 Where are you today, Brett? I'm actually in Nashville where my parents live. I'm on vacation, but I had made a big bone-headed move back in May of double booking a time slot for this webinar, this forum. And so Brian was kind enough to reschedule during this time. I told him, hey, whenever you can do it, I'll be there. So I'm casting from my dad's office. Well, I'm delighted that you could be flexible enough to join us, and I really appreciate you taking time for your vacation, as well as continuing the feature-transform session of having bearded people as guests, which is very good. And I could accommodate. You're doing great. Let me just ask. We ask people to introduce themselves by asking what they're working on for the next year. So looking ahead, I mean, next year means fall and spring term. What are the biggest projects and issues you'll be addressing yourself to? Yeah, well, this is definitely the new eSports program at Austin College. It's definitely going to be a big one. I was actually on sabbatical in the fall, the last fall, fall of 2018. And so I was, but it was in spring of 2018 that the school started seriously talking about this initiative. So I knew when I, thanks, Mary Goruz, I knew when I was signing up for this that it was going to be taking up a fair bit of my sabbatical time, which worked out. But then in the spring, I felt like it was a pretty heavy load for me anyway, with teaching three full-time classes and then doing this. And so going forward, one of the things I'm trying to do is negotiate with the various folks interested in helping the program, supporting the program to figure out what my role will be and how much time I can give to it. And then of course, as I said, I'm teaching a 3-3 load at Austin College. So I do media studies. I do, of course, some coursework on video games, but also on media production, especially video. And so doing those courses and just kind of trying to be a member of the good colleague and a member of the college community. You certainly are. Isn't it right that your college just started raising this as something to work on a year ago? Yes. And I guess it goes a little further back than that. Our new president, Stephen O'Day, had been to a conference for college presidents. And there, he noticed that a lot of people were a lot of those presidents were talking about esports. So when he came back to campus, he was asking around. Is anyone familiar with this? Is anyone interested in being a part of this initiative? And that was probably the fall of actually 2017. And it didn't start to really get rolling until the spring of 2018. We had a couple of meetings. And then we really started to kick it off and say, OK, this is going to happen starting fall of 2018. So over the summer, we had some further meetings, conference calls with people at other schools that had already started programs and so forth. So yeah, it's really, I mean, from the time when I officially said, OK, I will direct whatever program the esports initiative at AC becomes, it's probably only been about maybe fewer than 18 months for sure. Wow. So first of all, I have to say, I'm impressed that you've done this so quickly. And second for everybody, this is still early days. Definitely. Definitely. In fact, I'll admit, when Brian asked me about the possibility of doing this probably about a year ago, I had really literally just started. And as I don't know what I'm going to say to folks. And it was Brian who said, ah, by then, you'll be an expert, which I can say, I think, certainly in terms of the issues and the questions and concerns that one thinks about it, a smaller artist's college, a school that our size, Austin College is about 1,400 students starting up an esports program and going through the first year. Definitely. I can definitely give some feedback and share my experience. Well, that's terrific. Friends, I've got a couple of quick questions to start rolling. And I'm going to try and avoid making any esports puns if I can help. But the key thing is for you to ask your questions. So I'd love to hear from you all. I mean, think about either if your institution is considering an esports program in some way, or if someone that you know, including yourself, is playing esports, or if you're already involved in one. We'd love to hear from you. Brett is one of the nicest academics on the planet Earth. So he will be glad to address any of your questions very, very practically. Let me ask one question to begin over just to prepare this, by the way. I shared the news of this, of our forum about three days ago. And people flooded me with questions and comments, of which I'll have to repeat. Ottawa University actually abolished its own team this past week, I think, where they're on YouTube channel. So they wanted to share that. They were very excited about that. And then there's a news item that esports will somehow be part of the 2024 Olympics. I'm not sure how this plays out. I think there'll be esports demonstrations in the Olympics or something. So the yield is definitely growing really, really fast. How do you support all of this? I mean, are you the one-man band who's wrangling hardware, software, scholarships, and all that? We're going to do this work structurally. Yeah, well, that's a great question. And I think, of course, it's going to be always a little bit different for every institution, depending on your makeup. I can say for us, we had a couple of what I would consider very lucky breaks in terms of standing up the program very quickly and a couple of just more minor, not even so much coincidences maybe, but just helpful engagements with the folks who are supporting it. So again, first of all, this started with our new president. I mean, I do coursework on games and culture. So I wasn't really thinking hard myself about competitive video games, although I was certainly aware of it and it's certainly something