards their goal point in 2030. um the the second question is a lot easier so I'm going to start with that one which is hopefully then at that point the U.N or or other sort of a very significant thought leaders will come out with sort of like new initiatives of like like I said the to-do list for the world so I'm very confident that there's going to be no shortage of problems uh for us to to focus on and address uh going forward in terms of uh applying this and utilizing it I think absolutely I I don't think that there was anything you know remarkably Difficult about it it was simply getting out there and wanting to understand the hard part was we did have to alter the language of the sdgs a little bit so that people could kind of understand because if you're not familiar with that we had to then give types of examples so when we said like education and you know good jobs what did we mean by that so we used a couple of different examples um just to make it very broad so people could understand that was the only hook but it's just dependent on your audience and who you'd be serving thank you yeah yeah yeah [Music] that was thank you maybe um I'm glad you caught that uh yeah so the the question was was like okay now that we know that mental health is like a very large issue how can we actually meaningful help and I'm out of time so I'm gonna make it quick but you should check out uh riotgames.com mental health we have some resources up there but I want to share also one kind of quick story was um you you need to meet people kind of like where they are and sometimes they don't even know that and so like I said we want to be really natural and authentic and kind of not be overbearing with that but but sort of meet them in the hot moment so there's two organizations that we really love and work with and support it for a long time one of them if you haven't heard of it is called take this and I simply cannot recommend them enough they have all these resources out there for gamers for streamers for Content creators and Studios um and so we've partnered with them to try and like identify what gaps are missing and how they could support that the other was with um crisis text line and so what we noticed was we could partner with them so if a player after a game were to say hey I was playing with someone and I'm actually kind of worried about them or a player themselves would type in and say I'm really not doing well um we would connect them to a crisis counselor immediately afterwards like through through that and and with that we've been able to kind of take you know hundreds of of players over the last year from like pretty a hot moment to a cool calm um and and personally I kind of just tear up every time I I sort of think about that so we try and find ways to interact with them and not just say hey here's a big thing but like really providing those behavioral nudges right and when where they need it but I'd encourage you to check it out and happy to talk more afterwards I think I'm at time and they're going to bring the hook so thank you all so much I appreciate it all right we got a really great talk coming up so all of us know that Dungeons and Dragons is one of the most popular and cherished games of all time what we might not know is that in the fall of 2022 teachers were able to download dungeon dragon inspired teacher kits allowing teachers the opportunity to go on a collaborative storytelling Adventure right in their classroom the initial results made measured positive impact for over 9 million teachers students and families the next session will be a discussion on the intent and impact of bringing d d into schools moderators CNET editorial director Dan Ackerman will be joined by senior vice president of Dungeons and Dragons Dan Rawson and Senior brand manager of Wizards of the Coast Shelly Mesa Noble and Cade Wells an educator from Harrisburg South Dakota enjoy foreign [Applause] [Music] well okay everybody thank you so much for joining us for this I think really fascinating panel my name is Dan Ackerman and I am the Editor in Chief of Gizmodo and I'm very excited to have this very interesting collection of people here on the panel I'll tell you very briefly who they are and ask them just to give a one sentence super quick description of of what they do and how they fit into this so we can have a lot of time to talk about Dungeons and Dragons and schools next to me right here is Shelley mazzone and just tell me super quickly what you do at DND and wizards I am the senior brand manager for Dungeons and Dragons also I am a ninth level sorceress good to know and uh Dan Rawson over here yeah thank you um Dan Rawson I lead Dungeons and Dragons and I'd argue I have the best job in the world I I would say not a lot of people would argue with you about about that and then over at the end is one of the most fascinating people I think I've met in a long time Cade Wells he's an educator uh just give me a line or two about the grades you teach where you teach and why I teach seventh and eighth grade Advanced English now after many years of teaching Title One um the two different demographics has been one of the most interesting things about this journey of using d d in schools and we're going to talk a little bit about the difference between those different types of students and how the and how you use DND in schools in particular and the great success you've had um the concept I think of using Dungeons and Dragons as a teaching tool within schools is both makes perfect sense to me and is almost would have been on unheard of in my day growing up in the 80s when there was this sort of negative connotation and if you did it in the schools which we all did you had to kind of sneak in during the lunch hour and maybe tell the teachers you were doing something else uh so you know I think my my my first big question is you know why now how now how did we get here and and I'm going to start with with Kate and I'm going to ask you how did this idea start with you where did the gym come from I know you've been doing it for a long time not just since