 Hello everyone and welcome to the 3.32 o'clock session of the 20,019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are happy to introduce a presentation called Being Liminal, an educational look at lit RPG, the metagame and virtual worlds. Our speakers for this are Kay Novak, which is Kavans in Vodka. Chris Luxe, an abacus capillani and please check the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for the speakers bios, details of the sessions and the full schedule of events. A little background on these two. Chris looks as a community college leadership PhD student at Old Dominion University. He has over 12 years of experience teaching online and face-to-face at community college level. His areas of instruction are business, accounting, multimedia and graphic design. In addition to formal college instruction, Chris has a passion for investigating new technologies and for collaborating internationally with other educators on evaluating and exploring virtual worlds and game-based educational applications. I'm going to go ahead and just paste that in here for our audience as well. Kay Novak is a instructional designer for Colorado Community College and she's a PhD student at the University of Colorado Denver. She collaborates with ISTI's game and simulations network educators to offer a just-in-time series, which is called rapid responses whenever they find it necessary to discuss or fact-check current events. In her spare time she leads and facilitates the Metagame Book Club, which combines the reading of fiction, gameplay and education research. And I'm going to give you the website for this as well. I'll paste this into our local chat so that you can have that to be able to get to it as well. And that's the sites.google.com forward slash site forward slash metagame book club. And today we're going to be talking with us about exploring the exploration of the liminal state or in-between state that exists between the metagame and players in games and virtual environments. This liminal state has now extended to transmedia experiences to include the lit RPG genre, which is short for literary role-playing game combining the conventions of RPGs with science fiction and fantasy novels. This panel will discuss the exploration of the liminal state where a player or learner can take advantage of the duality that facilitates deep learning and creativity. Now this session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have any questions or comments during this session, you can send your tweets to opensimcc with the hashtag oscc19. Welcome everyone and let's begin our session. Hey everybody, this is Kay and thank you for coming. Um, can everybody hear me okay? Um, just type like a Y in chat if you can hear me so I can make sure everybody can. And it looks like, oh, I don't have any guesses yet from the nearby chat. Okay, now I do. Perfect. Okay, um, we're very happy to be here and we've been at the OpenSim conference before and when we're thinking about what to do this year, what's been happening with us is we're just seeing liminality everywhere. And what I mean by that is we're walking around, we're doing projects, we're working with our students and we keep bringing up the term liminal all the time. And so because of that, we decided that that would be a really good focus for our talk today. And liminal, liminal is really, it is really that in between stage, where, where you're not, where you're quite, where you're supposed to be, and you're kind of right on that journey. And the other thing we wanted to bring up, another term we wanted to throw out to get you thinking about, thinking about liminal, and then the next one is thinking about third space. Now in my doctoral program, this is one of the constructs that we're looking at. And third space, again, is in between space, where new cultural identities are formed and reformed. And this concept is, has been coming up when we've been, when we've been designing some classes for students that are culturally relevant, when we are trying to get students out of their comfort zone, when we are trying to, really trying to have discussions and projects that go beyond the dominant culture. So we kind of wanted to frame what we're doing with this and, and we'll, and we'll go into more detail. All right. Next step is, as Kay's been ravaging, is liminal. Liminal is very straightforward. It's simply related to the transitional stage of a process. It is all about occupying a position at, on or both sides of a boundary or threshold. So if you think of a door, you could be on one side of the door, you could be in the process of going through a doorway, or you could be on the other side. What we'll be talking about is we'll start looking at it from the various genres in games as well as in literature that we have. So for us, the first experience we had with Bardo was the, was the build Bardo. So we did Bardo, the Bardo game in Second Life. I believe we may have some of our help builders here in the audience. One of the things we, we did is we were working with one of our colleagues, and there's an interest in looking at the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Bardo Todo. And the actual name of it is interesting. It's the Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State, aka the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So this, this class we were working with was actually World Religion Class and Eastern Religion. And the backstory behind this was that at the community college where this, where we are at is the course had a lot of nursing students, and