 We're going to use mics because it is being recorded by Channel 17, thank you very much. So even for the Q&A we'll pass a mic around so please make sure you use it. So thanks for coming to this evening, part of our critical conversations series that's part of the Emergent Landscape class for the Masters of Fine Arts in Emergent Media at Champlain College. So thanks for being here tonight. Right we have, I'm going to look at my notes, our talk is called Engagement in Community in the Digital Space, Reflections from the Arts and Humanities. And to tell you a little bit before I introduce our speakers, I'll tell you a little bit about the class that this speaker series is part of and about the program. So the Masters programs in Emergent Media are interdisciplinary programs designed to give graduate students the opportunity to gain a deep understanding of how humans interact with and are impacted by technology, allowing them to become thought leaders and designers of media solutions for tomorrow. So our students are learning about how to evaluate the social impacts of technological innovations and communications processes and they're using media in new ways to address creative business social and education challenges and to make a difference in the world. So this class is an introductory class to, it's called The Emergent Landscape and it's designed, it's a speaker series course that's designed to introduce students to kind of a wide range of different ways of thinking about technology in contemporary society, really. We've had people from the healthcare space doing human-centered design, we've had generative artists and technicians, we've had people from the digital humanities, we've had musicians, I don't know who else, a lot of others. I'm missing a few, I'm sure. So today I'm happy to welcome Peter Gilbert and Karen Middleman to join me for a conversation about, again, engagement in community in the digital space. I should have brought water, glass of water, oh well, you'll have to deal with my cotton mouth. So the idea for this particular presentation began actually this summer when I had the privilege of being on the hiring committee for the new executive director for the Vermont Arts Council and we had the pleasure of interviewing, I had the pleasure of interviewing Karen Middleman who in the middle of the interview started talking about her vision for the arts in Vermont and how important digital media and the game space was to her vision for the arts and humanities in the 21st century. And she and I started getting into this conversation, this side conversation in the middle of the interview and we had to stop ourselves. So we chose her for the position and we brought her here and now I get to have this evening. I'm excited to introduce Karen Middleman. She has a PhD in US history and published her first novel in 2016. She was prior to being the newly minted executive director at the Vermont Arts Council. We're on month two. She was the director of the division of public programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to that, she held a senior position at the National Museum of American Jewish History and was a curator at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Karen and I started talking about this particular talk early on in her tenure at the Arts Council about a month ago, actually before she officially started six weeks ago. And she immediately said let's invite Peter Gilbert who is our other guest and he is the executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council. So we emailed Peter and set up a phone conversation and the first thing he said to us on the phone was I have no idea why you want me to participate in this conversation. I don't know anything about the digital space or how it impacts the future of humanities and arts. And Karen and I both said that's exactly why we want you to participate in this conversation. So I told him at the beginning just before that he's the Luddite of the group and so he can help us probe and ask questions from a different perspective. In addition to being the executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council, Peter is a former litigator and teacher of English and History at Phillips Academy. He also was senior assistant to the president and associate provost at Dartmouth College. And this was, I thought, the most interesting since 1992, Peter, sorry, my notes, Peter has also served as Robert Frost's literary executor. So yeah, so there you go. So I'm going to start with Karen. She's going to talk a little bit about her time at the National Endowment of the Humanities and some of the work she did in bringing digital media projects to the NEH. And then we'll have a conversation. And we hope that you guys will participate in that conversation as well. So. Thanks, Robin. Do I have to turn this off? And I'm going to turn on the TV behind her because we're going to need it in just a minute. Thank you, Robin. And thanks for being here. First I have to clear something up. I am not, this is not the tech person and the Luddite. I am much closer to Peter than it might seem. I don't come to this conversation as a tech person at all. I am trained as a historian and a museum curator and I really started thinking about the digital space and the possibilities of digital humanities as a funder when I was at the NEH. So we had, I had been at the NEH for 20 years about, and we had a very vibrant digital humanities program that was founded, I want to say, 10 years ago. But in my division, the division of public programs, we really weren't doing much in the digital space. And most of what was going on in digital humanities was very academic. Not to knock academics, but it was not aimed at the public. And my mission was public education. The division of public programs funded a wide range of public program formats that delivered humanities ideas to the public. So documentary film, radio, museum exhibits, historic site interpretation, reading groups in local libraries, you name it. Any format that brought humanities ideas to a wide public, that's what we did, except for digital. We had kind of shied away from that. And about five years ago, six years ago, I said, this is crazy. You know, we have to explore this digital space and figure out a way to play a leadership role. There was tremendous apprehension at the time in my field, in the museum field, about the potential of the digital space. It may be hard for the students here to appreciate this, but the first reaction of a lot of folks in the museum field was to, you know, kind of be terrified by digital. They were convinced that if museum collections were put online, for example, no one would come in their doors anymore, that no one would want the real stuff. We know that's not what happened, in fact, that digital engagement drives people to want to engage more deeply with the real stuff. But there was tremendous fear and apprehension and resistance. So, okay, so fast forward to 2014. We finally pushed through all that resistance and we said, we're going to do this anyway. We're going to offer a new grant category called Digital Projects for the Public. And I'm happy to say it's still alive and well. And we started to fund some really innovative stuff. We originally had very modest expectations. We thought we would fund websites, museum websites. We would help museums get their collections online. We would help use digital tools as a way for people to access humanities ideas and resources. But it quickly became clear that the digital space was much more than that, which is no news to