the pandemic but long before that so just give me a little bit of background as to how this idea came to you and how you first started implementing it sure so I've been implementing d d in class for 10 years um which is as long as I've been an educator because I wasn't always an educator but I've been a lifelong d d player since I was 10 and the game came to me in the strange way that it seems to come to all people from our generation it just sort of happened and as I was becoming a teacher going through the pedagogical training that they make teachers go through it all seemed really familiar in a weird way and I thought well I've never been a teacher why would all of these strategies sound so familiar why is this all so close in my brain like this all made sense oh yeah it's all in the dungeon Masters Guide all of these strategies of Engagement and building and inclusion of every person at the table all these strategies they were teaching Us in college to be great teachers were I already learned it you know by playing D D give me a quick line on what pedagogical means oh pedagogical means the study of teaching pedagogy is the pedagogy is the study of teaching and learning and then Shelley you work a lot on the official curriculum plan that Wizards and d d now has four schools which is a real thing that teachers around the country can get and access uh you know tell me a little bit about how that got started what your work with it is like uh and what teachers and schools can actually you know access and get yeah so I met Kade almost a decade ago we interviewed him on Dragon talk which is D D's official podcast and we were totally blown away and I honestly think I probably was crying through most of that interview like this is amazing just knowing that this is is d d is so much more than a game it's so much more than just entertainment and people like Kade really proved that because he was telling us these ways in which d d was having such a profound impact on kids and learning and it got me really motivated and inspired and I don't it's not an understatement to say I think I've spent the every day since that interview with Kade trying to find ways to bring D into classrooms to give teachers like Kate and people who don't have the that didn't grow up playing d d so maybe don't know exactly how to implement it but to give them the tools to use this very powerful tool in their classrooms because if you've played D you know it's there's math there's reading there's writing but it doesn't feel like math when it's like your dungeon master is like calculate your damage you know or it's not writing when you're writing your character's backstory and it's not reading like a little boring reading if it's like the stat blocks from the monster manual so wait last year we partnered with a company called young minds inspired and this is what they do they make curriculum standards-based curriculum and I was so grateful to find them and after five minutes of talking to them they were like we got it we know it we know what this brand can do this is going to be easy and they turned out some really amazing teaching kits for grades four through six and six through eight and what it is they're free to download for teachers they're inspired by d d our first round of curriculum was called build an adventure and it was really focused on language arts and that social emotional learning um so you know D D is wonderful at also fostering skills that are harder to teach like empathy and inclusion and collaboration and problem solving listening all of that it's all built into this curriculum but it's also really fun activities for kids to do so again it's all standards-based so teachers can go to the website they download it for free and they set kids off on these wonderful adventures based on Dungeons and Dragons now did this curriculum plan exist before you met Kade or is there something that's more recent because I know people are doing this for 10 years yeah and how long has that been available it has been available since September um that's when we launched our first wow yeah the first round of curriculum just came out in September Universal feedback the most consistent feedback we saw from teachers was please give us more so we did that the second round came out in March but the first round because it was our first foray into education in an official capacity we were thought oh you know it would be amazing if we could introduce D to 100 000 kids that was the goal and we got our metrics back three months later and we saw that we had reached over four million kids because teachers are amazing and teachers always need tools especially tools that are going to inspire kids yes how does a teacher and I want to come back to some more of this later because it's so fascinating is this just something any teacher can sign up for and get how do they access yes all you do is you go to Young Minds inspired website I think it's ymicassroom.com DD I think it takes you right to our micro site and it's totally free and if you're not a teacher you just want activities for your kids to do or um it's it's free and open to anyone so just go download the activities and get ready for adventure now now Dan you work at Dungeons and Dragons now you're a big part of what the game you know is and where it's going right now but you haven't been there that long you come from a very interesting background in Tech and other things did you ever imagine uh Dungeons and Dragons which is now your full-time life would ever be so accepted in in an academic uh uh you know area where again as we talked about when we grew up it was a little more under the table and it was a little considered a little a little dangerous a little suspect certainly in 1984 when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons I didn't imagine that but um you know I had a wonderful introduction to Dungeons and Dragons my my mom bless her actually bought the basic set many of you might remember the the red basement stuff yeah the red box with the beautiful dragon on the front she brought that home and it it became