the students had expressed an interest in learning more about other cultures' death rituals, which, which makes sense, because as there's a few nurses there who were interested in being hospice nurses, they were interested in looking at being more aware and having a better understanding of Eastern religious practices and perspectives when it came to death. And so one of the things we came up with was going ahead and creating the Bardo in Second Life. And the Bardo in itself, during Intermediate Tibetan Book of the Dead, there are various Bardo's that a deceased will pass through before they are reincarnated. And each liminal state is, is a Bardo. And so that's really sort of we first, and we first hear about liminal. And, and I just wanted to, I just wanted to jump in here. And this is a perfect spot to jump in. What I wanted to say was as, as educators, what I'm, I'm finding the most interesting things to teach and design are things for this liminal state. Okay. Design them and get the students to understand this. And now a while, I can tell you we did this 10 years ago. It was, it was our like first build that we ever did. It was, was Bardo the liminal state between death and life from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Just last week, I was working with, we just started a bachelor's in nursing program. And that's kind of unusual for community college to do a bachelor's degree in nursing. And we've just been approved to be able to do that. The thing about it is, I ended up working with students in this first, in this first class. And what they, and what they were reporting, what they had to report on was different cultures. And since it was the first class, there was just like, there was just two groups of students, because there weren't a lot of students in it yet. And the two cultures they picked were Muslim and Hindu. And they gave presentations about quite honestly, what nurses, what nurses dominant culture nurses would have to consider when they have patients who are not of their culture. And both of them ended with, well, when it comes to, when it comes to the patient, if the patient is dying or going to hospice, what you have to consider. So despite the fact that we did this, you know, 10 years ago, and the instructor we were doing with it has now moved on, it is entirely still relevant. And that's really why we love virtual worlds and virtual spaces and games, because you can kind of, you can do this, you can do this kind of thing that's not easy to do in real life. So Chris, I'll hand it back to you. Sure. And I went ahead and posted the link to the an actual article that the instructor we were working with actually wrote up for Pethios. And so when the student first arrives in game, they arrive at this slide, which is really just representation of a black box. So they arrive in a very dark space, they really can't see their avatar, they can hear their instructor talking to them. And really the two main characters in this liminal state are the actual noble one, which was a student and the guide who's the instructor. And what's interesting is, as the student progresses through these liminal states, the instructor is just reading various excerpts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So that's really the only guidance that the instructor is doing. And one of the things that was there is the reason why we did that is because actually the Tibetan Book of the Dead is made so that way whenever there is a death, the family members and friends of the deceased gather around the body and they actually will read the Tibetan Book of the Dead as it's a guide to help guide that the deceased through that process, through the reincarnation process. And so once they go ahead and get that the black box, they're quickly moved into the next liminal state, which is the peaceful realm. And there are peaceful deities that flatter, they offer them respite, they offer them rest, they offer them refreshment, comfort, different things like that to sort of distract noble one and to sort of keep them off or throw them off the reincarnation process. Next up is that gives way to the Red Zone. No, the Rathal deities, the Rathal realm, and these are the Harukas. And these are the Rathal deities that beat up, push around, coerce, attack, belittle. They bring up all the failures and the faults and the flaws. And the idea is, is trying to drive the deceased to a different path of the reincarnation process. And lastly is Lord Yama. Lord Yama is the cop-troller or the accountant of the after, of the Tibetan afterlife. And what he does is he counts the good and evil deeds and assigns a relevant reincarnation. Or the players can also flee. And so they can also run away. So they can just run away. And if they run away, they end up with the various, they can pick a various door. It takes them to their reincarnation. And the whole idea behind Buddhism is to ignore everything. So the only way the players could win is to basically ignore everything. And of the 30 or 60 or so students that went through this, we only ever had one student who just actually would have, would have, achieved enlightenment and ignored the distractions. Most of them picked a reincarnation. And so you could either be reincarnated as a chicken, you could be, maybe you're the worm in this perspective. We left that up to the students' imagination to look through it. And the interesting thing about this is the students got really, really engaged and absorbed in the character. And they really started caring for Noble One and what happened to it. And we actually