we talk about in my class. But it was the president who said, I'm hearing that this could be something that could grow quickly, could be a great way to engage students, especially and become part of the campus community, especially maybe students who haven't had an opportunity to participate in competitive kinds of activities before for various reasons. And I can say that that bears out when talking to our actual players, a lot of them say they really appreciate being able to be a part of it because they weren't able to do that when they were younger. But so from the president down through, that obviously, I'm sure all of you would agree that that's going to grease the wheels of a lot of different things if the president of the institution is saying, hey, this is an initiative that we wanna support. Can you help us out? You know, that kind of thing. So that's been lucky, I guess. I mean, obviously it wouldn't be doing this without his intro. Well, I shouldn't say obviously, but it'd be much less likely if he wasn't interested. Also, I've told this story a few times, but when the president announced it at the beginning of last year that we were gonna be doing this, the way I remember it, a colleague literally approached me as we were leaving the building and said, hey, you know, I've been, I've played video games competitively in the past as a younger colleague. And I was wondering if you had, if you needed any help. And it just so happened that one of the games we were already committed to starting was a game that he was really familiar with. So he was on board and then within a couple of days, another colleague, this time a staff member from the registrar's office and an alum said that she was also interested and her husband would be interested. And that was for a different game that we were already committed to playing. So those are some really, I think just lucky breaks. I wouldn't expect any institution to have that kind of, you know, initial support. Although maybe it is true, what you say, Brian, that these sports is growing at a breakneck speed and expanding and there are lots of people who are very interested in it. So you may be pleasantly surprised if you're interested in starting an initiative like this on your own campus. You may be pleasantly surprised when you start sort of beating the reeds among your colleagues and fellow staff members to find that there are folks who have some degree of interest in this. And so that was kind of, there was another piece there where institutional advancement, there happened to be a young alum who, a different alum in an advancement who sort of got assigned to it. But I think she got assigned to be our representative because she was a video game player and she was interested in it, maybe in a more casual way. But again, just understanding some of the terminology and some of the contours of the thing. Of course, IT has been pretty instrumental in it. But they've been, I think they're kind of just taking their direction from president, but again, when it comes to budgeting things, I get the sense that I'm not involved directly in the budgeting decisions. They asked me for a budget and then so far they've come back with things that I and my coaches have said we wanna do and approved it. I think we've been kind of deliberately limiting in what we ask for, because we don't wanna seem like we're just overreaching, but so far we've had budget approval on things like that. Then IT's doing that. And then admissions is also a little bit of a player, although we're not doing any kind of scholarships or anything, so, but we're starting now to think about who would, how can they help in terms of identifying students at the high school level who'd be interested in this? Wow, what an unusual background, very heterogeneous. And you've got the president, you've got the spouses of staff, you've got admissions, you have IT, you have faculty colleagues partly driven by the president's command and partly driven by individual experience with gaming as well as interest in that. Yeah. We had just a quick question that came in. This is from Adam Kehler, who asks, what games are you playing? Right, so we knew from talking to students and also reaching out a little bit to some of the sort of collegiate competition groups and conferences that are out there. So there's one called NACE, National Association of Collegiate Esports and there's another one called TESPA. And I couldn't say what the acronym stands for, but TESPA is really deeply integrated with Blizzard, which is a company that makes Overwatch and Hearthstone number of other games. So when we were thinking through talking with people and talking with what are students playing back in summer of 2018, it looked like Overwatch was a really good one for us to do. That's a 6v6 sort of hero-based kind of shooter game and then that's not exactly right, but this is sort of a decent explanation. Somebody can put it in the chat, a better description of one. And then League of Legends, which is an isomorphic sort of third-person view, five-on-five and it's known as MOBA, which is a specific subgenre of games of which Dota is another example and Hearthstone is another. But anyway, League has been very big, Riot Games is the company that makes that and they've really pushed the esports side of the gameplay and Overwatch. Of course, Blizzard wants to be, I think, involved in all things video games, so they're driving that as well. So we knew we were gonna do those too. I personally enjoy a different Blizzard game called Hearthstone, which is a turn-based card strategy game, not unlike just completely magic, the gathering, but a digital version. And I play Hearthstone, so I initially wanted us to have Hearthstone team, but student interest was not as high for that one as it was for Overwatch and League. So we're Overwatch and League, we've been doing that all year. In the spring, we