you, but it was sort of news to me at the time. So we quickly realized that what we had got our hands on as a funder was a whole new kind of learning space that had its own pedagogy and its own approaches and needed leadership from funders like the NEH to nurture along a sense of common practice and pedagogy if it was going to be effective in reaching the public. And remember, again, I'm thinking public. I'm not talking about what happens on the college campus or university classrooms. I'm talking about people, lay people. So we started funding digital field trips and experimenting with mobile apps, but I have to say that among all the things we funded, the most provocative and the most appealing to all of us on staff were games. And that's what I'm going to focus on tonight. The game space struck us all immediately as a really provocative alternative learning environment. And I want to talk about that on a couple of levels. And then I'll show you a clip from one of my favorites. So I think there's several things that make a game a really intriguing learning space. First, and some of these will seem obvious, but I hope during the conversation we can push deeper. So first, the most obvious one, access. People who don't, who no longer read books play games. Every generation can be engaged through a game that would not sit down and read a book. That's the most obvious. But also, there's access, so that's access on kind of the physical level, an intellectual level, but there's also access for people in China to visit virtually the Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection who are never going to set foot in the doors of that museum. So access on that level as well. In terms of the game environment as a learning space. It allows for situated learning. It allows for learning that is rooted deeply in a place or in a moment in time. And this is something that if you're a teacher, you long for. You long to be able to create an immersion for a student in another moment in time. I've taught history and one of the most impossible things to teach. Really not just in the classroom, but the most difficult thing for any of us to grasp is a sense of contingency and choice. So we know, for example, how the French Revolution came about. We know how it turned out. We know why and how the smallpox vaccine was invented. We know when and why slavery was ended in North America. We know all of these things because we learned them through history books or through lectures or from our parents. And there's a sense of inevitability that we absorb about history and it's almost impossible to unpeel that from your mind, from your understanding of history and not think that everything was just marching along the way it had to march along. What a game can do is it can take that away from you, that sense of inevitability, and pose an alternative ending. And play around with contingency so that you really are confronted with the fact that things really can work out differently if you make this choice or that choice at this turn in the road. And there's some fascinating, brilliant people working in the game development field who are playing around with the potential of the game narrative to affect our thinking about choice and contingency. So I hope we can talk more about that during the discussion, but I just want to put that out there. It's for me one of the things that's really deeply fascinating about the game space and how it can alter teaching, but really possibly alter our thinking about our place in this moment in time and how we got here. So, and I think because my background is history, that's probably the one that compels me the most. There's also a lot of potential for gaming as what's sometimes called an empathic narrative, an experience that can place you genuinely in the shoes of someone else, in the heart and mind of someone else in a different moment, different place, different point in time. I have to admit to a little bit of skepticism on this point and we can talk more about that in the break, but I've seen it work. In fact, a group of us were just talking about a game that a student said, moved him or her to tears at some point. I've seen games move people in ways that really surprise me. Because perhaps because I don't play them that much or I didn't until five years ago. But I'm much more likely to be moved by a film or a novel or a conversation with a person that I trust. But there's this form that is incredibly powerful as an empathic tool and an expressive and empathic tool. And I think we've only begun to understand that particular power. This is something that's completely fundamental to both the arts and the humanities, to the worlds that both Peter and I inhabit. The idea that a great novel or a beautiful dance performance or a great game can give you access to someone else's mind and heart. That's why we're in this business, right? I mean, that's why I'm in this business. And so that's, I think for me, why games are so exciting. Because we know that that depth of understanding can be genuinely profound. You don't have to have lived in 19th century Russia to read Anna Karenina and be profoundly moved, right? We know that a brilliant art form can push right through those particularities of experience that so often divide us. And I've really come to believe that a game, if it's well crafted and thoughtfully designed, has perhaps even more power than a novel like Anna Karenina to achieve that. So I put that out there for us to argue about later. Anyway, I think, I mean basically what this led me to is that if your mission is public education or teaching, you have to take the game environment seriously as a learning space. We just have to wrestle with what those possibilities are. So I'd like to pause for a minute and show you a clip of a game that I think will help raise some of these interesting questions. It's called Walden. It was developed by Tracy Fullerton, a really innovative kind of ground game designer at USC. She runs the game lab there. It was just released in June 2017 for both Mac and Windows. And in this game, instead of fighting zombies or surviving combat, you are put in a first person simulation of the life of Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher. The game begins in the summer of 1845 when Thoreau has just embarked on his experiment in self-reliant living. And as the player, you follow in his footsteps as he is walking through the woods, building a cabin, gathering firewood, finding food, sowing clothing, and more. And I will pick up this conversation after we watch it. This is about a two minute trailer that gives you an intro to the game plan. If we could all go to the woods to live in the good place. They reviewed this. They called this the world's most improbable video game. I mean, taking Henry David Thoreau, who we all think of as anti-technology and turning this, turning it into a video game. But I will tell you that the world's leading Thoreau scholars were advisors on this game and they love it. And they, in fact, one of them said to me, because NEH funded this, this game in part, one of them said to me that he believed if Thoreau were alive today he would be playing video games. I mean, he, in fact, was not the utter Luddite that we believe him to be. So the gameplay in this game is on one level very, very simple. There's about six hours if you play it straight through. And you're just wandering in the woods. You find food, you make clothing, you read, you write in your journal, you meet with Ralph Waldo Emerson, you go into town. The presence of the technology that Thoreau