had, when the students reflected on it, they actually added additional feelings and additional, their perception of the practice and what had happened to their avatar. And it was really interesting to see how that changed. But this gave them that liminal space where they could take themselves out of the classroom, they could put themselves in the space that Noble One was and could walk through the various bardos. And really what this is getting at is a role-playing game. This is really sort of one of the things you see. And it's very, very much multiplayer. So what you saw in all those avatars, all the hirukas, all the peaceful deities, we had about seven individuals running those various avatars. And so it was very player intensive and we all had a role. And so typically in gaming, you might have a tank, you might have a healer, there might be a damage dealing class, or if you're doing something like Cthulhu, or if you're doing something like more of a diplomacy or investigation-based game, you could have an inspector, an investigator, a diplomat, or a quartermaster. So there's a lot of different things that go into role-playing games. And some common role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons. I don't know if there are any, how many mud users are out there, but we'll give a shout out to the text-based multi-user Dungeons out there. We also have a little Warcraft. We also have EverQuest, Ultima Online, and many, many more. So those are lots of different options of role-playing games. And really, that's the key character, is there's multiple people. You act as a team. It's a lot about teamwork and negotiating things. How do you go ahead and figure out strategies? It could be hack and slash. It could be diplomacy. It could be a lot of different things. So it's really also one of these things is RPGs is very familiar to the academic side for those educators out there because we use it a lot. We have students form teams. We have students become, play as if they're in a boardroom. We have students role-play as entrepreneurs. We have students role-playing a lot of different roles to put them in that professional space that we use. So role-playing is definitely something that we use a lot of when you start seeing, we start seeing a lot of the new techniques and a lot of our engaging techniques in education. So next up is K and R-P-G. Okay, now this is an area that we've been playing with for a couple years now. And I will tell you we are figuring it out. We are putting our students, again, in another liminal space. So let's show you a little bit about this liminal space. And we're going to start it by telling you about what this genre is. Now, we learned about this genre, I'd say about three or four years ago, when we were at one of the local gaming conventions, one that Lear introduced us to, and we started it, and we ended up talking to an author who was doing a panel there, and we started learning more about this. It has become more popular. So what R-P-G is? R-P-G is when you smash together literature, like a book, and a role playing game at the same time. Okay, now the main characters end up actually being in, while they're in a book, they're also in a game. And the components of an R-P-G are that it takes place in an MMO or a virtual world, and a human is playing a game. And that human who is playing that game can be either trapped in there, or it can be totally voluntary. So think of it as this kind of science fiction fantasy that goes on. And there's some, you're seeing more and more books about this. And we're just throwing this up here in case the term is kind of new, whether we say MMO or MMO or R-P-G, what we mean is massively multiplayer online role playing game. And does anybody remember what the other fun thing is for MMO or R-P-G? What it's supposed to mean? You can type it in if you want to. And if nobody remembers what it is, yeah, I think Abacus is typing it in there for us. So the thing about it is a lit R-P-G is this genre of books. Yes, many men online playing role, playing games, yeah, role playing girls, yes, or women, okay, yes. That's what some people said, yes. Okay, but again, this even that part of it plays into that, because when you go into an MMO, MMO or R-P-G, you do not have to play the same gender that you are in real life. You have options to try things out. Think about doing things differently, exploring. Again, all these things that can put you into a MMO kind of space. Now, the other components of lit R-P-G is that it's considered immersed. Okay, so the thing of it is that whoever the characters are in the book, you know, they're playing an avatar or a tune or a character and they are in an immersive environment. The next thing about the lit R-P-G, so these are things that you can tell it, you can go, hey, is this book actually lit R-P-G? Or we like to play it with series and even movies and TV shows if it's actually a lit R-P-G. Okay, if something is truly lit R-P-G, there is a meta-awareness. And this is the part that I really like to discuss with students and if students are playing a game or if they're in a virtual world to discuss this, the meta-awareness. If it's lit R-P-G, the humans know that they are in an online computer game and system and they know that there are rules to this game. So it's not just do everything you can and that you have to start learning how to, you have to start learning what the rules are and how you can get around the rules, which is another great thing for this. Now, if something is actually lit R-P-G, there will be an interactive game