 Welcome to the afternoon track of the open simulated community conference, the panel on writing and creativity in virtual worlds. We're going to talk about how virtual worlds can inspire creativity can nurture creativity and can become a tool for creativity. And today we have some fantastic people on our panel today. We have. We first of all we have and cut worth who's a storyteller, a Emmy award winning storyteller and author of two books, virtual world design and extending virtual worlds advanced design for visual environments. So if anybody knows how to. You know, use virtual worlds for stuff. She's going to be the person to talk about that. We also have Donna down a Kaiser and educator historian artist radio broadcaster storyteller and virtual world builder. And we have with us Cynthia cologne also known as learn Lobo who's at the end of the couch there. Who's a professor at Parker University, a VR researcher and a member of those to see organizing committee and her team recently won a $25,000 grand prize for their space simulation. And she received a thinker award for her passion for virtual world education. So thanks everybody for coming here. And we're going to, we're going to give a quick five minute introduction of what we guys do. And then we're going to talk about what virtual worlds means for us in creativity. So I'm going to start off with a little bit about what I'm doing in virtual worlds. I'm the editor of hyper good business and I'm the editor of a new magazine called metasteller, which is about science fiction and fantasy. I'm the author of the cream books series of novellas. And I posted all the links here on this slide. And my email is Maria hyper good business.com. If anybody wants to contact me absolutely feel free to do that. I've been covering open sim since 2009. And, and I've really been inspired by how the metaverse and virtual worlds in general have been showing up in fiction. And I'm a huge fan of the genre of the matrix of snow crash ready player one of tron. And when I discovered open sim and second life, I was incredibly, incredibly motivated by it, particularly for years before I start actually writing in it. The genre that I write in is, is kind of like lead RPG or game lit adjacent. And some of the aspects of these books are that they're set in a virtual world, like matrix or ready player one. Often they will include gameplay mechanics. So for example, there might be a page in the book that shows you the stats of the main characters. And that's where it goes more into the lit RPG side of it. So it involves more of the technical discussion. It often involves progression as players go through up level up. And often, these stories are about what it means to be human, what it means for things to be real, what it means to be both to be sentient. So I love this, this topic. And I write, write about this. So I have 10 finished novellas to the first two which are already up on Amazon. And thanks to you guys from hyper good business. Both of them made the Amazon bestseller list in their categories multiple times. So I really appreciate you guys, you guys are awesome. The other eight here are all available for free on my website crim.world. And I will be posting them up on Amazon as they finish their editorial process. So it's the beta copies that are up online right now. So, and I have a work in progress that I've posted nine short chapters so far, and all these books are set in a crème virtual world, which is loosely, maybe not so loosely based on what I've seen in open seven second life. So, and it's kind of like Terry Pratchett meets, you know, meets, you know, Neil Stevenson, someone like that. So, so yeah, that's what I'm doing. Definitely check those out. If you want free copies. I would love to learn what you guys think. And I'm also the editor of the metasteller magazine which we launched last fall. Since then we've had, we're up to 15,000 pages a month. We've had more than 200 contributors. We've published hundreds of short stories. Everybody's welcome to contribute short stories and reviews of books of movies of video games, everything we cover video games, we write about narrative fiction. We've had narrative fiction writers and video game writers on our metasteller YouTube channel. So this is a topic that we very, very much care about, and we'd love to have you guys contribute. All the covers I made myself. I had a couple of designers for the first two. I didn't like their designs. I'm going to try again with like real artists, because I really don't like the way my covers look. But I can't like explain to a designer what I want in a cover, because I don't really have the visual language of a covers. So, it's something that I need to learn how to do, and it is on my to do list. So, so that's what I'm doing. So, and can you tell us what you are doing in, in storytelling and in virtual worlds. Well, thank you, Maria. Thank you. Thank you very much for that intro. For those folks in the audience, I'm going to be pasting in my transcripts so you can read what I'm saying. And first batch is coming in right now. Hey, hi. My name is Ann Cudworth as you know, and since 2007, I've been an avatar named Annabelle fanshawe and all the virtual worlds that I visit. And for many years, I've been fortunate to create Sims with talented people such as Vicki Brandenburg late in destiny, red rant Aaron Oberlander, Vic Streeter, and many, many others. I work as a set designer for television and film in real life. So I'm trained to create designs that support the narrative of a movie, a play or even a commercial. What came later, and my virtual world experience