abhorred and wrote about changing the pace of human life is there. You saw the railroad going by, there are other hints of that technology that we're encroaching on the world of Walden Pond. And you can write about that and reflect about that. There are quests built in, for example, as you explore the natural environment. You come across arrowheads and you can pick them up and in the process learn about the history of the Native Americans who inhabited Walden Pond before Thoreau arrived on the scene. The seasons change. You saw that in the trailer. Each one presents its own challenges and its own opportunities for reflection and inspiration. If you don't take the time to reflect, if all you do is hurry about the business of survival, the game changes. The music and the colors start to dim. The music gets thinner, the colors dim. And as a player, you lose energy. You start to feel faint. So in other words, you have to figure out that you need nature to replenish yourself and that you need reflective time if you're going to go about the business, return to the business of survival. It's that balance between survival and reflection, between the reflective life and our basic human needs for survival that really was what Thoreau was grappling with for those two years at Walden Pond. That's what you are forced to grapple with as a player. Nothing in the game tells you that. You have to figure it out as you're playing. What else? I'll read you what the game developer Tracy Fullerton says. She says, players cultivate through the game their own thoughts and responses to what they discover. When have you ever heard a game that is about a player cultivating their thoughts and responses? It's not about action. It's about reflection. The piece, this is Tracy Fullerton again. The piece has a subtle narrative arc in homage to the original text, which is not an adventure of the body pitted against nature, but instead an adventure of the mind and soul living in nature over the course of one New England year. Ultimately, what Tracy was hoping to do, and we can argue about whether she did it or not, was to prompt reflective play instead of fast paced first person shooter kind of engagement with games, but ultimately to also raise questions about the personal experience of the natural environment and the personal costs of human progress. The project includes a very ambitious outreach campaign. She's trying to get it into schools across the nation, and we don't know yet how kids are engaging with it. It was just released, but I'm really looking forward to the research on how it works in the classroom. I know for a fact because of the focus group research that I've seen that in the early days of developing it, kids were responding to this game who were never going to pick up Walden and read it. So in terms of access, it's clearly opening up the world of Henry David Thoreau to a whole new audience that is not going to encounter him in a book. So I don't know that Walden embodies all of the qualities that I think kind of the ideal game might embody, but I think it captures the way the digital space has enormous potential to invite discovery and to spark the imagination in ways that are substantively and I think profoundly different from a novel or a dance performance or any other art form that we are used to in our world, used to funding and thinking about. So this work that I've done over the last five years, I will say, has really challenged me as a historian, as a writer, and as a funder to think about my work differently. And so I'd like to throw out a couple questions and then I'll finish. I'm interested in opening up a conversation about in what ways do these new digital forms challenge us to change our practice? And when I say us, I mean artists, teachers, humanists, thinking people. What ways are we challenged to change our practice of engaging with each other and thinking about our purpose? And I think that challenge, for me, is clear in three areas. First, on the level of creativity, the most obvious one, right? The new possibilities for artistic expression that are presented by digital space are, we can talk about that for hours. The potential for collaboration, a digital app that lets a composer in Peru collaborate with a composer in China. The possibilities for artistic collaboration and expression that weren't there before. But also, and I think this is the most provocative, changing our ideas of narrative. So we're used to narrative as something that's linear, whether it's a text or a performance that has a beginning and an end or a museum exhibit where you enter there and you exit there. And you know that in the digital space, nothing is linear. So what does that do to our pedagogy as teachers? What does that do to our encounter as students with new ideas? When we're not encountering ideas in a fixed sequence? I think that's really fun to think about. So that's a whole bucket of questions about creativity. Second, inclusion. Not just access to new audiences, like the kid I mentioned who's never gonna pick up Walden but will might get engaged by the game. But in what ways do we, with digital space, are we able to include people in the conversation who otherwise might not sit down with us to talk and to interact? And then related, a whole set of issues about community. So there are games that pose ethical choices that are profoundly about our relationship to ourself and to others. There's a game that puts you in the role of a border guard deciding who gets to enter a refugee camp. There is a game actually that takes place in the Syrian refugee camp and tries to get you to think about what would your experience be, fleeing your country and settling in a new land. There's a whole movement of games that are motivated by goals of getting people to think about social change and social justice. So what are the possibilities for the game space for having us think about ourselves and our relationship to each other and our communities differently? When I went to a couple of weekends ago to a terrific conference that Peter Shupp put on here at the University of Vermont on the double-edged sword of technology, one of the speakers quoted Benedict Anderson's book, Imagine Communities. And the quote was about the idea of community in anonymity. And what Benedict Anderson was talking about was a group of people, I think in a public space, on a subway train all reading the same newspaper in isolation, not talking to each other, but because they were all experiencing the same narrative bounded by that printed page, they were in some sense engaging in a belief that they were connected in some way. Talk about a metaphor for digital space. So I think the digital space, everybody's talking about the digital space and its potential to forge a community, but what are the dimensions and the depth and the texture of that community? How do we enact it? How do we nurture it so that it's really meaningful to ourselves and to the wider human community? I'll leave you with that question. Peter, did you want to? Sure. Well, those are terrific remarks and just to pick up on one thread that Karen mentioned, empathy I think is a key ingredient to the humanities, whether it's whatever the discipline is, it has to do with not feeling for someone else, but feeling as someone else. That's what literature, great literature does. That's what history does. It helps us experience the narrative that happens in the past. That's the miracle of the written word of history, of literature is you can actually know the thoughts of a person who's been dead for 2,000 years. When you