 Hi, everyone. It is my pleasure to have you join us today for the X-Price Connect Future of Learning Lab. My name is Breanne Ward, and I'm the Project Specialist for the X-Price Connect team. I'm truly honored to introduce this dynamic panel of thought leaders dedicated to empowering others. Today, we'll talk about the power of gaming and the impact of games as effective tools in learning resilience, forming social communities, and the potential video games to motivate and create transformative experiences in learning, health, and social-emotional development. In 2020, we have seen a worldwide epidemic crumble our economy and hold the lives of millions of people and ultimately change our proximity to one another. Jane Conagall predicted in 2010 that if we reach a critical mass of gaming hours, we can solve the world's biggest problems like climate change or poverty. And it's estimated that 2.6 billion players play hours on end to save virtual worlds today. So raise the question, why are we not further along in using games to address issues and mental health? This panel of experts here today are all working on using games to empower people to build skills in virtual worlds they can apply in real life. I'll begin with introducing each of our panelists who will tell them a bit about their work and then we'll jump until a discussion exploring the potential of gaming and social-emotional health. Dr. Kisha Waddell is the executive director for the Center for Blockchain Studies where she supports supplied understanding of new and emerging technologies. Dr. Kisha Waddell, welcome. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction and I am so pleased to be a part of this inaugural experience with XPRIZE. Let me just tell you a little bit about the Center for Blockchain Studies. We've called ourselves Where Blockchain Education Meets Wealth Building Opportunities. The Center for Blockchain Studies is the forward-facing education arm of Black Blockchain Consultants which is a network of blockchain novices and seasoned professionals who collaborate to understand blockchain technology where it's headed, you know, how we can profit from the $3.1 trillion industry and we basically are trying to recognize, we recognize the power actually, we recognize the power and potential of blockchain and we are basically using our network to educate, empower and equip our members for the greatest wealth transfer since the creation of the internet. You might be wondering what blockchain is and how it kind of fits in here. Blockchain is a distributed synchronized database containing validated blocks of transactions and relevant to this discussion. It's important to note that the strength of blockchain technology lies in its consensus protocols based on game theory mechanics along with peer-to-peer networking and cryptography. The three work together to enable secure, transparent, immutable, reliable and validated transactions of value on the internet, transactions that are of a digital nature like photographs and video songs, currency and even academic credentials or even of a intangible asset type like patents and trademarks and intellectual property and then even as well as real assets like real estate property, gold, art and that's all once it's tokenized to represent a symbol of ownership backed by a legal system. But anyway it's all made secure and honest by the incorporation of cryptography and game theory and game theory works to incentivize the collaboration of good behavior and of anonymous nodes that are distributed globally for the common good of network. So in a purely decentralized blockchain network like a Bitcoin that you might be familiar with cryptography and game theory is critical to making the actions of band actors not even worth the effort. So that's how blockchain kind of fits in there but beyond my involvement in the Center for Blockchain Studies that is my after my full day job which is actually being a special education teacher in a public school setting in the suburbs and in my classroom I am known in my actual district I'm actually known as a person who integrates technology for transformative teaching and learning experiences which include high tech kind of gaming kind of things that I bring into my classroom learning experience to just reimagining you know normal kind of games or gaming techniques in the classroom just to deepen my students understanding. So I look forward to speaking with this esteem panel of folks who I know have experiences and they're probably tools that I would love to use in my classroom to tell you the truth so I look forward to that discussion. Thanks. Next we have Rosemary Lockhurst who's a writer technology entrepreneur and award-winning game producer. You may know her from her work on Shadow's Edge multiple award-winning mobile game as the producer and narrator. She's helped young people find their inner ninja. Thank you for joining us Rosemary. Thank you very much for having us here and I'm honored to be amongst these ladies. To go a little bit deeper into what we do with Shadow's Edge we help some people that have had some kind of hardship in their life be that a chronic illness or like now with what's going on in the world COVID and others build resilience through our game. The game is based on narrative therapy and on artistic expression and it's an adventure game where you have to save a city that has been hit by a storm and you do that by answering therapeutic questions that you find in the game and by painting spray painting in the game and sharing your art with others in a safe community. So the game is free we're a nonprofit and we just want to help as many young people as we can to build strength and to build emotional resilience. Amazing, amazing work. Next joining us today is Jessica Murray. She's the CEO and co-founder of WickedSanx Studios, a media company designing crazy fun interactive story