started doing Rocket League as a student run kind of side project and so there were a handful of students who were interested in that and we gave them some space and some time. No staff coaching that one, and then we ran a tournament because our division, Southern Collegiate, or our conference, the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference, decided to have their own Esports tournament in April. And we started talking about that back in October, but what ended up happening is we decided as a group that we would have Overwatch, League, Smash Brothers Brawl, and Fortnite for the inaugural game. And so we didn't have any Smash or Fortnite players, so we held an on-campus tournament to identify four players that we could take down there. Next year, I think we're gonna drop Fortnite in favor of Rocket League. So I think we're gonna, and then people who played Smash last year are gonna stick with us, I think. So I think going forward, we're gonna be Overwatch League, Rocket League, League Legends, Rocket League and Smash Brothers. Well, thank you for that detailed answer, much as it must be heresy to think of dropping Fortnite Thank you, Adam, for a really, really good question. And friends, again, this is just one question to start with. Let me hear from you. What are the other questions that you'd like to know about this, including what is Esports and how does this actually work? We're happy with any questions you might have. And while people are thinking about that, let me ask a different question. This came up from an Ed Surge piece which was asking about scholarships. Now, you mentioned that you don't have scholarships yet, but the question Ed Surge raised was, the scholarships for Esports tend to be aimed at male players rather than female, and also towards middle class and wealthier students rather than poor students. What do you think? Is this something that, I mean, it's early days for you, but do you have something you want to address? Do you want to aggressively recruit female players and people who don't come from a lot of money? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, our actual team, which has been just pulled mostly from freshmen and sophomores who were interested at the beginning of the year, is somewhat reflective of Austin College's ethnic background, ethnic makeup among our students, not so much gender, but we do have, this past year, we had three female players playing on Overwatch and League, and there was sort of a lot of, I think there was some interest among the administration in featuring that and sort of drawing that out. And then we have a number of Latino students and Asian students on our teams as well. So I don't, but to your question or to the point about scholarships, I have no doubt that that is accurate. And I think that must be one of the reasons why we are wading into the kind of idea of scholarships very slowly. I, as I say, we're not doing it yet only because I imagine that we might do it in the future, but as of right this second, there are no plans to do that as far as I know. It's probably something that folks are talking about and is this something that we should do? I mean, I think personally, and this is not speaking for the college, but personally I think that you can build, you have a very good chance to build a very strong, competitive team without necessarily doing that kind of heavy recruiting and putting in that kind of budget into recruiting, meaning offering scholarships. I think there are a lot of people who again, would love to be part of something like this at their institution, whatever it is, in our case Austin College, without needing to tout scholarships, at least now in the early days. It may be that five years from now or 10 years from now, when the dust kind of settles on how recruitment is done, it may end up being the case that the schools that really are consistently competitive are the schools that offer significant scholarships. And in that case, I'm sure we would look at that again, but I don't think, well, so that's where I think we're at right now. And as Brian said, it's very early days, so. Well, we had the, thank you for the answer to a great question. We had a question from Abby Johnson. Abby, I think your mic is off. Can you, whoop, no, I think you're muted. Let's see, we've got to be a chance to change up the change of the mic. In the meantime, while she's playing with that and trying to get that to work, let's get, we have another question from Charles Finlay. So let's bring him up on stage. Oh, Charles, we've got your audio, but I don't see your video. I might not have your audio. Well, if I can't get his audio or video, he does have a text question, which I can flash on the screen right now. And this is, are there leagues for e-sports or are they part of the college sports divisions? Sure, so yes, there are separate leagues. And one of the things that we're finding, one of the things we've kind of learned, for example, we had an interest in NAIS and TESPA early on, but we said we weren't gonna build the program around their schedule. And as a consequence, we didn't end up participating in either of those in the first year. I think we all felt like we were very lucky there for that our athletic conference happened to decide to hold a competition, hold a face-to-face tournament. Face-to-face, we were all in the same, they were all in the same room even though they were competing online. But yes, there are leagues. One of the things that is kind of interesting and developing in the landscape is who is gonna be responsible for running those. So again, organizations like NAIS are running, are trying to sort of run separately from the gaming companies, whereas something like TESPA is separate, but it's heavily integrated with the Blizzard kind of structure. And then of course, maybe not of course, but Blizzard has its own separate competition