contributed significantly to this was the urge to write virtual environments that told stories by interacting with their visitors. The attraction between a player and the game that transports them to another world is the real currency of our video games. But the experience is more transcendent in a virtual world. I would like to share five anecdotal stories based on the themes we found in our interactive games and the stories they lived in. As we go, I will share links. The next slide. Thank you. This was one of our very first once Vicki and I kind of got our feet wet. It's about how we stumbled into game design. In 2008, the magic of scripting inspired us to build a season changing sim, which we called trees. But we didn't realize that by giving our visitors the power to control the season change with a vocal command that we would be giving them a new game. Soon after we completed the sim, we discovered that our visitors would shout winter to freeze over the pond, run out on the ice, shout summer, which would fantasize the ice prince and drop everyone into the water, and they would repeatedly do this. So that was my first gaming aha moment. After that, we realized how engaged our visitors would become with an environment. We wanted to do more. And the link below is to my flicker site, which will show you many more pictures of that particular sim. Next slide, please. Then we decided to build a sim called alchemy. And the theme in this sim was when abandoned the whole world falls apart. This was 2009. And I wrote a short, very short story about the rise and fall of hope in a civilization that didn't abandon to buy its mentors. And this is the first time I'd ever written a backstory for a virtual environment. And the story told is told through a chat in a scripted tour vehicle that the visitors would take around the sim. At the end of the tour, they were invited to hunt for artifacts left by that abandoned civilization. And we observed our gaming visitors and learned about the intense focus a player will bring to a game, even if the backstory is not directly related to the gameplay. They would develop their own games again. In this sim developed, we created lots of unusual aquatic animals. One of them was known as the watcher. It was an enormous anemone, which would point its tentacles towards anybody nearby. And in the final days, as we were getting ready to shut that sim down, we embellished the backstory to recreate the mentors departure and the dramatic rescue of the watcher just before the ultimate destruction of the environment. And that went on for a week or two as we blew the whole thing up. Next slide please. Then it was the sixth birthday for Second Life. And we decided to build some pop up books. These were interactive if you walked up and clicked on them they would open up. Our inspirational compass was swinging in another direction at that point. I wanted to write more stories so I did I wrote a story for each one of them, including the using the history of the alchemy sim. And we synchronized the presentation of the story with text chat, as well as pop up images that came up out of the book. So the anvil acorn anvil and mermaid history of alchemy and Kyron's children may never become best sellers, but we enjoyed building them. And below that is a link to some more images for you. Slide please next one. It's taking a while to read it for you to see it. Yes, a little bit. Yeah. Next one that we built was for the IBM Sims. This one was called inland search for the sigh. There's a trailer at the bottom one of the links to a trailer on YouTube. This was a very complicated story driven sim that was based on epistolary information from our main characters diary. There were sequential levels that included on for artifacts. And you would once you had to collect these artifacts, you could assemble them into a key that would allow you to travel to other layers within the build. And eventually you would morph into a another kind of being which allowed you to eventually finish the game. And that was very popular. We had a very strong following with that and a big leader boy, a big competition, the leader board. So next slide please. Last one I'm going to talk about tonight is a game build that I did called three Billy goat's gruff. This was a game that was only sound. On the left side of the slide you can see what the basic symbol layout was as you walked into the game and you can on the right side you can see what the game looked like with its cover off, you would be inside a black box and not be able to see anything inside there. But you did see that key to the layout as you were entering within the box was a series of sound emitters, which would generate the sounds from various things like the goat barn or the troll hall or the, or the market in town and you had to navigate your way, utilizing your ears, rather than your eyes. And the ultimate goal was to find a baby goat who had gotten lost and bring them to the orchard. It, it developed out of my interest in audio books and the creation of a literal soundscape and my desire to open up people's idea about what a game could be in a virtual world. And the bottom of that is a YouTube clip. It's actually the trailer from the first book I wrote. So there is a lot of other stuff on there as well. And that's all I have to say for now. And there are some links to what I've been doing. Thank you. Wow, that's awesome. What are you working on next. Right now I'm writing. So, hey, what I'm working on is worlds created with words. So I just finished a novel, getting ready to send that out for agents and starting my next one. I work in that I write