games that happen to prompt behavior change and real world action. So happy to have you here with us Jess. Hello, hi everyone. It's so great to be here with XPRIZE and with these fabulous women around me. So a little bit more about WickedSanx Studios. So like you said we create interactive story games that are wickedly fun and actively good. So get out and change the world good. And so and within our interactive story games you're able to practice playing the hero and dealing with conflict and then we'll prompt you to actually do something in real life so you get to play the hero and then become a hero in real life. Right now our next game that's coming out that we're currently working on is called Pathways. So imagine Riverdale meets Game of Thrones and that's what's happening in Pathways. So again interactive story game on your mobile phone hopefully be available for young people very soon. It's a young episodic adventure game and all of our games are really based on conflict and that's because my partner and I we've spent the last seven years in peacebuilding and I do social change communication training. So that's where training young activists all over the world in how to create strategic messaging, storytelling, and even gameplay to start shifting attitudes and behavior. And we have what we call the tattoo method which is all about having an audience centered approach to really how to tap into your audience's identity and to so that they identify with your characters and your messages and your gameplay. So how to take young people on a real life hero journey and that's what we're that's what we're all about here at Wicked Saints. Our last panelist today is Ada Palmer. She's a professor at the University of Chicago studying pre-modern European thought, history books, reading, censorship, and information control. It's a pleasure to have you join us today. Thanks. So in terms of games that's my kind of other hat from my historian hat which is my science fiction novelist hat being the author best known for the Tara Ignota series but I've been using gaming both in history teaching and now in science fiction teaching. So for a number of years I've used text space and face-to-face live action role playing to teach history. I'm best known for my papal election simulation which for two weeks every year fills campus with people dressed in long cardinals robes and wandering around campus with swords and everyone knows it's because they're learning history. But for the pandemic the university has approved a project of mine called Exotera in which I'm creating an online text-based collaborative research community via Discord in which all of the students from across all different disciplines and campus are pooling their research to design a new civilization to be built on a terraformed exoplanet and so from our planetology and planetary science labs we have the details about the planets that they're looking at in the new solar system and all the different disciplines have to pool their resources to do it so the economists have to design economic systems the oceanography students have to design the ocean biosphere the law students have to design the new legal system and it's allowing all of the students hundreds of them in many different classes to do collaborative research toward an aspirational and constructive project which is building morale and community during the separation of COVID so a great example of how real research within a gaming sphere can be used to facilitate collaboration and community. All right thank you all so much you all do such amazing work with some concrete examples of games that can impact learning health and resilience from all of you so question for the panel what do you think is the true potential of gaming for learning social emotional skills? The true potential of games um Rosie do you want to start us off? Sure so we've had this question when we uh when we wanted to translate our book into something digital and we looked at you know what can we do to create a product that that is digital and that's comfortable for the next generations and gaming is just so powerful because it has a few values I think within games that you can't really match and play for example has been used for you know hundreds of years in psychology because nobody has taken it digital so far and I think just that that method of really being able to create experiences that people can go through they can experiment with you can't really kick your brother under the table well at least not more than once right but in a video game you can practice that and you can get better at it and you can take those skills back into real life and I think that's that's something where gaming has a lot more potential than we see nowadays to really teach people certain things not just procedures and processes but really teach them things about themselves and have them experience and practice that we'll know how you ladies see that well I added to that actually yeah I know you know working with my students who have you know clinical um disabilities you know to include the learning disabilities reading and that kind of thing I have to say that um when they are engaged in gaming they absolutely tap into almost what a sixth sense I would say you know they make sense of what's going on they they engage so deeply which we understand that's where learning even begins you know you bring in your existing knowledge and you you know and layer on new information but the biggest thing I see in terms of the impact with gaming particularly in the traditional classroom setting and I'm talking k-12 you know k-12 serves a certain type of or a profile of a student very well you know if you think of the bell curve kind of situation there's that set of kids who are going to do well no matter what and then of course there's a kind in the middle um which you know they kind of make it they