a family activity um and it was uh well accepted in my home and you know um I didn't realize it at the time but surreptitiously I was learning uh you know teamwork and cooperation and arithmetic and English skills and so it does feel entirely natural to me now that all of these wonderful values that come from playing D and D we would want to make available to as many people as we possibly can and of course you know kids you know our goal of Dungeons and Dragons is really to invite everyone to the party and so it's just a delight to see this program flourish in the way it has back in 1984 which is probably right around when I started two did you ever imagine it would be such a multi-generational cross-decade experience you'd still be involved with you know all these years later and that even today it would it would cross Generations in such a big way where teachers and students working together which I don't think at 10 or so I ever would have imagined yeah I mean certainly the eight-year-old didn't have the foresight to imagine that but um you know I I think a lot of a lot of special things have happened over the years that have made this moment in DND possible and you know D D is bigger than it has ever been there there are more people playing our uh you know players are more diverse than they've ever been um and you know I think it's a consequence of you know some very intentional choices like fifth edition which is so beloved uh was designed to be accessible uh to people and to really allow them to do the things they want to do um and then you have these wonderful kind of things happen in the world like you know the Advent of uh platforms technology platforms that allow people to connect um I have a friend who's been playing Dungeons and Dragons for 35 years and he would have to fly you know back to his uh childhood neighborhood to do a monthly adventure with his uh with his play group from from childhood now he gets on you know a social platform and plays in a hybrid format every day um and so you know I do think the pandemic which we all you know went through was an accelerant in helping people realize that they can play DND they can connect they can enjoy all these benefits of social interact action in this way through hybrid tools so uh it's entirely natural to me that it would be this accessible now you know we we want to support and promote it it's funny the technology I think played such a huge part of it obviously when I was a kid the idea of adding technology to it was getting the cardboard cut out dungeon tiles yeah mapping out on on graph paper but I want to go back to to Kate who is such a fascinating even talking to you briefly the other day I was just my head was filled with all the fascinating stories you telled I I would like to hear a little bit about the skills that students are taking away from this because the first thing I thought of is okay reading reading comprehension sure but there's so much more than that tell us a little bit about what else including the reading but what else students are getting at I think a better way to look at it is or what it what it doesn't give them which is not very much I mean the game I've tested it with every population when it All Began in in title one I was using it as a tool for intervention for kids with dyslexia autism trauma Etc and I immediately because I was the department chair of English I was allowed to pull kids every other day for 90 minutes and uh these kids were were hurt you know and uh I noticed immediately with that special population that the inclusion helped them almost immediately and so what skills does it give them the kid who had dyslexia wanted to be a wizard okay buddy um you know my Barbarian maybe Rogue dude you know no Mr Wells I want to be a wizard not going to stop you okay after about a month of gameplay this kid would turn to we had a new member join and he wanted to cast a spell this new member and he's like I'm not really sure what it does and this other student said oh hold on and he read it verbatim from the player's handbook this is what the spell does this would have been impossible a month prior to this okay the child with autism was able to look people in the eyes was able to laugh and smile with his peers this was not possible before this had happened um the the skills are are as many teachers can align the skills once the child knows how to play Dungeons and Dragons you can you can funnel in whatever skill you want that might be missing for instance writing is not a great big component of Dungeons and Dragons inherently the very first writing lesson that my students do is a head to toe description of character using sentence variety so they learn to color code their sentences to make sure that they're just writing in various ways and they use uh Hero Forge as their app to make the characters visually and so then they have that visual tool and then they write a one-page description of this character and so those things are very very simple for an educator to put in um putting in an adventure the quadratic Castle okay I'm not a math teacher I would never know how to solve this adventure but these things are relatively simple for people in their content area to say you know these puzzles are all based upon the quadratic equation and your your characters are going into this dungeon and you're going to need these math lessons in order to solve it so as far as like what it teaches them it's it's I think it's the most inclusive all-encompassing educational tool that I have ever ever seen in my life and of course I've been playing since I was 10 so I might be a little biased but we go through trainings and trainings and trainings and trainings as teachers and they're like oh this tool this tool this tool this tool and it's like none of them combined would be what Dungeons and Dragons is for students and if you really want to know like the trauma element um it has helped me with my trauma I've seen it help my peers with trauma in childhood as we were growing up it gave us a place to belong where we were out of trouble you know it kept us