for professionals, the Overwatch League. And Riot has their own competitive kind of conferences that they run. Riot who does League of Legends, there's a professional and there's a collegiate. And I think they may even have a high school or a pre-collegiate. So there are a lot of, and I think a lot of these different companies are experimenting with different kinds of things. Some of these games can be run as kind of more, more like maybe chess or something like that, where they can have brackets of large numbers of players and they can have games that play down to a single championship or now into a place or the span of maybe a week or a weekend or something like that. Others are running it more like a sort of athletics type competitions where each week there is one competition and there's round robin or a soda and it creates a kind of a breakout of the top teams and then they compete at the end and some kind of championship or playoff or whatever. So you're seeing pretty much in any kind of thing that you could imagine people competing in. You're seeing people experimenting with that. Of course, the big, the companies that have invested so much money in these huge AAA games like Overwatch are obviously invested literally and figuratively in supporting eSports and having their hands kind of in it so that they can drive it. In fact, that's one of my personal concerns getting into eSports. Something to really look out for and watch out for is the extent to which in a traditional athletics scenario or again, something like chess or go, the rules for the game itself exist separate from any particular instance of play. So you can say we're going to have a chess tournament and these are going to be the rules and then everyone agrees when they enter into that but the group who created the competition they're the ones who decide on ultimately what the rules will be. With video games, it's necessary for the companies that the for-profit companies that are making these games to decide what the rules will be because they set the terms for the code that supports, that's part of the game that creates the game each time. So I think it's interesting to see they have an interest for example in keeping the game fresh and introducing new rules and rebalancing always the different characters and there's some really interesting conversations that are happening now because eSports is a part of it. For example, in Overwatch there has recently been a big change to the way that even competitions are allowed in the game such that which is apparently intended to keep this one particular composition of players. It's known as goats if you want to look it up, G-O-A-T-S but it's a particular way to play Overwatch, like a strategy and it looks like the company has deliberately tried to suppress that with changes to the game itself apparently because fans don't like to watch the same composition over and over again. So there's a really, yeah, well there is that mode greatest of all time but I think actually what it is is there was a team that called themselves goats greatest of all time and then they were the ones who ran this strategy and it was I guess a year or two ago and it's just been dominating. So now Blizzard is looking at this and saying well fans are complaining and players are complaining that it's no fun or it's less fun to play their game. Of course they have a profit motive in making sure that doesn't happen. So, and I mean maybe it ends up playing out the same way it would if we had a even CAA or equivalent for e-sports but I'm not sure, I'm not convinced that having an entirely for profit regulatory body is the very best so we'll see how that plays out. This helps anticipate a great question that just came from Mindy Collins and we flashed this on the screen. She asks about what we're researching in e-sports and you just outlined a really good media studies approach talking about privatization of game ownership and the role of a for-profit company in shaping a game. What other questions are being researched in e-sports in higher ed? There's a good question and I think I would have to admit to some extent a lack of knowledge there. I think I ended up spending a lot of my time in this first year just trying to get the logistics going and so I felt like between that and my other full-time job I was not able to dig into that kind of stuff as much as I would like and that's, but I do think there are, I do think there is a lot of kind of what there are a lot of questions being raised about what direction this can go especially because if the school is gonna have its own team and it's gonna compete against other schools that have their own teams then we can, I think in fact, sorry, Brian, I don't know if you sent me this article the other day, but there was a note about how institutions were trying to, people at institutions that have e-sports programs are trying to think about, well, what would a, for example, a collegiate e-sports administrative conference look like or an organization that would be responsible for identifying specific rules about team composition and times when players can play and the amount of practice and ethical guidelines. There's a lot, I think everyone is very familiar with how toxic a lot of the game community interactions can be, right, there was a piece I just saw after the Fortnite tournament that was sort of, the title was the top 100 players in the Fortnite tournament where the winner was 16 years old, a male 16 year old boy and made $3 million off of it and none of them were women and why is that? And this author's suggestion was that it has a lot to do with the kind of boys club mentality of a lot of the Fortnite community and how that sort of keeps female players from wanting to get into that. So I think that's definitely something that people are looking at trying to think about. Well, first of all, is it reasonable to apply kind