don't and then of course the folks on the tail end who are just this is not going to be the right setting gaming allows for everyone to show their expertise um and to be what it is they they want to be in a safe place as much as a lot of times educators attempt to make their classroom a safe place to you know fail which we know is a part of learning um it's not it's not a safe place you know but even if even if it's his teacher uh he or he or herself um it's very you know empathetic and caring you know you got this the whole set of peer pressure and such like that that those dynamics that go on in a classroom so when you're able to take on a persona inside of a game um a gaming situation in this and I'm not even really just referring to a digital space but just even when you're able to role play and really take on a persona whether it's digital you know offline or online people really get into it I mean I I see how people change behaviors just at you know at Halloween time when they're able to put a mask on they become a whole other person you know what I mean um are you do you see do you see that kind of um behavior uh Ada like on your in the classroom yeah absolutely yeah on the campus after the role play exactly uh you know the the role play that I do in my uh Renaissance courses in the midpoint of the class so they've already been in class for a couple of weeks then there's a smart where they take on different roles and they become different people and they have to negotiate to betray each other and help each other and invade France or not invade France whatever they decide to do afterward they know each other's names uh afterward the balance of who speaks in the classroom changes totally so that it evens out uh and a lot more students who didn't speak before do and the students who were sort of the hyper enthusiastic hyper engaged student intended to dominate the conversation instead are eager to hear what their peers want and address more of their question to each other you know oh you were King Charles when you did this why did you do it instead of it being between them and the teacher it's amazing how much and and another great example of this it lingers so that this year as COVID shut the classrooms down and shut the campus down it was the students who got to know each other through that role playing game who kept in touch formed an online community supported each other had the emotional and friendship resilience to cope much better than the students in other courses because they had that experience of having tried together failed together planned together and accomplished something together or or on down in flames if they were the losing faction but even that is an accomplishment because of course in a game as I stress to them what your your goal isn't to win your goal is to create an awesome experience for everybody and so if you're the person who's going to go down in flames that is a great achievement too so long as the going down in flames is exciting and dramatic oh my gosh this is so interesting you guys because um and so in peace building we use role playing a ton um and just said you know more to say like if you're in the field like what would you do in this situation we also use it for violence prevention training and so out to this one violence prevention training where all they they never told you what to do they just had you through scenarios okay this is what's going on what would you do and um and it's so powerful and and again what you're talking about with experience like we know that behavior change doesn't happen by giving someone information it happens through experiences and um and that's something that we can give through gameplay through stories and it's one of the reasons why I train storytelling in so many places is that um you know you can kind of vicariously have an experience through somebody else but through gameplay you can be that main character you can decide how to respond in a situation and then safely experience the consequences of that behavior um you know when we're talking about something that's like uh you know real life type of things as well as what you know you really address in our interactive story games is like okay what do you do when a bully's coming at you what do you do if a bully's coming at someone else what do you do if someone's saying something really uh racist and hateful if you respond in an aggressive way the chance of retaliation is really high if you respond passively you become a bystander you become vulnerable but between passive and aggressive there's all these other ways you could respond and wouldn't it be great if you could practice those responses in a safe environment um where you can still get that feedback that you need but you don't have to um experience that embarrassment or or being horrified or or paralyzed at the moment when it happens in real life and and that's what we found when what led us to inactive story games was actually in the beginning we started with just having a gamified app where it asked you to go and do missions in real life and we found that the youth didn't have um they didn't have the self-efficacy so they didn't believe in their own ability to accomplish their goal um and that lack of confidence so social cognitive theory says that self-efficacy is a number one indicator whether someone will take action or not and these youth wanted ways to practice dealing with conflict having these tough conversations what to do in these situations before being asked to go be a hero um in real life um rosie do you also find this kind of thing with the students that you're working with that like are looking for some kind of experience or or is it something different or they're looking for an escape or something else so i i think because of how we advertise the game in the app store they are trying to to actively learn something and in our case because it's