language, there will be player stats, there will be item characteristics that show up just like they would hear on OpenSim. If I click over on Abacus right now, I can learn a bit about him. Somebody clicks on me, you can learn a bit about me. So these components have to be there for it actually to be a lit R-P-G. Some other things about it is gameplay is explicit. So while the characters are there, they realize they're leveling, they're doing quests, they're grinding and they're doing combat. So they're aware of all of that. And the thing that I like about this, grinding equals questing, not dancing. Well, I don't know, I'm willing to put dancing if it's the virtual world in there. Okay, now some of these, some of this is a bit more popular in Russia, Japan and Korea than it is in the US, but it is becoming more popular, especially over the last three years. And we'll just put up some slides of some places if you want to go find more about lit R-P-G. I love Goodreads when it comes to any kind of book or any kind of review, you can go there, read it, there is a subreddit for lit R-P-G. They get a little explicit in there, but that's okay. You still find out when the newest things are coming out. And this is a funny one that I, you know, of course social media, you can't help that, right? So yes, to follow lit R-P-G, I have a hashtag lit R-P-G that pulls up. Now this one I had to do just because if you take a look at this and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to read the tweet. Lit R-P-G, this is what the author is saying. It's like Game of Thrones and Ready Player One had a baby. And Rick and Morty are the godparents. So to get an idea of lit R-P-G, yes, you have all the wonderful fantasies, science fiction that you love in other places, but you get to think about the whole system as a whole. It takes you out of just reading the one character, but really thinking about systems thinking. Being able to think about design and really brings that meta-awareness there. Again, that's why I like it for students, that you start getting that meta-awareness. Now if you ever have a question, it's something in a lit R-P-G. If you take out all the things about the gaming, all the things about the virtual world and the story stands by itself, then it's not lit R-P-G. It has to, all the gaming elements have to be essential for the story to stand. And we'll just show you some slides real quick to get, so you can see more. Here is another one, Gamer for Life. I will tell you lit R-P-G at this point in time. You're not going to be reading Tolkien. It's developing, so just please understand that. But it's a wonderful way for your students to start looking at this and have your students start writing these kind of things. Now what you'll see in, like, this is game on. Some of the things that you'll see there are straight out of a game. Look, there's the character name. He's a human summoner. He's level one. He's strength to five, agility of five. So that's what I mean about the essential game components. So what I mean by, if you take that out, this doesn't work. If you take that out, the story doesn't make sense because you need to know those levels to understand what's happening with the character next. Yeah, it's like D&D character sheets. And D&D character sheets are wonderful for creativity, for thinking about things, doing, you know, having students do research. We have something that we call crisis cards that we give to our humanity students. And our humanity students do actually use character sheets that they have to develop. Now, we'll show you real quick. Here's a couple other things that you can see there that in this part of the book, you're getting an update about what happened after he went on a mission. And then, again, some more, you're gaining XP. It always, all that information always stays there. And then, you see, this is how it looks if it's taxed. As I continue deeper into the tomb, I obtained several magic items along the way. A plus one flaming sword, a gem of seeing, a plus one ring of protection. I even found a suit of plus three full plate armor. So these are things, again, there's a meta awareness. The character absolutely knows that they're in a game. And the reporting it like that. So it's not just putting a character into the Lord of the Rings. It's that they're aware that they have to do these specific things. And that's what makes it really liminal. So like I said, we often have the discussions, we include the discussions about, say, if a movie or if shows are actually lit RPG. Delightful. I think it could. I haven't thought about multiple intelligence or strengths, but I think you can totally build them into that. I think that wonderful insight there. So this is like the movie. If you saw Welcome to the Jungle, Jumanji, Welcome to the Jungle, that is what that's a movie version of lit RPG. All the characters are totally aware that those that what's up on that picture are not their real bodies. And that they're playing those bodies. And they have limitations. And they only have certain tools and they can only do certain things. Now, this was really wonderful. And the character that Jack Black plays, well, I should say the actor Jack Black plays. So he's the safari professor looking guy like who's in the middle. It's what made one of the things that's funny and great for exploring in this in this movie is that supposedly the character playing him is a like 16 year old girl. So lots of considerations that the 16 year old girl has to take into account that she never would like this kind of professor. So the