in the speculative fiction science fiction fantasy realm. Any connection to virtual worlds. Some of the novels that are some of the stories I write have virtual worlds in them, but I sort of consider the literary environment to be a virtual world in itself. So, so I don't necessarily reference a structure like Second Life, unless it's part of the of the game, or unless it's part of a character's interests. Alright, well I'm looking forward to seeing that when it comes out. Or beta copies if you want to share them. I love I love reading that kind of stuff. I'll let you know. And that goes for anyone here if anybody here wants to form a writer's group focusing on virtual worlds. Look me up. So our next storyteller Donna Kaiser is also a virtual world builder, and you can see her bio up there. And down to tell us what you're working on in terms of storytelling and creativity and virtual worlds. Well, thank you, Maria. Thank you for having me. Basically, I would say that just about everything I work on that has anything to do with virtual worlds is creating a story. And what, let's see the next slide. What I'd like to really talk about right at the beginning here is the idea of lateral storytelling. And that is this idea that you have many, many micro stories within one larger overarching story. And these micro stories are each of them is its own complete, tiny, tiny story that is also interconnected with larger stories. And to focus this even more, I would just like to talk a little bit about the natural curiosity that human beings have for the pathways. That which is unknown that something that is beyond in this particular slide, the gate. This gate happens to be the start of something called the Lost Merchant's Trail. It was a region that I had that I used for my quietly store for a while. And I would, I couldn't, I simply couldn't bring myself to just set up a store. It made itself, it devolved itself into a story. And so as you walk along the trail and you find out what's around the corner and you find out what comes next over the hill, down the hill. You encounter different things that you can click on and everything along this trail has a story in it, every tree. People who know me know that I like to build trees and I like to do things out in nature. And so you walk along the trail and you can click on a tree and you can read the story, but also all along the trail there are different the parcels that we create and each of those is also part of the story. So it's the natural curiosity of the human being that I like to draw on to attract them into the story. And let's go on to the next slide and this next build. Now this one is in a different platform. This is in sign space. And I call this one between land and water because what this is, there's a path, but the path is made out of water. And it's a path and a puzzle basically because you have to figure out if you want to get to the tree that you see there in the distance. It's not really amazed so much as it's an enjoyable wandering in the winter in the snow to get to your destination, which is the tree and the tree has its own story. The region is called Steam Lake Winter or it's called Steam Lake and it's in the winter right now. And the tree is kind of like a carnival ride where it rotates and the branches go up and down and there are dances on each branch. And so it's also set up for a party and I have, I created this when I was doing more events in sign space and broadcasting music. And so and this and the tree is steam driven. And so you can catch glimpses of this huge pipe that goes down into the ground and again drawing on that natural curiosity. And there's also a tugboat lunch and you'll discover if you are brave enough that the gates will actually slide open and let your boat go through and then slide back through back together. And so this idea of the pathway, drawing the reader you might say, I'm a big fan of the Mist and Uru games. And so this idea of exploring because you just want to know what's around the next bend. This one I call the destination puzzle because the chapel is sometimes a destination, but how you don't even know it exists, first of all, unless you explore. And then this picture was taken from an angle where you're not quite sure where the road or the path starts, but you know where it ends. And so the puzzle is to figure out which turn to take to actually get to the destination that you want to get to. Next slide please. And then this all of this is still in steam lake and this one I call curiosities choice because it is part of our natural curiosity to make a choice. There are actually three paths that you can choose from here, maybe even for one goes to the right one goes forward. There's one you can't see that goes off to the left. I call it the slide hill, but I haven't actually figured out how to make a toboggan slide animation that works all the time. And then where we're standing here is on the ice and so there is actually something hidden down one of these paths. But if you happen to go there, you can walk down that path and see which one that is. And so part of the joy of writing a story in a lateral story telling the process is that every corner has there's a story. There's many, many, many micro stories and all of these together build on the larger story and you can jump into the story at any point and it will start building itself. And so there's not really a beginning and there's not really an end that you have that doesn't dictate the flow for you. You can just wander and explore and find things and there might be in micro games in there and there might be other micro puzzles in