of traditional ideas about sportsmanship, I guess, player ethics to e-sports? Are those, do those fit appropriately? Are there some things that we would need to do away with and replace with newer ideas? I mean, certainly one of the things for us as an individual team this year has been how players interact with each other online. The fact that we do have a co-ed team, so we have male and female players playing with each other and a lot of, to be honest, some of our players have not interacted very often online with female players and now they're on their team with them. And so there are those kinds of ethical and sort of social issues, cultural issues that affect the way that the team interacts with one another and then goes out into the world and interacts with other players. Well, that's a good bridge. Let's see if we can get Abby Johnson back on. Abby, we still need your audio is off. Do you want to try the condenser mic in your laptop? Nothing yet, nothing yet. Listen, Abby, tell you what, can you shoot me a URL for your research on this so I can share it with people? And I will flash your question on the screen so people can hear it. Yeah, I can't hear you at all. I'm sorry, I know it's so frustrating, but I'm glad to see you. Listen, Abby's research is on gender division of play in video games and on why women play or don't play. And she had a question, let me just bring that up, which is the gender division you have on your team, which is COVID, and if you manage to market to women or other groups. So specifically, when we started saying, hey, we have this team and we invite you to join, if we did any kind of specific marketing or promotion of the team to women or other groups, is that how we take the question? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, we didn't. And again, I think this is the kind of thing that we were, maybe we just were pleasantly surprised that we had several women who wanted to play and were already good players. We had coaches who, as I said, or I don't know if it was clear, the faculty colleague, he ended up coaching Overwatch and then the staff colleague and the alum and her husband ended up coaching League of Legends. And so, I don't, in fact, we've talked just a little bit. We haven't really spent a lot of time this year, again, because I think it was at such a breakneck pace, but that alum and I did talk a little bit about the nature of having both a male and female coach and how that may have sent signals to female players about being welcome or not. And so, that came up in our conversation. It also came up in terms of giving support and coaching and mentorship to some of the male players who seemed to have trouble, maybe not with the idea of having female teammates specifically, but with not sort of being unaware of how their talk in the voice chat and their other kinds of interactions were affecting their fellow teammates. And so, she was really great and really helpful with kind of speaking to some particularly problematic players' interactions and saying, hey, listen, let's think about this. So, but to answer your question, no, all we really did, and this again, I think goes to how big eSports could possibly be, is that we sent out like a blast out email, which we know students don't really read. We made a Facebook event notification and some of the people who are already signed up, shared it with their friends. And then we attended, we had a table at the activities fair on the first week of school and just put some flyers up around campus. And so, just on those basic simple things that any activity is gonna try to do, we managed to pull in, I think it was over 30 students who participated in the first year, which again, for us, we feel like was a major kind of win because we're pretty small or 1400. And we have, and we really only, we think we really only, based on who came, I think those messages really only reached freshman and sophomores, the opportunities, activities fair is usually not attended by upperclassmen and so forth. So, I think it's actually, it could have been larger and so again, I was happy to see that there was a diverse group of people who came. It was definitely predominantly male. I don't, I should be prepared to the statistic and I apologize for not being, but I could find it. But I don't think, just thinking off the top of my head, I don't think that we're predominantly white either, although that again reflects our student body because our freshmen and sophomore classes are minority majority. Their Caucasian students are fewer than 50% of the total. That could just be something that has to do with our particular makeup, but I'm not sure. Abby, that's a terrific question. Abby just shared with me a dissertation entitled on the cultural inaccessibility of gaming, invading, creating, and reclaiming the cultural clubhouse. A dissertation by Emma Vossum. I just shared the link to that on Twitter if you'd like to use it. And if someone is in the chat box and wants to grab it off of Twitter, please, please share it. Abby, thank you for sharing that. This is a very, very important topic. And Mindy, thank you for suggesting research on this. This is a crucial area, but again, this is a topic that cuts in a number of directions and here's another one, another direction comes up from the awesome Roxanne Riskin who asks, I'm interested in learning about the estimated cost of setting up a basic eSports program. Games, the technology required to compete with the colleges, the colleges they had the best tech in bandwidth. What's the dollar price on this, man? It's a good question. I mean, I'm gonna hedge a little bit, Roxanne, and interpret the word basic because surely different schools have different ideas or different individuals have different ideas of what basic is. For us, what we started with was 10 higher end Dell stations. Our school has some kind of agreement with them