think about that, that is really bizarre, that's really extraordinary. Unfortunately, I think we've lost, many of us have lost that lesson. We've lost the lesson that literature can be enormously powerful. I'm glad that we have emerging media that are picking up and capturing people through different means, but I'd also like to grab those people and show them the power of a short poem, the power of a sentence, the power of a short story, the power of a movie, you all know all of those things. A lot of, a book, a game like Walden will I think engage some people, bring them to the table in some way. How far, how long they sit at that table, how far they go along this journey, we don't know, but my hope would be that some of those people would say, this is kind of interesting, I gotta find out about this guy thorough. I'm gonna pick up that book, and then they'll sit down and maybe read a little bit in it and about it and follow those threads other places. Why, because it started here, it started somewhere for them. So anytime we can have experiences that put us in the shoes of other people, we're doing a wonderful thing. Too often, I think the stereotype would be that we objectify in the violence of video games, antisocial behavior and do things that are really pernicious to individuals and society. There are ways, as Karen has pointed out, that we can do just the opposite, or that the opposite can be done. Those shared texts, those shared experiences are, whether it's all reading the same book in private, that's what journalism does, that's what when we make a passing reference to something and everybody smiles because you know that song by Madonna, or you know that poem by Frost or whatever, there's a connection there that matters a lot, not only in the subtlety and the efficiency of communication, but also the bonds that they create. So we really do want this to be a conversation, so I'm hoping to pass the mic to somebody and start a conversation. Does anybody have a question or comment that was raised? Hi, I'm really interested in the idea that we all experience the information that's being provided, whatever the medium is, simultaneously and therefore experience some sort of connection. When we're talking about digital media that allow us to manipulate the experience, have we had any kind of connection? What do you think? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think, so let me start with a story. In the 1990s, when the internet was a new thing, I know some of you won't remember that, but I remember it. I was at a New Year's Eve party with my best friends and we stayed up late drinking too much wine and we were arguing about, don't laugh, is the internet a good thing or a bad thing? But the substance of our conversation, it sounds like a ridiculous question, but it wasn't such a ridiculous question in the early 1990s. But the substance of our question was, is it going to isolate us or is it gonna bring us together? And we were passionately on opposite ends of that spectrum. And the question that you raised is really, for me, the crux of the matter, if you, how do you forge something shared from a digital experience? And that's what I meant by saying, how do we nurture it and enact it and build it so that it's meaningful? Because just saying that we're both on the same, looking at the same digital information is not community. Any more than those people sitting on the subway both reading the same newspaper, they might have had the perception of community, but one was taking away this message and one was taking away that message and if they're not exchanging ideas or affecting each other in any way, to me that's not community. So that's, I'd love to know what other people think. One quick response or addition to that, it may actually make it more shared and more authentic and more connected because in life we have the two of us see the same thing or read the same book and we do have radically different, sometimes, reactions to it. You found that character sympathetic. The person we just met, you actually thought he was a decent guy, I thought he was a scoundrel. Then there's a little exchange about that and I learned a little bit from you and you learned a little bit from me. The fact that we art in lockstep is closer to reality. It's closer to the way we live our lives, whether it's in art or literature or a game. Well, and I'm glad you said that because I recently had sort of rebuilt this argument with a new friend and I was saying, if you're existing in this digital world over here and talking to people like you and looking at photo art, you're the architecture of this environment so you're choosing what images you see and who you interact with and I'm creating my own digital environment over here. How can we find a shared map of the world? And she basically looked at me and said, Karen, we've never had a shared map of the world. This is not about exactly as you're saying, you're naive if you thought that human beings have ever walked around with a shared map of the world. That's not the nature of human experience. It's just that we're reacting to these new tools if they're altering our experience. Not sure I buy that 100% but it's... Well, you have much more to say. I'm there with you 80%. You have much more to say about a movie that you've just watched with somebody who disagrees with you than somebody who says, yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. That's not very interesting and it's rare. I have a question about learning through play and I wanted to ask it about the Walden game because I think it's exciting and a really great case study. And so I've sort of bridged two worlds in my life. One, the sort of digital media making world and one, the free play unstructured play experiential ed outdoor play world. And those two worlds hate each other. And so I think the Walden game is really exciting but I can think of my mentor at Play Core in Providence saying, if they play that game, they're looking at screens and they're not going outside into the world and having their own experience where like, which isn't circumscribed by a narrative designed by somebody else. And so my question is, how can these two forms of play be in productive conversation with each other? And is that possible? That's a big question. Hi. So my background is I did history for my undergrad and I'm a game writer for my masters. So what I thought of immediately when you were talking about that is unstructured play to me, and I actually got to play Walden and it's a great game. It's a really cool game. And I didn't actually realize there even was a narrative. To me, it was simply unstructured play. And then structured play to me is another term. It means the same thing to me as the emergent narrative, which is also something that Karen was bringing up. An emergent narrative is, it's not the story that anybody hands you. It's rather that somebody creates a world for you to explore. And it's a story that you as a player or the viewer create for yourself by virtue of your actions and your choices that you make in the world. So for me, emergent narrative is really the same thing as unstructured play. And I think as game designers, like something I'm working on is moving away, precisely moving away from linear storytelling and into creating spaces that are really just opportunities for players to make their own stories. So I think that there's a lot of overlap in what you're talking about. So this makes me think two different things. First, the people who are at Walden Pond in Concord have installed a kiosk so that people who