out of trouble it grew up in a very small town where trouble is kind of what you do and so we were safely in a basement you know playing DND but uh there's one story that I can't not tell there's a couple that I can't not tell but I'll tell one right now uh Skip's name was Victor and he was from Honduras and the the Guerrilla Fighters The Gang the gang Warriors came to his village and he was put on his knees next to his parents and his parents were beheaded in front of him and they told Victor you're gonna they're gonna leave get out of here when we come back this Farm is ours he somehow made it to Houston ended up living with his aunt and his uncle and his teachers and his aides were saying he disengages he puts his head down you know he just wants to sleep when he writes when we actually get him to write something he writes about going back to Honduras and ending his life excuse me nobody knew how smart Victor was we were all making characters I had to help the other kids a lot Victor was making his character and he would hold up his character sheet and say Mr Wells is this right he was right and accurate every time putting things in the right place the right information he was moving stuff and here I am trying to figure out what it is that's doing this right so he uh he it was the belonging it was he was started to smile right we were going on adventures he was a very effective character right you could see the pride building in him daily that we were doing this one day about two weeks after we started playing his Aid comes to me and she was always really a hard lady to read she's very Fierce looking you know and she said what did you do to Victor I was like uh we've been playing this game called DND you know and she said he is a changed boy he helps other students he raises his hand he answers questions he turns in his work he smiles he laughs and of course you know I just weep in the hallway this might sound like an isolated incident I've seen stuff like this happen over and over and over again for 10 years so what skills does it give them what skills does it not give them is the real answer to this question Dan really truly is and I think that everybody likes you know I think even hearing that story but even without it I think everyone on this stage here understands the value and understands how it fits into an educational curriculum but I can only imagine the difficulty of convincing School administrators especially uh since you don't you know live and work in a in a big you know Cosmopolitan City uh to go along with this uh it would have been impossible when we were growing up now obviously it is possible because you're doing it but tell me a little bit about how you approach the schools that you worked at what kind of pushback that maybe you got how did you convince the the the bureaucracy of the school which I know can be immense to to embrace this even before you had results to be able to show them uh one of the easiest ways to do it is to show them right and nobody's going to resist having a Dungeons and Dragons Club after school that you know at clubs or clubs right you can do whatever you want in a club your kids are not forced to join a club so if you have an administrator and you're looking to do Dungeons and Dragons actually in your classroom like I play with my students every Friday so so they the first two weeks of school is they make characters do their head to toe description and then every Friday as an incentive for hard work for the week we play D D on Friday so in terms of uh how to get an administrator to allow you to do this like mine have if you start a club you say hey please come and watch this club or here make a character um back when I was in Aldine in Houston uh we had our director of English came in for an observation and this is the big cheese on campus right this is the big big lady and she came in and saw my kids playing d d and at first she was like what are you doing in here you know because they were laughing and enjoying themselves and um and these are largely language acquisition Learners right and and um and kids from poverty you know we know that they have many fewer words than you know kids who grow up effluently and so forth and she was upset immediately upset and I said okay just hold on a second first of all listen to them okay these are language acquisition Learners they need to speak and listen to each other in order to learn language properly and I handed her a player's handbook and a character sheet and this I've done this many times with parents with Administration anybody who's resistant I say okay well you just don't know so let me show you please before you get upset or just say no because you don't know take a look at this and they turn a few pages in The Player's handbook and start seeing the vocabulary that's there it's written in around a 1400 Lexile which is great reading and what you notice about that is for some students especially in Aldine that would have been hard for them to reach except the incentive of wanting to play this game they start to understand the words just like I did when I was 10 because I needed to know what that meant because I might be missing something for my character and so she noticed strength dexterity intelligence wisdom Constitution Charisma right she's like wow these are really great words I said lady you're not even seeing the iceberg yet okay like this is Page following from the sky that's going to land on the iceberg so dealing with Administration another tool was if any Educators in the room here are familiar with the Danielson framework Charlotte Danielson that is the system by which teachers are measured and graded and DND play and the research that it takes to make the characters and Level Up characters checks literally every single box on our assessment tool as teachers so it's that was a really easy conversation now the parental thing parents of advanced children now that I teach were very leery about tell me very quickly what you teach in a different place now that when you started but tell me about those two towns okay so very