where we get some kind of special pricing. The guy in IT ran that whole thing for me, but... You can tell the local company. What's that? You can tell a local company. Probably, that's probably another thing I should know, but yeah. But anyway, we have that. So we'd started with 10 stations and the question was where would we have this? So we decided right away that we wanted to have a separate space to run this. Now, I think it's certainly possible, feasible, if you had a space where the stations were high enough quality in terms of the graphics processing and as you say, the bandwidth and so forth. You might be able to have those stations be shared with other students, i.e. during certain hours, they're locked down for eSports, team practice use and then during other hours they're open to everyone on campus. I don't see why the public-dedicated lab. A reasonable model. What's that Brian? So it's a public slash dedicated lab. Maybe, in fact, that's something that we've been toying with. We're in this old building. It's been sort of, it's the old science building and it's been closed down for a while, but we're growing kind of faster than we can reasonably produce new space. And so the decision was made to just open up part of the first floor for folks who needed it. And that was, we were one of the groups that got in there because there had been a lab there before that lab was moved to the new science building and it's been sitting empty. So the infrastructure, all the cabling and the drop floor and all that were already there. So that was nice and we re-appropriated it. But there's been discussion about what if we had a space, as you're saying, a sort of hybrid public, quote unquote private teams-based, we might move in that direction, I don't know. But so we started with 10. And the biggest problem we found was that if you wanted to have like a first team and a second team for Overwatch, which again is 66, then having only 10 stations for them to scrimmage each other isn't gonna work, right? Like there will always be two players who have to sit out or use another machine or something. So we went back in kind of halfway through the year with, and I don't know if I mentioned, but we're organizationally under student affairs. Also interesting experience, probably not for the whole group, but if folks in the group who are faculty wanna talk to me about having like two masters, you know, the VPAA and the student affairs, happy to talk about that. But because we're looking into that, budget decisions go up through him and then the president approves it as of right now. I think eventually probably there's gonna be some kind of budget line for esports under student affairs. So we went back through that process and said, hey, what do you think about two more of these? And that was approved. So now we're at 12. And that works pretty well because we can have, again, when we have Overwatch practice and we have them separated. So Overwatch has been two days a week all year long and League has been two days a week all year long. And when they're in there, Overwatch can run two teams scrimmaging each other if they want to. And there's the number of stations available. So each one of those stations under our Dell deal was something like, I don't know, 2,500 or something like that. Then we bought some gaming chairs and some headphones. And so that was right there, that's 30,000 startup, right? If assuming you have a space and assuming that that space doesn't need to be retrofitted with kibbling and wiring. I don't know all the details, but our IT department tells me that there's some kind of separate like network partition that's just for the lab. So we don't run through the same network shaping that all the rest of the campus does. So we get kind of like a raw tap to the internet, which is nice. We have a really, really great bandwidth. I think they might not have necessarily done that deliberately, but it was more like, hey, this room that's been sitting dormant for two years, how are we gonna get it back online with all the new stuff we've done? You know what, but we'll just give it a separate. So it was solving some of their logistical problems as well, I think. So maybe 30K is I don't think unreasonable. I think you could do it with six. You could just say, look, we're gonna have a team and they're the one, we're gonna play one team at a time and do it that way. But I think 12 has given us a lot more flexibility and obviously going beyond that, you could go to 18 or 24 or some other multiple if you've had the money. We don't actually have in terms of budget, a lot of travel costs, which, or we don't have to. As I mentioned, our athletic conference has decided to have a face-to-face tournament. So just like, you know, they're all used to that, I think, like getting the team together, putting them on a bus, driving them somewhere and then having them compete against each other. And so it turned out that another school in our conference Shriner, which is down in San Antonio about six hours away from us, had the infrastructure to run something like this. And so they volunteered to host it. And so that actually has been a big, one of our larger ongoing costs. It happened this past year, it's gonna happen again this coming year. And that's, you know, for us, if we're gonna send 15 to 20 students plus a couple of coaches down there, that's probably gonna be another eight, 9,000 because you've gotta rent the bus and you've gotta do all the rooms and the podium and all that and everything. But, and then there's, sometimes there are costs to join some of these conferences like NACE, but then there are groups like TESPA that don't have a fee to speak of to join. I think it's, personally, I think it's important to recognize there's a lot of work that goes into this for whatever staff are supporting it, like myself and the coaches. And so I'm in discussions with