it's uh you know mental resilience what they're what people come to us for is self-care or self-help and so they do know what to expect when they get into the game um i think one of the things the combination of really being able to immerse yourself in a game such as our game shadows edge where you have a different world different characters they don't really look like humans you know it's there there are things that really give you that suspension of disbelief that video gaming can can bring but we then combined that with really proven um therapeutic processes that take them through what they're going through and actually really teach them something about how they react and how they process certain situations let's say for example with over now we've seen a lot of our players really ask these questions about you know isolation and how they deal with it and then we encourage them via challenges within the game to actually reach out to people that back into real life where they also practice what they did in the game what they practice in the game and they take that back to their own life and i think that's something that we see a lot so they do know what they're coming for um we do give them that that clear period and as Aida was saying too you know there's a bit of role play in there we're first in her certain game but there's a bit of role play in there because you're the savior of the city and you have that power to actually make the decisions necessary to save that city and to do that you have to deep into yourself and really talk about what what you're going through and that that's the basis of narrative therapy that they take back into real life. Dr. Keisha how do you see that working out? Oh you know um i was really just thinking i know we're talking about digital gaming a lot but i really i am really what i'm saying i'm thinking about my daughter actually as you guys were talking she had a um an experience a collaborative experience in her first year of college where she was supposed to kind of exchange different things with different people who she never met before um i could get with it it's a very very um famous study i was trying to think of what it is but anyway she came she was very reflective she realized that she really needed to um kind of you know scale up her social skills you know she she felt a little um insecure asking people questions and that was something she wanted to kind of develop and and as the game went on because i guess there were so many of them doing this game that people were starting to get a little more comfortable with people coming up to them and asking for exchangers the kind of a barter thing or something i forget how it goes i'll have to look into it but but anyway um she realizes that she she started to be a little bit more conscious of her surrounding you know how how students and people nowadays have earbuds in their ears all the time and they're not really they're kind of in their own world um she would have to kind of overhear conversations because i guess she had to find certain things and when she overheard different things she would approach the the person to talk and so anyway that she came away just really feeling like um she really needed to increase her skills just from that experience and again that was the college a very large you know typical lecture study kind of course and the outcome of it was so much more than just the task and it really affected her to date now she's a second-year college student but yeah it's i i really do see that um you know being able to go into uh to gamify instruction really allows us to cover so many uh learning outcomes and necessary skill development that um you know and isolate putting the putting them in isolation just just doesn't happen you know there's just uh we know the 21st century requires uh critical thinking skills and all of that kind of thing goes on you know goodness just simultaneously in a gaming situation um from what i understand and even with the digital ones i see how um i see i have i have a set of twins and a lot of times they'll be uh in their very separate rooms and they're i hear them you know this conversation going over they're not even in the same room but they're interacting through a game you know and it's it's just interesting to me so it truly does create oddly enough even though they're right there it does create uh community uh we have another girlfriend who's you know 52 like myself and she um does the regain with the words or whatever with other people and it just it it really does bring in community uh where you would think it's kind of that that negative um perception of you know some lonely person in the basement playing games kind of thing it's hardly that it is definitely much more positive and on that point that connects to something i'd wanted to bring up where which i think is one of the elements that tends to be under tapped in digital gaming and also in what one might call big budget gaming because there's lots of small scale indie gaming that makes use of it which is the power of generating your own words rather than just words you know most of the role play that happens in large scale digital games is you get to a point where there's a choice and you have a palette of five pre-written answers the good answer the medium answer the mean answer and the you could only do this because you joined the cult of the cat god answer right and you pick one of those four and you can have very interesting narrative trees from that but it's a different thing from generating your own words whether you're generating your own words via speech or via text typing and there are a number of games in and formats that even a very large scale digital game can tap so for example a really neat format for a very simple moment within a game is you have people that have characters they're in a multiplayer situation and something comes where