quickly so we just have a context yes sir sorry uh Houston Houston we taught in Title One um High poverty high crime you know lots of lots of need um and now I we went home to be closer to friends and family after six years which was kind of always the intent and now I teach affluent kids uh in seventh and eighth grade Advanced English and so yes sir in what state oh South Dakota sorry and South Dakota um and so what I noticed is I thought you know oh it really helped these kids that really really needed an intervention all kids need an intervention y'all it doesn't matter how if you've got two parents that are both doctors well guess what they're gone all the time you got parents who are lawyers they're they have really busy you know time frames of working at home and things so where I thought I was afraid that this effluency was going to you know minimize the effect that this was going to have it did exactly the opposite these little mousy children who have been raised to be super you know super disciplined and stuff they they wouldn't talk you know they wouldn't communicate with anybody that they didn't grow up with immediately and so I noticed instantly how that created this classroom culture my classroom culture y'all they will do anything I ask them to do okay with with efficacy you know with without without disgruntlement I mean it's just incredible and walking in there is like walking into a room full of friends they know that they can be themselves on the frame you know we all got to frame up a little bit but they can be themselves they can say what what's in their heart it is a safe place and anybody who's an educator here knows that the safety of your classroom is among the most important things of your environment so I hope I'm not going on too long here Dan I I mean but that's such great context and thinking about it you know working in technology and games journalism for so many years you hear people talk about gamification and trying to crack the code to that I was trying to do that too Dan I was trying to make something gamified and then as I kept playing d d with my friends I was like it's just a game it's a perfect it's a perfect gamified it's a perfect tool instead of making up you know like points for math tests and things like that Shelley now since you work on the curriculum side of this and have contributed to that this is a fantastic success story how widespread do you find similar success stories to be uh what what objections or what barriers or what friction have you heard about uh from people trying to Institute the curriculum that you guys have now so we fortunately a lot of Educators today are people like Kade who or both of you dance who grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons it is a a lot lot uh easier cell to get D into schools I have heard just mostly from Educators that are just very grateful to have these tools and I my son is in elementary school at a public school and I made this huge pitch to them which I thought I had to do a big pitch to them like do you want a Dungeons and Dragons Club let me tell you all the reasons why you should and I don't even think the principal read the email she was like yes yes obviously we want this like get over here and start this club um so it we have the feedback that we've gotten has been you know very very positive there was one um question that arose from when we we did a series of webinars last year with the international literacy Association that were phenomenal came with on every one of those as well um and the international literacy Association people said hey we got like one phone call from someone and she said Dungeons and Dragons why and they were like how do you want us to answer that I'm like I'll talk to her but no it was we haven't heard really any um I haven't heard those those stories so thankfully it's because I think teachers are you know kids that grew up in the 70s and 80s and have have had experience with this game and have seen the benefits in themselves and in the people around them and even leading into the current ERA where there is this curriculum and there is this framework I know a lot of people started playing or getting back into playing or introducing their kids or their students to it during covid where everybody was stuck at home and we developed this skill set of using these tools like zoom and other uh you know computer aided communication platforms and all of a sudden it seemed very natural for this and and did you see that sort of bubbling up even before the formal curriculum process got started yeah and we would hear from people all the time that were like hey I'm starting a DND Club at my school or you know can you help us out here and there or just running into people that would be like oh you work for wizards of college yeah there's a huge DND Club at my school or something so we knew it was it was everywhere so part of what we've also launched last year was a an official d d after school club kit so that if you want to start a DND Club you don't really know where to begin you can just get our kit for free which includes a copy of our the new starter set and character sheets and a demo encounter and then instructions for whoever is going to be the organizer even a cool poster to advertise your Club so those kits have been hugely successful so we ran out of them almost immediately there's more coming so if you haven't gotten your kitchen yeah material it's not just stuff physical it's a physical kit that we you just go online request that kit and we will send it to you there is a digital component as well so if you want to have access to DND Beyond tools we now for educators and qualifying organizations you can request access to that we will give you a free license that grants you access to the core rule books and some Anthology products and all of the starter Adventures as well as tools like the character builder so you can keep all of the your club's characters in one place you can manager campaign in one place and just try to make it as simple as possible for people yeah I think to if I may to Pivot a