actually come to the physical space play the game, which if you think about it, I'm a little makes no sense, right? Cause they're there in this beautiful natural environment. Why don't they just take a walk and explore Walden Pond? But in fact, what they are finding, and it's still, you know, this game was just released. So I think we have some time to figure out how this really works. But what they're finding is that people move back and forth almost seamlessly between those experiences. So, and this gets to your point of how can those two worlds be united productively? I think in fact, if you just let children alone, in particular, they do move very readily back and forth between those two modes of experiencing the world. And they don't think it's jarring the way that we do. There's some really good research in the children's museum field about that, in fact. And I have a hunch that's what they're gonna find at Walden Pond. And that's what the curators interested in seeing. People don't do one in place of the other. They feel like they're mutually reinforcing and that one deepens their experience of the other. And it's something that I have to say, I don't quite get on a personal level because I would much rather be out there walking around the pond than sitting at a kiosk. But I know that that's not true for other people. And I see the research and I see it happening sort of the light in people's faces when they're discovering this environment through the game. And those two modes do, there is a way that they, I don't think we have to do anything to facilitate that experience, it happens. So, I mean, you're asking a bigger question. I think a pedagogical question about how can we as teachers facilitate bringing those worlds together, which I think is a really interesting question, which I absolutely don't have the answer to. But also, how can we create as humanist productive conversation between those two groups that see themselves as diametrically at those and when they're clear in the mind. Right. But just, can I just ask, I don't know your name though. Okay, so Dana, so I have a question about the games that have that kind of self-directed narrative. And this is a question for anyone in the room who's played them. That to me feels like one of the most profoundly isolating experiences. You are actually constructing your own reality as you play a game like that. And I played a couple of them and they're completely mesmerizing. And you know, five hours can go by and you don't even know that the time's gone by. But you are utterly, utterly, utterly creating your own reality in those five hours. That's to me a little scary. How then do you ever create a bridge between that experience and the experience of another person? That's, it's not fair to ask you that question. But, but I mean. What, in what way is it scary, did you say? Because it's so profoundly isolating. And isolating in the way like you felt like you were alone or, I mean, I'm curious what. Yeah, so I don't think it links me in any meaningful way to someone else in another room or classroom or country who's playing the same game. In the way that if two people are reading a great novel, they might, they might, there might be places that they can come together at their local library to talk about those ideas. They're, you share a great novel with your friends in a book club or with your mother or with your sister. You don't share the experience of playing one of those games with somebody else. Because it is a very deeply personal experience. So I think it's, there's something fundamental. So, so I find that really jarring when I think about its impact on us as a human community. I think there's a lot of hands kind of going up from some of us who've played some of these kinds of games. You find the other people that have online through forums, even in libraries looking up the same kinds of materials. I had assumed when you said it was isolating that you would have that kind of play experience. You build your own narrative and you would be unable to share that narrative with somebody else because it was self-driven. But I think of games where people have to face a similar challenge. And even if it's a real open world experience, you run into this particular challenge and you don't know how to get around it. And so you start finding videos of other people who played it and how they got around it. You start talking to other players about what techniques they were using. You start showcasing your own ability because you think that you've come up with a better solution than they did. There's a lot of community that can be built even in those very personal play experiences. And I think I saw your hand, but I'm not sure. You said most of what I was going to be and I'm going to add is that the companies that are making these games are the smarter ones actually doing things to encourage those communities to come into being and to exist, be it running forums or what have you because they know that increases the value of the product. I think too that a lot of those self-directed games run on the same kind of juice you're talking about with Walden. I mean, the experience is all about your sense of choice and agency and the narrative that emerges from that. So it has a lot of that built into it. And there was one other point I wanted to make about that. Oh, not to go off in this direction, but I've played some of those games and they do feel maybe a little bit isolating because you are sort of having that experience alone. And one of the things that's different about that from say reading a novel, which can be a very intimate experience even though you don't know who in the world is reading that novel at the same time is that there is not really as strongly felt presence of an author, authorial hand. You know, every time you pick up a novel, especially the ones that I pick up, which are always written by people who have died years ago. I know all about them. But you have that sense that another human being created this and that you're being kind of spoken to or communicated with in some way. And we know that these games are the product of large development teams and the good ones cover their tracks and they leave you alone. And so you really do feel alone. I get what you're saying about that. Well, and there's the illusion that's deliberately created for you that you are the author of your experience, right? So, I mean, that's a really interesting point because you don't have that imaginary connection to the author or the choreographer or the painter or that you're right. It's because the game developer doesn't want you to have that relationship. They want you to believe that you are the author of your own experience. And that's a profoundly different relationship to just experience than most art forms that I'm used to. Also, I think it ends. Like you said, you can get fully immersed into that experience for hours and hours on end and you are alone and isolated in that space while you're doing it. And, you know, you hear, you know, I've seen and experienced myself that I might sit down to play a fun little game and two or three hours have passed and I don't even realize it where when you're consuming traditional media, there is an end that's predetermined and you might read a book a second time or watch a movie over and over again but there's a finite time associated with it. It's not this bottomless pit which also I think feels isolating to me anyways because you're alone with the screen. Even if you're even with games, I think in which you're having digital communications