our Student Affairs VP about some kind of stipend or salary to do this. But it's definitely not fully decided on. That's up in the air with us. Maybe other institutions would say, would have that built in from the beginning or maybe other institutions would take a chunk of an existing employee's time and sort of say, okay, your responsibilities now include esports and they don't include these other things you're doing before. But I think it's really dangerous personally to just say like, well, people will just volunteer because they love it or something like that. I mean, that might work in the short term, but you need to think long-term about compensating people for this. And there are some little things, you know, we bought, what's that? Classical liberal arts problem. Yeah. And there are little things, I mean, you can't see on the camera, but we bought, you know, t-shirts and stuff and, you know, some other things like that, some swag to try to get the word out and help players feel like, you know, they're engaged and involved. But it isn't as expensive as I think I initially thought. I mean, obviously, you know, 30,000 is a big outlay, but it happens at the beginning and then you can go for a pretty long time scrimmaging and maybe even competing without committing a lot of additional money. Again, I think as long as you are, you know, making sure that you're supporting, you're thinking about compensation. So, yeah. Roxanne, what a fantastic question. What a great answer for people. Well, thanks, Roxanne. That's a good question. Just as a quick note, someone shared this with me, which I thought you might appreciate, that TESPA used to stand for Texas E-Sports Association. Okay. It was founded at UT Austin. There's an Austin connection, at least by name, if not the institution. Right, right. Yeah, that's right. This is probably a good time to echo what Mo already put in the chat that Austin College is not in Austin. We're about four hours, four and a half hours north, almost in Oklahoma. We're north of Dallas, so. But yeah, the Texas connection. And the thing about TESPA that I think is really interesting, I don't know where it'll go from here, but it's very strongly built around student organizations. So for example, I was not allowed to join as the TESPA coordinator because I'm not a student. So if we wanted, when we join this year, we will need to identify one of our students, a captain or one of our more serious players to say, one of the roles we want you to serve is as coordinator and conduit. Even if we end up sort of, that's just kind of a rubber stamping kind of a thing. I don't know what we'll do with that, but they don't allow faculty and staff to be official participants. So I think that's an interesting model. Speaking of space, we have a limitation of time. We are coming right up towards the top of the hour. And friends, this is where I pushed things towards the future a bit further. So a few questions or thoughts about where these sports I'd be headed. This is a great time to ask. We have one question that points in that direction from Michael Hagins, and he's quickly pointed up. He asks, what differences do you see between online competitions and face-to-face competitions? Yeah, well, that's a great question. I think that, again, there is the cost involved in getting to the face-to-face, right? And so you might immediately ask yourself, well, then why do it? Like, why not just stay in your hometown and compete that way? And I think as tools like this, like live streaming webcams and multiple video streams happening at once, as those get better and better, we will probably see less and less face-to-face because of the costs involved and because it can be simulated so well. But I do think that there is something about, I mean, I had a fair bit of athletic competition experience when I was in high school and going to tournaments and being there all day and watching other players play and then thinking about how you might respond to that if you had to play them or just even thinking about how you can be better. I think it helps players improve to watch other players play, but even that, I mean, a lot of these games have spectator views, options where you can go in and spectate a match and or the teams may be running a Twitch stream or some other kind of live video stream. I think Brian mentioned that in the email that went out, but we have a Twitch channel. We currently, Twitch has a limited window of saving recording. So if you go there now, you won't find any of our recordings. They've all rolled off the backend of the time thing there because it's summer. But when we start up in late August, we'll start streaming scrimmages and games and stuff again. In fact, there's a lot of discussion among coaches about how much of a delay needs to be there so that players on other teams can't see what you're doing on your stream and then feed that to their players to get an advantage, right? I think right now we're running at like two minutes or something, and that's a pretty standard thing, but that kind of thing is going on. But it also does have its own challenges face to face. And again, I'll give you an example. One player who was down at the tournament in a Shriner was doing this thing where he was, unbeknownst to us at first, standing behind, one of our players was standing behind other players, kind of talking and commenting. Basically, he was trying to get a rise out of the player and maybe make a mistake. As soon as we discovered that that's what's happening, we pulled him out and scolded him and he didn't do it again to our knowledge, but that's a downside of doing a face-to-face competition because you have that opportunity, I guess. And I suppose there are other ways that you can sort of kind of troll other players or get in their fate, grief them or whatever, but online, so I'm not saying it doesn't happen at all, but it's