there as well. Next slide please. And then this last slide that I'm going to talk about this is actually part of the work that I do now. I'm just putting up a couple links here. This is the Ageless Mind Project. .org and a daughter organization is Music is Brain Food. This is our expo exhibit. We're on Expo Region 3 in booth 12 and you can see there's pathways. One of my favorite things to do is the walkways that there's signs that sort of give you a nudge as far as what the meaning of is this particular place. Now this is something I call the Mind Health Walk and I want to bring this up because this is the kind of lateral story telling that becomes your own story because Ageless Mind Project is all about mind health and brain and body and emotional health through different activities, different puzzles, different ways of engaging your brain in different ways. And so there's different ideas and suggestions as you walk along this path. And there's some of the signs will give you some ideas about it and some of the signs will simply be there for your curiosity or your imagination to decide what it actually means. And so it's meant to be an enjoyable and engaging and creative kind of walk for you to engage and express yourself. And that's all I have to say for right now. Oh, this is gorgeous. You've inspired me as I was watching your slides and listening to your talk. I'm thinking I need to build a virtual world map of my world. I need to build the castles where everything's set. I need to build the battlefields. And okay, I guess I got my 2022 all planned out now. My virtual worlds always starts with I love to landscape and the steam lake region is in science-based, but it's actually built. You can build your objects in Blender or in a 3D program, but you bring them into unity and then you can terraform. Just like we terraform in Second Life and Open Sim, you terraform it in. You can do that right in unity before you upload it. And I love to do that. So I always end up starting the region with the landscape and there always ends up being pathways and they might be just in the landscape makes the pathways. I very rarely use cobblestones or bricks or sidewalks or anything like that. I mean the walkways that you see here in this image that I created because I had one region that was mostly water. Of course, we needed a way to get around to the water and that creates its own story. You know, if you're going to fall in, if you're not going to fall in, if you're not careful, if you're careful. And so I always end up starting my regions with paths and you can tell so you can do so much with simple landscaping where the grass parts where it doesn't part. You know, if something that goes around the corner and you don't know where it goes, you will fight you'll be surprised how often people will just follow that because we are human beings. Naturally curious. That's so cool. It's very rewarding. All right, next we have Cynthia cologne. Also known as lure Lobo. And can you talk to us about how you see creativity in virtual worlds and stories. Absolutely. Well, I love stories. I'm an avid reader. I must read over 200 books a year, maybe more, which isn't really very much, but it is when you're busy right for fiction, especially. And I love writers conferences. So I have gone to like 18 writers conferences physically. I've gone to a lot of them online as well, but this is where I go and meet with people have lunch have dinner. I had, I had dinner with the guy who wrote Dexter, I had lunch with a good friend who wrote seven of nine for Star Trek Voyager. So some of my, yeah, murder she wrote sliders you name it. I've hobnobbed with all of them and for nine years I just did it for my vacation. That's how I spent my vacation was going to writers conferences. Yeah. And I loved it. Now, I have written and published but it's been mostly research right. And of course the world the academic world thinks it's fiction. They, they're like surely the things you do aren't real. And of course, because you're going to Mars you're thinking about life and an improbable future. That's not possible today. And this first one, what I want you to look at on this and I don't have it in my speakeasy. Notice on the right that Andy Stricker, that's Spinoza Quinnell has his cat on the back of his chair. That's something from life, isn't it. And we were celebrating a birthday, you know, for his sister-in-law, and Barbara was there with us, you know, but she was on Skype watching. And of course, this was a week before she died. And we, we all looked at his cat and next thing you know, we all pulled mountain lions out and put them on our shoulders and on the backs of our chairs. And this is one of these art imitates life kind of moments that really makes you laugh and makes you, your heart seeing and makes you think about why stories matter. And the fact that each of you has a story within you, each of you can write. And of course, all of these things inspire me. Next slide please. So what I'm going to do on the speakeasy, you're going to see some, some bullets and some links pop up and these are talks I've given. I give a lot of talks on how to write because I want to inspire the world to tell their stories. I want more people writing. Now I know the people who publish and make money at books are like, whoa, hold it, hold it. Because when we have 4,000 new books being published every day, which was one of the metrics we noticed, you know, a couple years ago, we're like, who has time to read all this stuff. And of course, to curate and to ensure that they're telling great stories. Well, here we're seeing a story. This was, I