through avatars or even through conversations. I mean, I watch my kids play video games and they all have their headphones on and they're playing virtually with their friends from the other side of town and having conversations while doing it but it's still you're alone with the screen for an undeterminate amount of time that also I think changes things for me. So I want to take things back for a minute to communities and specifically digital communities and it seems to me that when we're talking about sort of traditional communities, communities that existed prior to things like the digital age, one of the main basis, one of the main bases that community was founded on was dependence, reliance and consequence with other people. So if you have to live with people, you have to see them every day, you have to take responsibility for your actions, you depend on them socially, emotionally, economically, all those sorts of things. And I think anyone who spent any great amount of time on the internet can see that there's a lot of toxicity that can frequently come up in communities when anonymity is assumed. So that people do not feel like they have to respond to the consequences of their actions and therefore can just kind of make a mess of things that other people would rather they didn't. So do you think that there's any sense in which digital communities should have more accountability towards individuals or more ways to make it so that consequences are more real to people as opposed to something that can be just sort of shoved off and you get more of an illusion of community where it's more just like feelings or ideas being exchanged rather than concrete currency of emotion or economics or those sorts of things? You're the humanities person you're talking about. I guess the question you asked is the one that society and the marketplace would be asking. How that decision is made would happen in a variety of ways I suppose. But I suppose if it gets so bad that nobody goes there anymore like Yogi Berra's full restaurant, if places are so toxic that people lose interest in the thing, somebody, a new sheriff may bring order to the place. And it's a balance between how about freedom and unity to coin a phrase, the tension between obligation and autonomy. Well I guess what I'm asking is would it be worthwhile to try to pursue making digital spaces have more accountability to individuals? Is anonymity destructive of communities when we're talking about digital spaces and would it be worth trying to have some way, like in some multiplayer games that I've had there is a great respect for the social community that goes on in these games in large part because there is a huge amount of time put into your character in the game and into the world itself and therefore when other players mess with that and when they do things with it there is a strongly felt emotional reaction against it which other players can act as sheriffs and act as real forces to try to get things back into a real kind of community control. And in other areas when anonymity is much more widespread that kind of social pressure doesn't exist in the same way and therefore it's a lot harder to create a real community one where people's actions mean things and where people are actually trying to pay attention to one another and have their actions have some reciprocity basically. So is there, might it be something that digital communities need to do to try to really reach out towards the people who are actually there and connect them more firmly than just having a name that comes up whenever you're espousing something on the internet. Is that kind of implied social contract that you're talking about? Is that something that has arisen organically or is it built into the architecture of the game that you're playing? This is largely organic. This is basically like the more time you put into something the more you care about it. I mean I would say there's your answer. I think those kinds of forms of policing or control should emerge organically and shouldn't be, I'd be really reluctant to say that it's anyone's job to create that kind of structure but that's just my, that's a philosophical question. Our society generally looks with some suspicion at anonymity. We permit it in places where it's needed to protect victims, to protect people who are in positions of weakness against a retribution and the like but usually our society says, no, no, let's, who are you? Put a face to a name. Put a face to a name so that I can understand where you're coming from. I can judge your credibility. I can find a connection with you. That's the way society, live society is built at least in the West. Absolutely. And I think this is also related to, you know, everyone likes talking about fake news nowadays and I think that there is a, I think that that lack of accountability towards individuals and the idea that you can just go on the internet and edit Wikipedia or you can just go on and post anything on some particular journalism website. I think there is something about the kinds of communities that spring up online that has this high potential at least for deception and for kind of creating areas in which policing becomes very difficult and I don't know, I don't really know exactly where my question is going, but I do want to bring up the link between anonymity consequence and what those things have to say about what kinds of communities are real and which ones are more illusory. My question is somewhat related. So as I'm listening to you speak, I'm hearing some similarities between some traditional, more traditional media such like poems and novels and the like and video games. They're both potential engines for cultivating empathy. I agree with that. And they both kind of operate by immersion. They achieve those effects in different ways. You know, in a short story or a novel we have to decode the language and that kind of unlocks it and we fall into it and it works in different ways in video games. But we've been defending literature, some of us for a long time on many grounds, one of which is that it provides a useful literacy. There's a link between literature and literacy, let's say. And so I'm asking the question now about these digital spaces. Have you thought much about the literacies that emerge from that? How did those stand up? And I think it relates a little bit to what you were saying because we're asking, so what do I become when I play these games and what does that matter in how I actually interact with real people? There's a huge literature on this that I'm not, I can't speak to except to say that it's there. I mean, Kathy Davidson has written some really interesting work on how the game environment and digital space affects kids cognitively and builds different skill sets than traditional reading a book or a poem. And there are psychologists and neuroscientists who are studying this. So the answer to your question is yes, there is a profound difference and there are different skill sets that are being developed, but that's not my background, I can't speak to that. I would also argue that if you were a dyslexic growing up 100 years ago, you are left behind, right? So our traditional form of literacy affords success to certain kinds of brains. And I think what we're going to find in the next, however many years, is that this new form of digital literacy is going to afford success to a different kind of intelligence. And we will change, right? How we'll change remains to be seen. And it also hopefully will change pedagogy in the classroom. I mean, there's a lot of evidence that