second Jumanji is coming out soon. And it's supposed to be fun. And it should be based on that also. Another one. We knew it. We love it. Ready Player One. The book came out in 2011. The movie came out in 2018. So Ready Player One, the main character Wade, he was playing a character in besides being in real life is also playing a character in a game. Now, I'm throwing this up because this is a build that we did on Ready Player One. We built this before the movie. So this was our interpretation of Ready Player One trailer Park being pink. So Oh, that's wonderful. Sun Sue. Okay. So just wanted to show you that another one. Now now that we're just running this one out for you to think about how many people here have read the book Ender's Game or you could have seen the movie. Anyone works? Yeah. Oh, I did both. And through the book club, we really looked at Ender's Game because of because of how Ender was learning and how Ender was being educated and how he was educating himself. So we really did a good look at that. But if you think about Ender's Game, and it was written like in 1985 or something like that, Ender's Game, they continually have them do simulations, continual, right? But if you remember, and if anybody still needs to watch the movie or read the book, go ahead and cover your ears, come in and do a spoiler alert here. Oh, yeah, delightful. Okay, so I'm going to do a spoiler here at the end of the first book. And this is also the end of the only movie they made of this. Ender defeats the buggers. But he and his crew believed they were only doing a simulation. So the adults in the room, the generals of the generals trick them to make them believe that they were just doing yet another simulation instead of that this was life and death. So really interesting play on lit RPG in the space. Yeah, your Ender's Game, great book for moral challenges and when you want to have discussions about that. Okay, so next, Chris. Okay, here is a very fun one. If you are on Amazon Prime at the moment, there is a series called AFK. It is taking lit RPG because here's what happens. A bunch of gamers get put into a gaming world where they're their characters and they have to deal with it. Yes. I like the characters. I like the characters a lot in this in AFK. They are all flawed. Okay, nobody's perfect. Oh, yeah, Banya as the bad guy is wonderful. I and I like them because they to me they seem real because you want to slap and you want to slap them and slap each character at different times. Okay, and it's a fun one. So if you already have prime, go ahead, take a look at that. Now this next one that's coming up. Okay, so this has been my latest love and this is considered the first with RPG. Okay, this was done. It was a light novel that was done as a web series, Japanese. And it went on Riki Kawahara's website from 2002 to 2008. It became an anime series in 2012. At this point in time, you can go on Netflix and watch it. Okay, Amazon Prime is not there. Okay, I would say look up AFK because I think they might even have it on YouTube. So Netflix Sword online or SAO, people also know it as SAO, is considered one of the real ones. And it's really interesting Kirito is the main character. I won't go into a lot of detail on it, but Chris, you can flip through some of the quotes. They've been translated into English, of course, probably much better in the Japanese. But how about this for us in virtual worlds and games? What about this quote? Now remember, this main character knows that he is in a game. He has been forced into this game, but he knows that his body is out there somewhere. And then this, whether here or in the real world, you can cry when it hurts. There's no rule that says you can't show feelings because it's gay. I mean, what wonderful look and flip on this for luminality. Go ahead, hit the next one. We'll show the next here real quickly. This one I really like. There's no meaningful difference between a real and a virtual world. It's pointless to ask anyone who they really are. All you can do is accept and believe in them because whoever they are in your mind is their true identity. Again, so some great thoughts about this in between stage, this way that we can bring our students into games and virtual worlds and we can come in ourselves. And even just going back to Jane McGonagall, you know, in these places, we might be able to do things that aren't possible in real life. It's possible for epic wins that might not be possible in real life. But these are great places for your students to use a creativity to stretch themselves. A delightful set about strengths and multiple intelligences before. Fantastic. All right, next up. And for some of you, the tabletop RPGs might be familiar. And one of the reasons is because they've returned to popularity. So some of the things we've had, especially Dungeons and Dragons based RPGs. So probably the one that is probably considered the flagship version for this genre is the group Critical Role. And one of the reasons what you see for here is that Critical Role got in the news, especially in late 2018, because they launched a Kickstarter campaign to try to create a 22 minute animated episode for the low, low price of $750,000 US. However, they found out within an hour of launching, they raised over a million dollars US was raised. And at the end of their Kickstarter campaign, they had over 88,000 people contribute over $11.3 million US to help fund their show. And now what's happened is that they'll make a 10 episode animated series. They'll go ahead and done a variety of different little one