call this the last Christmas. And of course, it's just a simple visual. In fact, you're probably looking at it going, you're not a very good photographer, are you? Well, normally I take really great shots, but this one touched my heart because I was watching as my friends were all playing and one of them, J.J. fell underneath the deer. And the deer's kind of hugging J.J. while Barbara's looking on. And we're all just thinking about, you know, what's in store for us in the future. Next slide. Now, the link I'm featuring in the text chat is about developing your voice. And I know you're going to hear this a few seconds after you see it, but it's this notion that I have a bunch of slides online that you're welcome to download. Of course, Scribd bought LinkedIn, bought Microsoft, bought SlideShare, right? The place where I put curate on my content has been sold so many times that now it's a subscription service, but you can have a free account there. And my stuff is supposed to stay accessible, you know, to everyone for free. So hopefully they're not going to dishonor that agreement, right? Hey, take care, Mike. Have a good one. Here you're looking at Pompeii and we decided to have Valentine's on Pompeii. So Andy creates not just Pompeii, but we're using chariot races and trying to have that authentic experience. And I'm thinking, hey, what could go wrong having Valentine's Day on Pompeii after pandemic, you know, and of course he has the volcano there too. So it's this notion of setting, this notion of we have people, we have places, and then next we have stories about things. So if you think about virtual worlds, these are places that of course encourage us, you know, to have a setting for a story, right? And of course, thanks to Riannon and to Frans, they loaned their Vesuvius region and I held a little workshop called the Writers' Craft Writing on Fire inside a volcano. And of course all the workshop attendees came in the nonprofit commons and my goal was for people to tell their stories, whether they're fiction or nonfiction, and to keep writing, keep reading, you know, not lose track of our culture, you know, not become so media rich that we lose track of the spoken and written word, right? And why it matters to us. Next slide, please. And of course, if you look up those slides about the Vesuvius thing, the volcano, the book that's in front of me floating as you see my avatar. I didn't feature an image here, but it happens to be a short story I did for the Lit Fest that was published by them and they had me record it, you know, and recite it over their radio station, over the fantasy radio. So that was fun. And yeah, that volcano build is so great. I've done scripting classes there and all kinds of events. Now here you're looking at Sakurajima. And this is Frankie Antonella wanted to get in touch with her roots. She was born in Japan, but didn't grow up there. And so Andy built this grid for us that set in Japan. And you can see it strikes a mood on the left. You know, it's very evocative. But on the right, we're having Thanksgiving and instead of Turkey, we're having crab and lobster and all kinds of things. And of course, enjoying our kimonos and thinking about the Emma, thinking about the little thoughts and prayers and our wishes for the future for strengthening our world. So then I did a talk for the nonprofit comments. And of course I talked about what is your social good story. No matter what walk of life you're in, think about all the things you do that are so magical. Do you ever write that down? And do you ever share it with others? And will it persist long after we have these experiences? That's what I'm thinking about here is how do we tell those stories? Now I did a funny one and I don't have an image of it. It's character strengths and storytelling. And it was based on Dr. Stricker's work with the military on leadership. And of course we featured the movie Gladiator. So we took the story of Marcus Aurelius and all the characters from the movie Gladiator, of which some of them were not so hot when it comes to character. And so of course I even featured Mr. Bean in there for a little bit of humor. But to think about why do these things matter? Why should we worry about what our strengths are and how we work with others and where we're going with all this? Then years ago I was trying to explain to education why these worlds matter. Why they're not just art and they're not just a social space. They're actually a space that touches the heart. And so I looked at our classes as they were doing their final presentations. And Barbara was doing one during this. She was my student at that time. This was like 2013, 2014, actually 2013 because she graduated then. And I called it the renaissance of a master storyteller constructivist and futurist. And in it my students had created two waves of builds. One wave was about the Greek gods, right? And so they had the labyrinth. They had all these games and puzzles and things with stories that drove you through it, you know, to find the clues and to win prizes. You'd win your wings to be Daedalus and fly off into the sun. Which maybe isn't such a great prize when you think about it. And then Barbara took on Pandora's Garden and talked about the evils in the world and whether they're truly evil or not. I know, what a great thought, huh? And while she's giving her presentation, it's set in a garden. Of course there's Mediana Prim along the walls. There's artwork, there's statuary. There's incredible things to look at. But while she's talking, she activated her avatar switch and she became the phoenix, a bird on fire. And that was so