we're very focused on individual learners and the proficiencies or skills that they develop that we can measure and grant them credit to graduate. And we know the little that I've read, I know that the digital space encourages a kind of collaborative learning that isn't just easily defined by, you have the skillset and I have the skillset. Kids in a classroom that's digitally, whether the pedagogy is shaped by digital tools from the get-go, they learn differently, they interact differently, and it's a much more fluid and collaborative kind of learning that doesn't lend itself to that kind of individual measurement. So talk about a vast sea change being required in our classrooms. We've been using the word education. I think that emerging media are excellent at experiential education, coming to understand something through experience. I'm not convinced that there is equal to books when it comes to information or knowledge. It's important to know a variety of things, citizenship, tolerance, and a variety of other important themes that one could learn experientially. But our society also needs people that knows about the balance of powers in our government and how many Supreme Court justices there are. That may sound dull, but if you don't have that fundamental understanding, you get real problems. I think that's pretty clear. And it's important for people to have a shared knowledge. And you know the best way that I know of, to convey information is the written word. That it hasn't gotten any better. You can have it said to you, but I can read faster than that, even if I'm not a fast reader. But information, that kind of knowledge of that the Civil War happened before World War II is gotten best most efficiently through reading. So there are different kinds of learning that happen. I wanted to revisit something that came up earlier about it seems like in this conversation, we've had a lot of worrying about digital technology taking the place of reading or them kind of being at odds with one another. And I had a professor, Ken Howell, who's a teacher here who said once that culture is a luxury item. And I think that as our technology gets better, as we are able to have more free time, we're actually spending more time entertaining ourselves in general, whatever that medium may be. A couple years ago I did a paper on eschatological themes in television and I was studying how television habits have changed over time. And separate from the whole Netflix and Hulu and everything else kind of replacing traditional cable television, one thing that I found that was interesting was all of these broadcast networks are kind of freaking out, worrying that people are gonna be watching less television because they're on the internet more. And it's true that people were spending more time on the internet in 2014 than they were in 2005, but they were still spending the same amount of time watching television. And so to extrapolate that a little bit further back, I think that we're seeing people just in general spending more time with all forms of media. And so maybe it isn't as much of a battle for real estate in people's minds as we're portraying it to be. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Holly, did you have a question? I just was gonna comment and I really appreciate the comment about television obviously, but the comment that you had Peter about a shared knowledge, I still can't get over the idea that when you create your own reality in a digital format, you aren't having an expression of an art form in the same way that creates a common culture, even though, to your original point Peter, people even see color differently and they have interpretations that are different. But you don't give yourself over to the attempt of human communication in the art form in the same way when you're doing this digital interactive experience. And I do worry, as a purveyor of Ken Burns' documentaries, that there is a need for a common culture that even goes beyond mere information. Just saying. Well, I'm sorry, go ahead. And I worry just to keep on the convergent-ness here, that I worry about, yeah, that's your job, I know I'm still your job. No, but I worry about abandoning linear narrative to be very traditional. I mean, Ken Burns' documentaries are a great example. I used to fund Ken Burns' documentary, sorry. You know, there's an incredible beauty and power to a narrative that's beautifully constructed to move you from here to here. It moves you emotionally, it moves you intellectually and you don't get to here without knowing what you learned over here. It matters that you go in a sequence. It matters the way the story unfolds. If you're in a space where you just get to bounce around and pick up content the way you choose, something is lost. I can't give up on that idea. And I'd love someone to push back against that who's younger than I am, because I fear I'm betraying my age here. Thank you very much. So I'm gonna have a question that's probably different than everything else about sustainability. And one of the things I've been talking about in some of my classes now is that it's really, we want to get into a more sustainable age where we're using sustainable materials and how do we teach the humanities using sustainable technology? For example, why would we use the books when it's more sustainable to use the digital technology because it can last longer and it doesn't have to destroy the environment as we do it? So I'm wondering, I know it's a different experience using a book to learn about the humanities compared to using another device, but how would we get into this future age where we can actually be sustainable but still learn about the humanities? Can I, let me push back on that. I mean. I'm on your one. You're on mine. You're on mine. I think you've got a couple of professors. I've had the same book in my family for 100 years and I can read the same one and I can hand it and lend it to you. You have changed your computer at least once in the last five years and that has a lot of toxic materials in it. It has things that are limited resources. It's really hard to recycle and a paper and it uses power and a book doesn't do any of those things. It's incredibly cheap. Once it's purchased, it is free. You can read it a million times. And it's free. That's true. And also I'm thinking about space. Like the amount of space a book takes up where a file is not that big and it can go on anywhere. I'm just thinking about the future of where we're going like we're not gonna have bookshelves in outer space or something like that. It's gonna has to be in a digital format. So I'm just wondering how are we going to deal with that when that time comes when we're like we can't use books anymore? Did you want a question? Well I would just suggest that you look into the carbon footprint of like Amazon web services for example. Like we at Champlain use Canvas as our learning management system that's hosted by Amazon. There's these giant cavernous warehouse buildings out in Nevada or something that are just chewing up electricity to keep those servers running and they're multiply redundant and all of that. So I mean there's actually studies done of like what the actual carbon footprint of a tweet is. And you know just multiply that by the billions that occur every day. Like those, there's power required, there's storage space required. The cloud, I mean we have a colleague Brian Murphy who talks about this and he's like the cloud is not the cloud, it's a physical reality. There's this massive infrastructure supporting it. So sustainability is a