little bit on that um you know uh DND is just easier these days to get into um you rewind the clock almost 50 years and it was a little intimidating to to play DND you know the the rules were kind of you know I I had to explain to my wife the other day that he used to it when we were talking about a D and D that's what we were really talking about real game if you were playing just be a t oh my God you know back in the 80s that was not the real game the debate here is endless um but uh uh you know what what's happened is a lot of tools have been created you know Shelley mentioned DND Beyond we have 15 million people that have registered on that site and they come there to learn about DND to download free Adventures to you know build their characters and it's an absolute Delight to me that we can make this you know access available to to teachers and schools um and they can leverage it you know it's you were so involved in kind of the the DNA of the game itself now uh what what sort of tips or advice do you have for people who want to get started maybe you're coming in cold haven't played since they were a kid uh maybe you want to try to introduce her to school maybe in a formal way maybe in an informal way and it seems overwhelming uh you know what what path would you steer them down ah great question um I think Kate will have a great point of view on how to do that in the school but you know what I like to tell people is um go to DND Beyond check out some of the free materials there and this get into it like you can't do it wrong you know people like oh I don't know I don't I don't know about you know being a dungeon master is going to be hard well you can't do it wrong you're the dungeon master if you don't know the answer if you don't know the rule well you're probably playing with a group of people that don't know it either and so much about what's wonderful and DND is the improvisation is the yes and so I just encourage people to to get in and they'll learn the rules as as they play so there are lots of tools online DND Beyond there are lots of uh you know professional people that are out there doing it and you can watch them and I think all those things have helped break down barriers and made the game much more approachable I love that thought about teaching improvisation and teaching thinking on your feed and there are no wrong answers in a lot of cases uh Kade because you've been doing this for so long you were doing it sort of pre-covered that everyone else really started doing it during covid and many people have continued it tell me a little bit about how taking a break from the in-person classroom during covid changed how you approach this what tools you use whether it made it harder or easier for students like how did that play out funny thing is I didn't have to do anything at all because they did it on their own when they left my classroom and kovid shut us down the kids missed d d on Friday so much that they became sad parents parents were getting you know concerned of the isolation that their kids were going through and they didn't want them just playing video games all day and I can understand that a cute story a parent was walking by their little girl's room I think she was 12 years old seventh grade and she heard her laughing and she said I hadn't heard she sent me an email literally as soon as this happened so I got it you know right away she said I hadn't heard her laugh in a month and here I go past her room and I hear her laughing and I knock on the door and I open it and I said what are you doing she says oh I'm playing d d with my friends so we had to install Zoom of course on all their devices and that's the device that they had that's the tool that they were able to do and they were they missed each other so much well what are we going to do together well let's play D D so there all their little faces are on Zoom she said and there they she you know they all bought Dice and stuff they were all they were all taking it upon themselves to relinquish this thing that had been lost and so what what did I have to do I didn't have to do anything DND Beyond is actually unfortunately firewalled by my school at this at this time we're gonna fix that um the kids though talk to the kids about vpns yet the kids would I would tell them you'll pull out your phone it's fine pull out your phone use your phone get make sure that your care character is accurate then you know then put it on the on the character sheet or whatever so I the cool thing was once I taught them I didn't have to do anything and I honestly got a just in full honesty I like them sitting around the table as much as absolutely possible because it's our job as teachers to make sure that skills are not lost in life okay and I have noticed as years have gone on especially as social media has become so prevalent and you know video games have become the Catalyst for so many children that visiting face to face has become kind of hard and what I see them do is so incredible at that table and what it does for them is so as a teacher it's super easy to see what they don't know what's happening in their little brain right well then certainly after a year of it you watch the growth and you see the measurements so the the pandemic did affect our classroom but you know the d d is inspirational essence just they just took it upon themselves to figure it out which is even better because the problem solving is one of the great things about the game you know it's Catalyst to what happens during gameplay so here they were going to solve that problem of how we could spend time together and have an activity now after when people came back to the classroom after covid did they carry on any of those kind of covered workarounds they had come up or did they just go back to the they would have like character creation meetings you know like oh I'm going to level up you know at home this weekend and they would Zoom each other to to talk about well if you're going this path and let's I'll go that path so that we're a more effective party together so I think just the the connection