shots and different things like that. And then also in November, it was reported that Amazon Prime has ordered 24 episodes of the animated series. So it's kind of launched there as well. And what you see here is this is how this show actually goes. It started out on Twitch. They still do Twitch every Thursday. And you can also watch it on YouTube as well. And you can just watch the series there. They're in now their second campaign. All of the animated series will be based on the first campaign. And now what you see is you see a setup as you see it now. And you can see you actually watch these guys play and gals play Dungeons and Dragons. So they they roll their dice. They got wonderful sponsors. There's great companies that are D&D related have some awesome products. But really they do a lot of things. They do a lot of raising funds for local charities, as well as other charities as well. The most recent one was for OSD, which is for the families of veterans or so the families of active military in the US. And they also have a lot of step pieces so they can watch this. But they're by far not the only ones that are out there. There's also Force Gray, Giant Hunters. And so this is another one. And this shot is again more of a group shot. It's on a set that's built around being more than just liking, more than just being sort of like sitting around in someone's living room and playing World of Warcraft, playing Dungeons and Dragons. You also have Dice, Camera and Action. And so this is another group by Chris Perkins from the Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of D&D now. And then also probably the other big one that's out there is Acquisitions Incorporated. And so this group happens, yes, Magic the Gathering as well. And so you have a lot of these different groups that are out there that are bringing this genre to new generations as well as reconnecting former players with that feeling and getting involved in local groups as well. And so there's a wide variety of different things going on there. So it's a really easy way. If you want to bring role-playing games, you want to show the power of role-playing games, you can go ahead and bring this to your institution or ensure, say, this is things we can do. We can put people on the playing snares. There's lots of different ways to go ahead and engage folks and give them different pieces. And so the next chart is we're going to start getting into the later half, the later third of our presentation and looking at the metagame. Okay. So the other thing, Delightful just said, chaos plus order emergent and more unpredictable creating ongoing engagement. Yes. This kind of thing is a beautiful space to put your students in, whether it's through whether it's through the virtual world, whether it's bringing them into a game and then having them live as they based on the gameplay that they were doing. But have them do it where they bring in all the components of the game like lit RPG. These are just beautiful spaces. The last thing we wanted to say, and it's also another kind of liminal space, is the metagame. So quite honestly, the definition of a metagame is the extension of the game past the creator game space. So it's anything that the players and the fans do that takes it further. And Jim G likes to call this an infinity space. Now, when it comes to the metagame, sorry, this is one of our examples. Okay. There's a game called Freddy's. Freddy's Fridays. Yes, this is one of the kids that is going ahead and dressing up for it. We didn't have her in full cosplay, but we grabbed her picture there anyway. So the metagame also includes the cosplay that can happen outside the game. So when it comes to the metagame, let's hold on a sec, and then I come in. This metagame is, these are places where people discuss. They co-mentor, they tutor, they critique, they reflect. For us, it's we take a million screenshots. We put them on flickering. We decided to, we decided to do screen captures of us playing all those kind of things. Yes, Five Night at Freddy's. Yes. And I will tell you, there's a certain age group that really loves that game. And they take the game outside that. Now, all of this, when it comes to education, all of this is connected learning. Okay? All of this is socially embedded, interest driven, and oriented towards educational, economic, or political opportunity. This is connected learning. So if anytime anyone tries to say, oh, well, this isn't real learning. You're just having the students play games. Uh-uh. This is exactly what it is. And last but not least, because I'm going to turn this over to Chris, the metagame is also theory crafting. And if you're not familiar with theory crafting, I think, Chris, you're going to go into it more, right? Of course. Okay. Theory crafting is math. Okay. It's a wonderful, no, it is a wonderful way for students to learn math, for students to think about math, to think about physics, to think about different ways things can be done. So theory crafting gets gets over from the literature side over into all the numbers. And all those numbers, your worst students can go ahead and put them in the stories too. And theory crafting is a big part of lit RPG. So you take it over, Chris. Definitely. So with the metagame out there, when it comes to looking at how folks are taking theory crafting and taking that quantitative piece to it, what you start seeing is, we're going to use an example of World of Warcraft. So basically what we're talking about is quantitative literacy that's out there. These are things like probability. So this could be