amazing. We had guests from other faculty, we had students from past classes who had graduated. We had people from all over coming to this event because it bridged outside the boundaries of a class and it outside the boundaries even of our university. We were connecting across time and it just really felt important. It felt like a very special moment. And I'm almost ready to wrap up my stories but I have one more. So as we think about these cultural stories and some of our students created an entire build, an entire region, and all of it was on one reservoir. And it would res to Mayan temples, it res the underworld. It was one of the largest and most ambitious things we'd ever done. Maybe some of you have done entire region grid resing but it was pretty wild for me. And of course we made it all collaborative so it was all full permission so we could adjust each other's scripts and make sure that everything was working and link, you know, resolve all the linking issues, etc. And in it, we even had that little game where, you know, the two teams are playing a form of football, right? But the team that wins, the captain loses his head, you know, so, you know, I don't know about whether winning is always a good idea, you know. So anyway, but cultural things, thinking about, you know, where we're going. And the last one I want to tell you is something that touched my heart. My school was about to downsize because of Obamacare. And so everyone was going to become an adjunct, right? Instead of full time. So we weren't going to have health benefits and things were going to change. And so I was working with my students and I thought about this and I said, am I, am I still relevant? Do I still matter? You know, and so I looked at this Twilight Zone called the changing of the guard is the name of it. And if you've never seen it, it's about an aging professor who teaches his students poetry and he's quoting all these favorites of mine that I quote too. And when they tell him he's being retired, he's devastated and he goes off with a gun and he stands before the statue of Horace Mann, you know, this innovator and thinker. And he proceeds to think about killing himself when all of a sudden the bells ring. And he's called back to the classroom, even though it's Christmas, even though everyone is left, he knows they're gone, but the bells are ringing. So he runs to class and there before him are the ghosts of his students, his former students, and he starts thinking about them because they're not in his current class. So it's not like they just returned. And as he looks at them, he realizes that all of them are dead and that all of them had done incredibly brave things. Some of them had done it for science. Some of them had suffered radiation. Some of them had found cures for malaria or diseases or whatever. They participated in something very noble. And each of them told him that through his teaching, he had taught them courage and bravery and all the things that really mattered to them and gave them strength. And as a result, he's so moved by their stories that he's renewed in spirit and he continues to mentor future students from retirement. He goes off no longer disenchanted with the change in state for his own profession. And I thought about that and it gives me strength as I see my life changing. I now teach for four universities. So it turns out it's not that I'm irrelevant. It's now I'm all over the place making a difference. And so, yeah, exactly Maria. And Anne and Galen. So this is what stories do to me, whether it's fiction or nonfiction is they give you strength. You have this moment to be heroic and to overcome challenges that they just feel defeating, right? Anyway, his story became my story and I just wanted to share that with you. I can't remember if it's from season one or season two of Twilight Zone, but it's just amazing, really. And of course my students got together with me, 11 of them, and presented it through the virtual world and through their own story action for the TCC Hawaii conference. And so it became all of our stories, not just mine. And I want to thank you for inviting me to this panel. It's been a pleasure. Well, thank you for coming. And I didn't mention this at the beginning, but you guys all came at the last possible minute. And I really appreciate it so much. It is such a great topic. And especially right now it is so relevant for the world. And I want to thank you all very much for coming here. I have some questions for you. But before I get into that, if anybody has questions that they want me to ask the panelists, please put them in the chat, in the chat, in the local chat, and I will ask them out loud so we can get them on the video. But I have some questions for you, for anybody who can answer. So, you guys have talked about a few different virtual environments. I heard you mentioned sign space and unity, and of course open sim and second life. So if I am a writer who is maybe not that technically inclined. Not, you know, not that I am, but you know, say if I was. What would you recommend as an, as a good environment in which to start creating interactive environments for storytelling, or as adjunct to our storytelling. Can anybody jump in on that. This is this is Donna Galen. What I, what I would first say is, you're probably a little more technically inclined than you think. And the second thing that I would say is to explore platforms. I spent quite a few years exploring platforms, some that no longer exist now. I don't know if anybody's ever heard of Geneva, or open cobalt, or, you know, I was early, early in the second life, early into open sim. But, you