the connectability was was enhanced as I'm sure everyone has noticed you know through the digital platforms my students really did enjoy the the verbal you know just the being face to face and stuff and zoom facilitated that as as needed for us because that you know they're all on school devices and so you can't just go ahead and put roll 20 on your school device necessarily right so they were using what they had but how proud could I be of my students for you know solving this problem on their own since we're talking about performance in schools and how this helps students can you tell me a little bit about some sort of objective data that you have collected over the years um my curriculum director of the school that I'm currently at uh put together an algorithm to measure the covet slide as many administrators did across the country they wanted to know how test scores were being affected by this not being in school so I had the advantage this time in this particular instance of having kids for three years I had them in sixth grade where I taught him to DND seventh grade where they really took on to it and then eighth grade where they're almost like young adults and you know they're they're ready to go to high school so my curriculum director dumped that data into this algorithm and the normal mean is this cute little line you know of all the students in the district and they didn't slide backwards too much the expectation line and the what was actually achieved was pretty on level my students in sixth grade were right above those other students and then in seventh grade there's a bullet point and it tilts and they I go up and then I had them in eighth grade and there's a bullet point and the Tilt goes like this so that data was so incredibly impactful to me to actually see these are the kids that were tracked for three years okay even better was there was another uh another class that was the same cohort of advanced children that was not me as a teacher so Apples to Apples their graph was just like the regular District graph so putting my graph next to their graph the only difference is my classroom environment and playing Dungeons and Dragons so the actual reading test data that those kids produced doubled every time doubled now I'm not kidding we're talking 3.6 to 6.2 you know like just incredible from 6 to 12 from 12 to 24 increase in growth is almost impossible okay like I can't explain to you how difficult it would be to achieve that I couldn't believe that we achieved it and now we can replicate it it keeps happening so you can point to this as the variable between those this is the only thing that I can think of now a teacher's own strategies right like DND is not just what we do on Fridays it's made its way into all my sort of uh we do a lot of product-based learning um there's lessons that are all around revolve around choice and um the ability to create it's always like I always think if if they didn't make something they didn't learn anything if they can't show somebody this is what I learned you know here's here's this thing that we did with this project then they didn't really probably learn it you know and that's not always true but uh that's you know D D is not just what we do on Fridays like I said it's it pervades my entire classroom um I veered a little bit there and I missed it down no that's that's exactly what I was looking for uh Dan hearing these learning these stories as you're still sort of new to the brand relatively speaking compared to doing it 10 years in this guy I do uh did you imagine coming in that has this changed your perception of the brand at all knowing that it has this whole other life in classrooms that maybe you and I hadn't thought about d d in classroom since we were you know teenagers yeah I joined Wizards in September of last year and I think it was in that first month uh yeah I I met Shelley and learned about this program man I was delighted to hear that it was happening just absolutely um uh thrilled you know D D Is This Love Affair for so many of us right like uh and we we get emotional about it because it's it's fostered friendships in our lives that uh are so meaningful and um like I want to see as many people as possible have that value and that joy in their life and so to learn that the team was already leaning into this and making it happen um gets my full my full and ringing endorsement Shelly if a if a parent or a teacher or a school is thinking about implementing this uh but they're having some bureaucratic trouble they're having some pushback they're not sure quite how to make the sale what advice would you give them uh to kind of move this conversation forward if they're running into some roadblocks I would just say yeah if we can't get Kate on Zoom with everybody in real time although I bet he would make him crazy available we we have a lot of resources available online that show the you know other Educators Kate himself all those webinars I was talking about there's a great video about another gentleman named Zach clay who runs he's a professional dungeon master because that is the thing everyone uh and he he runs D after school clubs and he put together this video These middle school kids and we're looking at kids that are the jocks and like you know the the math kids and the theater kids and they're all together and like boys and girls like it is it is 50 50 split here and we even there's even a kid who's there going I just like all the math and Dungeons and Dragons Who says that who is saying it was very nice for you to say the jocks and the math kids and theater kids and not say the Johnson nerds and I appreciate that we're all nerds now they're all nerds I don't even think that they consider d d nerdy anymore more but there are plenty of resources out there and there's plenty of Advocates out there too I mean with 50 million people out there playing d d you you can wear that shirt anywhere and somebody's going to stop you and be like Danny I love it um so there are again like tap into any of the people in your community that can be an advocate for this and really