tricky thing in the digital age that is not as you know we can grow more trees. We can print more books if we want to go that way. But so yeah. I think the funny pushback would be like when it all goes to hell I don't think we'll be worrying about like how we're gonna be able to plug our laptops in because the only thing that will be left are books. So that would be, oh well we gotta read these now. I think a funny thing and we're talking a lot about where does all this additional media fit into the larger landscape? And I always think that if you look back historically whenever a new form of communication bursts onto the scene and gets sort of a foothold, the ones that were there before are freaking out, the new one always thinks it's going to take over the world and then it's going to be the only thing and the end result is always the same. The end result is always that the new thing just becomes another thing and then a new thing comes along and then the same sort of dance takes place. My question is and I have no idea and I don't know if anyone else has an idea because do you think that the human brain will ever reach a threshold where there will be so many things that will be spread so thin that we become sort of the jack of all trades and master of none intellectually? Like is that something that's maybe a legitimate concern that we have so many different methods of communication that we are not good at any of them? Yeah, no more new things, right? But I think you're right. I'm not gonna answer your question but I will kind of piggyback a little bit on what you said is that I think as these new media come into play, I think the old media gets to figure out what it's best for, right? And I think that as you pointed out, there are certain things in which the written word is better at communicating but I think there are certain things that the branching narrative possibility of a video game are also better at and now we get to stop making books do all of the heavy lifting for everything and everybody and we get to start diversifying that experience. I wanna hear what you have to say but I also wanna call attention to the time. I think it's a little bit after eight o'clock already so I think we should maybe have a couple of last comments and then we can wrap it up and if anybody wants to stay and talk afterwards but go ahead. I think you're absolutely right there and the trick would be in any kind of project like this is to use multimedia. They match up very well. If you use some emerging technology, narrative, you could also have text, you could have audio, you can have video and together those create a good balance and a good combination. They are also collaborative. I've got one thing and you've got the other thing. You've got the letters from that great person and we can put them on and you have a fabulous interview so I wanna use that and you have film of the place and together we can have a terrific product but it's the product of four things or five things or eight things and 20 people and not just one. So one of the interesting dynamics when we think about collaboration and community like this is an interdisciplinary class so there are people who are like more maybe traditional media makers, digital media makers like that coming together and that always feels like really, really exciting. And like I'm in that headspace too as like a creator and as a thinker, I do media studies but for me, but like one of the sticking points is about funding always. Who is getting money? And I was just curious about like your perspective on funding because I read a lot about like the crisis in the humanities and that crisis is necessitated by like a defunding that has been happening over the course of the past 20 to 30 years which is happening in the US at the federal and state and institutional levels. I see it playing out even in our own local sphere so the defunding of the humanities with the funding of like technologists who are creating humanities-ish type educational things to create empathy-ish and so but without the context or the experience of the humanities and then like the humanities people are expected to oh, let's come play with you and we'll collaborate but we're not gonna actually give you money. And so I'm curious as to how that dynamic like plays into this conversation about like education, humanities, and digital technologies and whatnot and what your perspectives are on it. I'm considering like you're both operating in those spaces. I have no money so I don't fund anyone. So I think the question for me as a funder is the one circling back to what Robin said which is what if I'm gonna make decisions as a funder, what is the best form to accomplish the kind of public community engagement that at the Arts Council or formerly at the National Endowment for the Humanities we wanna foster and sometimes that might be a traditional humanities form and sometimes it might be a new digital form. I don't think funders need to think strategically about what is the best medium to achieve their ends and it should be a blend of traditional and digital. I mean that's easy to say in an environment where you know STEM is ascendant and the humanities have to claw away to get any attention but I have to say maybe I'm an incurable optimist but when I left DC I did feel a bit that that was changing. I mean even despite all the threats of defunding the Arts Endowment and the humanities endowment I don't think that's gonna happen. I don't think there's appetite for that and I also believe that most of the funders of STEM are recognizing that arts and humanities can amplify and deepen the work that's happening in STEM because the research is there now and the research wasn't there 10 years ago. So you know and that matters, that turns a funder's head. If you can demonstrate learning change in the classroom, change in student achievement through engagement with the arts or humanities alongside STEM or instead of STEM, it matters. And so I feel like there is a change in the last, I don't know, I wouldn't wanna say an exact number of years but it feels like in the last maybe five to 10 years because of research and that funders are taking notice. That some of the larger foundations and government funders including the Department of Education are taking notice and there's a more integrated approach but again I tend to be an incurable optimist so. I don't know if you have the same perspective. I know that the Department of Education in Vermont just tired a STEAM content specialist not a STEM content specialist. So I think that's true. I think there is a little bit of a movement. A couple of quick comments. The first was I was actually going to suggest that you're, you worry less about the linear narrative and you take a deep breath because the fact of the matter is although the playground type approach, sandboxes are cool, the fact of the matter is the vast majority of games today are still fundamentally linear narratives with stuff we throw on top which is smoke and mirrors to make the player think they have some agency. The other comment I was gonna make just to support Sam a little bit is you were mentioning they've measured the carbon footprint of Google but have they measured the carbon footprint of the room I have devoted to books in my house and the room that every other friend I have has devoted to their books and all the identical copies of the Azamo Foundation trilogy? So I think unless there's any other last comments, questions, maybe I think we're good. I think we're good. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thanks.