loot drops. This could be chances of finding a rare item or a rare spawn. This thing here is from World of Logs. And actually what it does, this is actually tracking a raid group's damage output over the course of a fight. And so each line there is an individual player and the bottom part is tracking their different activities that they did. And so these are what these players, these high end players, or even just some casual players are following up on this to try to really optimize. Because really what this is, is this is all about min maxing or optimizing output. Whether you're whatever role you're playing, this is the quantitative version of how it's, what's the best, what's the fastest, what's the quickest way to be the best at what you do. And so in a game like World of Warcraft, that's very much a battle game. And so this is stats for fights. So this is a lot of damage output or healing output, different things like that, different factors that you're seeing. And then you see like here it gives you rankings. So you can actually look and see how other people are doing, like that seeing how you're doing, seeing if you're casting the right spells, things like that. It's also provided in tabular form if you prefer tables. But most people like the pretty, pretty pictures of the graphs and they look at that. The other big chunk of the metagame is dedicated to navigating the world. And so this would be surrounding about how do you go ahead and how do you fight a certain boss? How do you handle the combat that comes in? How do you navigate the environment when you're engaged? One of my favorite groups out there, because the name says it all, is Aletus Jerks. It's exactly what they are, otherwise known as trolls. So they're really, it's an interesting read. It was really active before. I think that they're still a bit, they're probably a little bit less active now, just because of how the game has changed a little bit. But this was always a good read to see what's out there. Another good read out there is Icy Veins that's dedicated to not only World of Warcraft, but a lot of other MMOs. Icy Veins is across the wide variety of genres. So they have a lot of stuff that's there. A new player on the field is Ask Mr. Robot. And Ask Mr. Robot is really focused on gearing. They have a variety of different things that are out there that allow you to sort of compare your gear in World of Warcraft and allow you to go ahead and choose one item over another to help build it out. Yes, Alcozam is another good one. So there's a lot of things. And what's interesting about all of these resources is the content is provided by players. This is not a company. They're not affiliated with World of Warcraft or anything like that. These are all player-generated groups. So these are people sharing their knowledge, sharing their experiences, doing that theory crafting, doing all that math thing to figure out how to do it. And so really, this is that peer-created content that you see in these types of genres. Go ahead, Kay. Okay. Okay. So go ahead and hit the next slide. So we're wrapping up now, if you weren't able to tell. Basically, what we're going to end up wrapping up with is just encouraging you to think about liminal and limous spaces and how you can go ahead and you can go ahead and bring these into your classrooms, how you can use them for design, how you can let your students go ahead and do this. This is just a shout-out to leaders involved in this too. We are working on a one-shot role play online in the style of Critical Role that we will go ahead and be doing this February with Educaus. Some other things that we should fess up to are is we, through the e-learning consortium in Colorado, are involved in a journal called the Liminal Journal. So you can really see how liminal keeps showing up for us like all the time. And I'm just going to put that in there in case anybody's interested, but especially for liminal. We're starting to think and delightful, you can probably jump in on this also. We're starting to think that smart cities might have a liminality to them. That we're very used to walking around a city and just seeing it for the geography. We're less used to pulling out our phones and seeing what augmented reality there is to get additional information as we walk around. So the Liminal Journal for its next call for proposals, we are actually doing it on smart city. And with that, we're wrapping up here because we're told time's gone. So thanks everybody. I just wanted to say that hopefully we were able to get you to think about liminal spaces, how you can design them, and how to use them with your students. So thank you very much. Well, thank you very much. And is there a way for them to reach out to you if they have questions? I see that advocates put a gmail account there. That's good. Well, thank you, Kavan and advocates for a terrific presentation today. That was awesome. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule. That's at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next session, we'll begin at 4.30 p.m. in this same keynote region. And it's entitled, oh, this has to be a mistake. It says, OpenSim Education is Dead. Let's bury it. Guess we'll have to tune in to find out what that's all about. Also, we encourage you to visit our OSCC 19 poster expo in the OSCC expo three region and to find a company information on presentations. And you can also explore the hyper grid tour resources, which are located in OSCC expo two region, along with our sponsor and crowdfunded boots located throughout the OSCC expo regions.