one of them has to make a decision one of them is the head of the space agency and this has to decide which character will be the pilot and which character will be the head of the mission control or you know you've come to a place where somebody has to make a decision as to whether to you know pass a law or not or somebody is the judge in a trial and has to decide whether they think someone is innocent or guilty and you can then say okay there's going to be a half hour timer and we're connecting the players directly to each other to talk whether by text or voice and debate this and you have to embody your character and say the things you think your character would say in the interaction and then in the end a real human being makes a real human decision based on your persuasive efforts and you've used your own words to do it and it's an immensely powerful tool in gaming people talk about it years later remember that time when we were playing the game with the space decision you know you do see people doing that and we have medical studies as well which show that there are a lot of different neurochemicals in the brain but there are some that we associate with fight or flight reactions sort of stress chemicals the stress chemicals that are generated by living in covid the stress chemicals that are generated by trauma or anxiety system stress chemicals that are generated in fact by by some forms of action gaming because when you're doing a really awesome simulator of being chased by terrible monsters your brain is also in addition to being filled with fun being filled with stress chemicals which can do damage and can linger in your mind a long time after you finish playing the game in a way that we think might be damaging they've they've monitored these chemicals lingering in the brain for up to two hours after playing a game or watching a film if you have a conversation with another human being they go away in 15 minutes wow that the power of just human interaction is so therapeutic and so that can be integrated into any game just by making it possible for the human beings to create their own words and interact whether as the whole game or whether as a small node within a game with many other structures and maybe if i it may add to that i think that a lot of these mainstream games at the moment they go by a certain formula of what a game should be like which is a lot of it is you know giving people multiple choices as you say or you know you either do this or you do that there's there's limited option we've opted to go for a different way where we try to encourage people to create their own diary and create their own narrative and their own story by writing about what's happening to them in real life and then take that experience back into the game and share it with others and i think with with what you said Ada is it's very powerful if you then through what you are going through and what you are thinking especially if you're like stressed out or anxious or depressed it's very powerful then connect others through that game in that world that is not as realistic yet as your real life and you can test those things out and you can experiment with them before you actually take you know what you've learned back into your own life and and hopefully start reaching out we've had we've had players that said you know we i actually did talk to my parents now i've never done that before and and it's really rewarding to hear that they take things seriously that has been created in a game right and that they actually came to with their own conclusions through their own work and i feel like that's so important it disturbs me so much when i hear students feel like they have to they graduate from traditional education they feel like they now they learn you know now they learn what everything means so yeah having that connection and that deep connection you know with one another and with themselves is is tremendous and and i have to say too i think that is one of the tremendous adds for gaming is that whole idea of of choice you know real choice and then particularly in the way you're talking about policy that of those that's really dynamic to make it choice that is outside of the just show just choosing c as the answer mindset you know kind of the thing yeah you always noted some amazing points of how gaming can fill in gaps where other technology may fail and particularly within the traditional or mainstream education setting i wanted to know what you all think about using gaming to support those who have more atypical conditions those who may fall in the autism spectrum or those with who may have gender dysphoria and working through gender fluidity and how we can use gaming to improve and understand those those areas and also how we can create more acceptance within those people and going back to this idea of resiliency well i think we've touched on it in the sense that gains allow for the building of empathy you know on on deeper levels aida you just kind of mentioned how when you talk when in that study when people talk with one another the information just kind of disappears in in 15 minutes and i think that's the stress chemicals yeah oh the stress oh the sketch oh the stress oh okay just figure out then i'm gonna take it somewhere else then um yeah well then um well what i was really just going to get at well i misunderstood that what you said then but what i was going to get at was um just the whole idea of being able to uh kind of like what we all have been saying be able to take a situation and really play it out without the the danger of offending someone and what have you i mean i feel i feel like the power of gaming is likened to the power of music you know music is considered the international language kind of thing um there's much that can be conveyed in a gaming situation and depending on the the purpose of the game um it could be used as quite