know, you can do so much with a story with just a few objects. And so explore the different ways that you can not only interact with your virtual environment, but different ways that you can act on your virtual environment. And I say that specifically because as much as I love, love, love the Mr. Uru stories when we first went into the 3D world of Uru and we told our stories around the history of that civilization. We weren't really able to act on our environment. And so look at the different ways that you can act on your environment. Can you even bring in or can you res a cube? Can you res a tree? If you can, you're, you've already got something to talk about, you know, so start there and don't worry too much about your technical acuity really just tell your story with what you have is what I would recommend. What about creating environments for the most possible access? Because open sim has a high learning curve. If I'm going to, if I want to share a link to my environment, it's kind of difficult to do. I have to explain to people how to install a viewer, how to create an avatar, how to get an account on a grid, how to hyper grid over to my world. What would you recommend for that situation? This is Anne. I think any access to a virtual world is going to involve that kind of a gateway. Lately I've been exploring AR with the hopes of bringing some of my elements into the real world and that's a little bit more accessible because people can do it on their phones. So that was, that was where you might want to start is with an AR platform and then evolve it into a VR platform. And to comment on the first question, if you're not that technically oriented, I would advise Second Life because of this just so much content that you could buy or get for free. So you don't really have to worry about building anything. Yeah, I was quite the same way too. I was getting there too. Another question I have is about designing interactive characters. And I don't know if you guys have them in your environments. But I've seen some other writers in OpenSim, namely the writers on Nara's Nook, who have done some amazing work, use interactive interactivity and chatbots to let users interact with avatars. Have you done that? Is this something that's accessible to an average writer? Sure. Yes, this is Anne. I'm sure. I, I've scripted chatbots and given them dialogue. The hardest part is thinking up what they're supposed to say, not really programming them. You know, they're especially OpenSim, which I think has a little bit, it's a little bit easier to sort of add stuff in on that level. But I, it's also interesting to have chatbots talking to each other. It kept going very fast. I think it's good, especially if you want to have your own little virtual muse. Somebody asked how you see the relationship between your academic writing and such as like publishing papers and the creative side of your writing. This question for Lear? I guess you all do academic writing and creative writing. Oh, sure, sure. So restate the question again because I have to admit the dog next door is banging at the door. What's the relationship between the kind of writing you do academically and the writing that you do more creatively? That's a really great question. After doing a few books and thinking at first to tell the story of research, I realized that's not what's interesting to people. What's interesting is how they can experience it, why it matters and how they can extend it or take it into the future. So we make contributions, right? And we tell the stories about them, but the stories have to be first interesting. And secondly, inspire future scholars to continue the work or to advance the discoveries because otherwise it's the stagnant little thing that only is a moment in time. And instead we want it to be to gain momentum and to inspire others. Yeah, and I would just like to jump in here very quickly. As far as what I have done a little bit and it's still in my mind to do more of it is to actually create a region, say in OpenSim. And I had started to do this also in Kitely. And that virtual environment is the article that I'm publishing. And there's, of course, in the same way that you write a lateral story, whatever you encounter, you know, there's a note card in there. There's links that you can look at from it. There's even I even had literal footnotes where there was a parchment piece of parchment underneath your foot when you sat down. It was literally a footnote. And in there was the actual, you know, historical references. They were, you know, academic references. So we if when we think of it in that way, it's very possible to do it. I think it's going to become a whole genre of publishing is the virtual world itself. I totally agree with you. It's it's such an amazing field. And we're seeing it not just in virtual worlds like Second Life, but I've talked to people who write for video games. And on that side of it, and it's turned they're turning into scripted complex narratives with complex characters and character arcs. And it's just, but with interactivity. So it's really interesting to see. And I think you guys who are researching this and helping create this whole genre are doing amazing work. Thank you. So if anybody wants to see the slides. I posted the link here. I'm going to add some of the other links that people mentioned during their presentation to these slides because it's a Google Doc so we can change it and add stuff to it. I want to thank everybody here for coming. You guys are awesome and so inspiring. I personally feel inspired by you and I hope our audience is as well. Thank you very, very much.