just a different kind of venue. I have a feeling that, I never really asked them, but I have a feeling that the reason, the main reason why we ended up doing a face-to-face thing is that that's what all the athletic conference folks who were involved in this, getting this put together were familiar with. That's how you do face-to-face track and field. That's how you do face-to-face volleyball. That's how you do whatever, right? Or how you do it, is you do it face-to-face. I don't know if that really sort of answers your question, but yeah, I think it's, I think we're likely to see it less and it's already not the standard. A lot of the competitions do just take place online, but I think there probably will always be some kind of room for face-to-face, I would imagine. We have time for one last question and this comes from Adam Kaler, who asks, where do you see the platform of esports evolving over the next five years? The which form? The platform of esports or platform evolving over the next five years? Yeah. Well, I think right now we're definitely just in this rising interest mode and that's gotta take another couple of years to play itself out where schools are just saying, oh, this sounds interesting. I think we might be ready to do something like this. Let's try it and then they try it for a couple of years and they see how that affects the campus community and diversity among people who are involved in activities if that's a concern and retention is a thing that a lot of people are hoping, I think. Esports will help with certain students who might not stay at the institution, but then they get involved in esports and then they decide to stay. And of course, recruitment as we talked about, so I think we're still on the up slope of all of that. Going forward, again, I have real kind of questions about the longevity of any one game because it's always gonna be beholden to and very closely tied to the profitability of that game for its owners or its creators. And we've already seen that a little bit. I mean, Blizzard recognized, I think, early on that things like StarCraft and South Korea were gonna could last a lot longer than the game's interest more broadly. So StarCraft is still a big competitive game even though that game was not sort of popular among the general populace for a long. And that'll probably happen with Overwatch and League of Legends and Smash and all these other games. And so then, will new games come along to replace them? How easy will it be to transition from the previous game to the former game? Will we just see a lot of turnover in players as their game kind of goes out? And so they kind of move on to something else or will they be, like, how long will a career in esports last, will it be like athletics where it's just a flash, it's just a few years and then your sort of body can't handle it. I mean, there aren't as many physical issues with esports to be sure, certainly, but there are some. And then again, the games may have a, the individual games and the ways those companies are marketing those games may have a big effect on what we're seeing. I remember as a young professor of 31 playing a multiplayer with my students and my reflexes were just nowhere at their level. Decade and it was enough. Speaking of levels, we've reached the end of our level. Thank you so much for telling us so much. This has been terrific. Thanks, Brent. You've given us a lot of information about a project which is on the way up, doing so much work and I really, really appreciate it. Thank you. What's the best way for people to keep up with you these days? How can we find out about this? Well, I am on Twitter, I'm not on too often. Email is probably the best. I do have a blog that I very infrequently write on, but yeah, if you email me at Be Best and at AustinCollege.edu, I'm happy to talk to you. I don't know if I mentioned already, but I've already spoken to, believe it or not, of several folks at other institutions who are just trying, like we did a year ago, just trying to find out what's going on and how they can do this exact kind of conversation but individually and so I'm happy to do that with anybody who is here today or if you know someone at your institution who you think might be a better person to sort of lead the eSports charge on your campus or something, I'm happy to chat with them. It's very kind of you, Brent. Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your vacation. We'll stop interrupting and good luck to your team. Thanks very much. Don't go away yet, friends. We just point out for next week, a couple of things coming up. First of all, next Thursday's session is an experiment. The guest next week is going to actually be a combination of myself plus hundreds of people in Wisconsin who are doing this an experiment. I'm giving a keynote talk to the Wisconsin Digital Technology and Digital Teaching and Learning Conference. And so we're gonna begin our forum session by discussing the major trends in free shipping education and technology that are gonna shift to be actually giving this keynote address and then shift back to all of you combined with that entire audience. We've never done this before. It's an experiment, but we'd like to try out. So please join us next Thursday and you'll get a chance to converse not just with me but also with all these other people. Now, also we're about to launch a blurb or I'm sorry, a survey for our next reading. That'll come up. If you'd like to grab a copy of any of our books, head to our bookstore. If you'd like to keep these conversations going about eSports or anything involving technology and education, please use any of these groups. Slack, LinkedIn, Facebook, and of course Twitter. In the meantime, thank you all so much for a really terrific conversation. I really appreciate it. And good luck to everybody exploring eSports. Until then, we'll see you online next time. Bye-bye.