a powerful tool in which case again um i feel like we really need to teach people how to evaluate things because you know we have we're using games for good and there might be some really um some ideas that we don't want you know to get locked in so deeply but that's we know the power of gaming and we could go that way and in a negative way so um that's where we still need to uh games also play into making critical decisions and evaluating things so that you can identify you know what message is really being sent you understand what i mean yeah definitely i think um i think inclusion um and representation empathy are so important to consider when um when building your games you know we look at um when of course i'm always going to go back to like conflict and peace building but the um what we tend to do is demonize the other and um when you demonize the other it makes it easier to harm that person um and also you know when you feel like you're under attack it's also impossible to see the pain and suffering of others um and so that's the amazing thing about games and um more so games i'm i'm more um even like the the narrative scope of things is is when you also have a really strong narrative base you're able to identify with some of these people and whether and and you start to form a relationship with these characters especially if you do the whole character development and they feel real um and it goes a long way to thinking about okay so if you're to have this person who if they're on the spectrum or um however they may be different being able to see them as a as a person being able to interact with them to see the ways that you interact with them and how it affects them in their in their life and and and in their happiness um is uh is a great way that we can start building um empathy and really starting to you know maybe you can go play the game in their shoes for a while and um and and so it goes across every every type of difference and i really believe that our inability to deal with difference stops us from making progress on everything we face and um you know and then the other thing of inclusion is you know whether you're creating a messaging campaign or story people have to be able to see themselves in it um and if they don't see themselves whether it's themselves in the language or the imaging or how they identify that means that that whatever that is is not speaking to them you're not speaking their language and so it's so important to have um this kind of representation within games and so kids can see themselves within the games and interact so on kind of both sides of it whether it's empathy for how you treat others or being able to build confidence in who you are and that's okay and seeing yourself represented in games all those are really powerful um powerful tools and again you go down to kind of this power dynamic that you're talking about Ada with you know when people are able to come together and collaborate together and that social um impact how how powerful that is with um contact theory is about you know people um it's it's not about helping the other but it's about engaging them as a partner to accomplish something together and that's when you see a reduction of fear and an increase in empathy and that's something that these games um whether they're they're social games or you get to kind of you know dive into this world and practice stuff um there's so many different elements that i don't think that we even tapped into all of it that can really help build relationships and and um lead to more inclusive society if we're conscious about how we build games i know rosie you i'm really curious to hear what you have to say with all the work you've done around um mental illness and things like that and how you've seen it kind of play out with your players yeah we we do a lot of testing with our players and we do one-on-one interviews with our players so it's very interesting to hear back you know how they perceive certain things we've had a lot of communication on our in-game platform about what's going on in the world right now with covid and how that's making people depressed but also you know we've had uh discussions around suicide or racism in there and it's interesting to see that um these young people they do feel all of that and they do want to learn something about it it's it's more that a lot of a lot of times it's fear uh fear of being ignorant that stops them from actually finding out more about the other person you know once further even with games which which to be fair we don't do a shadows edge at the moment but i think that we will in in the future i think games are uniquely positioned to also have us as game developers as industries and how people play the game and what they play and how long they play and what choices they make and why they make those choices to really potentially in real life be able to help them and support them better as well so we could also use gaming as a very powerful research. Agree. Ada how do you see that uh do you learn a lot from what you do in your if for example in your real world role play games or that you take back into teaching? Oh lots um i think there are several points i want to touch on in order and the starting with a through thread on uh inclusion and also disability uh you know rolling to what you were saying and also what jessica was saying about there being an eagerness among young people especially to learn about inclusion and also an anxiety about how to be sensitive about it to give an indication of the degree of this eagerness you know i'm disabled myself a chronic pain sufferer and a couple years ago when i had to miss class for a surgery i'd you know in front of the class and said you know i'm disabled a chronic pain sufferer i want to give you a five minute q and a about it so that you'll understand why i'm missing class they were so eager to talk about it