just show them the data show them the the stats show them the game explain that this is you know how this game can have profound impacts on on kids not just with their education but with their social emotional which is so important now I told these guys backstage that 45 minutes was just gonna fly by because we had so many great stories to tell and so much great information to impart I did want to save a couple of moments for questions even if we don't have a mic to pass around I think if somebody can shout out or come towards the front with a question or two uh let's try to at least save our last two minutes and 30 seconds to take a question yeah go ahead and just make it loud so I can hear you and I'll repeat it okay I work already and I'll just repeat it real fast so anyone else can hear it he asked within the curriculum process are there any tools for Indie creators who use the rule set to make their own step tools specifically is that we can work together or help yeah so because it's still so new um that this became an official you know it was just like dipping our toe in the water in September and now we're like no we're doing this this is happening so um at this time I'm very interested in obviously learning more about what people are doing and the tools that are out there and then if there's ways that we can partner together or work together or help let's do it cool that that's the answer go ahead I want to see if do you guys have like a curriculum that's based on Executive function because DND does all of that yes it does company because social emotional also falls in emotional regulation calls on the umbrella and you have to also negotiate between different personalities and stuff within like everything it does so much on the executive functioning like umbrella that my job is so easy but I it's kind of like herding cats I love working with kids having usually but it's so easy to see the benefits of you guys have like I don't know either like some kind of tool that says like hey hey this is what it does for executive functioning this is how it works for those brains of their Divergent Minds I can address it if you want yeah there are lots of um uh social scientists that will study groups of kids over the course of a semester and track them um I based upon what you've just said I think that you should make the time because sis that's that's what happens is like that's what I did is as I tracked the data and said I I can check all these boxes of all these things that it does and since you're the one working with them there I did a little bit of brain science and discovered that the piece between the two hemispheres of the brain when that's underdeveloped it's almost always linked to ADHD or hyperactivity disorder and the gameplay element of of the speaking listening Reading Writing Circle for the kids it reinforces that part of the brain and the Brain just sort of starts to work better in the myelin sheath between the two hemispheres becomes much more greased and all of a sudden the kid just inherently is like this test is easy you know or yeah I can sit listen to your teacher wow you know um also the incentive of getting to play a d d for a kid with ADHD it's like dude if you don't do this We're not gonna play oh right so my my honest advice is is to write that up and and you check the boxes and do a little bit of data driven work and then share it with these guys because it's it's a community we need to continue to build this thing together because we're at a conference called games for change y'all for 50 years Dungeons and Dragons is the game that created all of the games that you all play I love that and all the game creators of the future will come back to Dungeons and Dragons to figure out how it all started in the first place we have gone over time the red light is thinking but I don't care let's take another question the young lady very patiently uh yeah go ahead sitting around the table the president and I'll just repeat it real fast uh yeah how much of the the magic of playing the game comes from being physically in the space you know communicating do you lose any of that online I don't think in our day and age we could call it lost by not being sitting at the table because people have become quite used to using a screen for things I'm glad that they're playing DND on a screen instead of just more video games right there's more cognitive functioning happening when you play DND than any activity that I can actually think of however for kids it's very beneficial for them to sit in that Circle that being impossible I would say that other digital platform where they're still playing d d and still seeing each other's faces they have to read body language and things like that that's that's just the next step down right for me personally um my all of my relationships and my whole life of friendships have all come from d d and we've been friends for you know 23 years in some cases and so I'm really aware of what that relationship building component looks like for them uh in our in our time now though with technology being so accessible I think it's fantastic that kids can play d d one well kids move right when a kid moves a kid moves to you know San Diego and their friends are all in South Dakota they're going to play DND online and that's I think that's amazing do I think it's as good as being around a table I don't think anybody who grew up playing the game would say yes you know but but sorry Dan the thing of it it's there right it's there for kids who want to play or people who want to connect and use it as a device it's better than not playing d d would be what I would say yeah well thank you everybody I wish we had a whole another hour to take questions uh thank you Shelly thank you Dan thank you Kade this has been fantastic and I hope everyone here enjoys the rest of the conference thank you for listening thanks everybody let me take a picture while we're here thank you for attending the morning sessions we will take a break and resume again at 1 45. again we will take a break and resume again at 1 45. everything