uh eager for an opportunity to ask about it to ask how invisible disabilities broadly work how to be a good ally how you know mental illness which is invisible disability versus invisible disabilities that affect the other parts of the body work that they kept asking questions for the full hour and a half and afterwards 13 of them came to my office hours to talk about it more there's so much eagerness to have a space to talk about how to be a good ally and gaming can absolutely be that in a really valuable way especially when it's cooperative especially when there's a team and different people on that team have different roles because if you know if this is let's take my exoterra project where students are designing a new planet if there's a team that's the agriculture team and there's a one person on the agriculture team who's a microbiology specialist who knows how the microbes in the soil work you have to listen to them when it's time to make these decisions right there's the expert on this everyone else there does plants or does consumption or something and if that person is on the spectrum and talks in a funny way everybody wants to listen to them practices listening to them right they get to speak to other people who really care about them feel authoritative and be the expert it works the same way in the historical role play where you know only one person is the king of france only one person is the cardinal blonde they have things these are the people need and it means all of the students practice really having a strong reason to interact with a person that they don't personally know who has an unusual affect and the person with the unusual affect has the practice of oh my god everybody in the room is listening to me really seriously and taking me seriously nobody is being a jerk about this it's a very positive experience on both ends of that enabled by the fact that it's teamwork and everybody has something that they're the only one that contribute to this situation it's been immensely effective in that i want to talk a little bit about representation as well which is another space where again when teaching these things it's very effective so you know i i'm always making a point of pointing out for example when historical figures we're looking at are disabled because often we hear about famous historical figures like Lorenzo de'Vedici but because his disabilities were erased in the 19th century they tend to still be erased and when you point out to students you know not only Lorenzo de'Vedici but also King Charles of France in the period are both what we would in a modern sense call disabled everyone is super excited by the fact that these major figures the king of france are in this category and it becomes a group you know conversation let's say in a lot of games where the characters are pre-generated there are limits to how much you can represent right let's imagine you're in your five-person squad and you've tried to make them as diverse as possible they can't cover everything and even if they do cover a wide variety of things the intersectionality won't necessarily what a particular person is looking for you know that that you might have somebody who is an asexual uh black uh trans woman and that combo doesn't appear like each of those attributes might appear but they won't be together and there are also this is about future-proofing the utility of a game there are axes of marginalization that we aren't thinking about yet that have not yet moved into the forefront of discourse that exist right but we're constantly expanding how many different categories we're caring about there's much more conversation now about trans rights for example than there was 10 years ago think of the equivalent of that a decade from now that we aren't thinking about yet but that matters to people and will matter when you have an opportunity for the person to design elements of their own character to create part of the backstory themselves and have that backstory matter not just be in their own head while they go around being a zombie hunter like everybody else but to embody those attributes in a conversation with another person in a set of actions in something they write you make it possible for your game to give representation to every intersectional combination and even to axes of marginalization that don't exist yet right and 30 years from now when we have kids who are genetically engineered and feel interest about that and that's an axis of marginalization which doesn't exist now your game even if it's 30 years old can still be powerful and cathartic for that student if you've built in the capacity to have some self-generated elements of the characters that is a powerful point uh i love it so there's work to do it sounds like in this in this space um but yeah that's entirely powerful i was going to mention how how i think i may have started to talk about how powerful it is to take on personas but but just being yourself in your in your full self is more powerful you know and you mentioned that ada there was a statement you made about the difference between um it was something you shared but that that really was oh yes lots of yeah lots and lots of games offer a power fantasy right lots and lots of games offer you are the chosen one and you're the only one who can save the world thank you the girl yeah sure the disease but you know defeat the dragon uh you have the special whatever it is whether it's dragons blood or whether it's a technology or whether it's just you have protagonism most right you have the attribute of being the main character and everything will revolve around you and you will solve it uh you know those kinds of power fantasies are fun they're narratively powerful you know we've been writing them since Homer's Iliad they're really cool they aren't the same thing as making a person feel personally powerful so that when they leave the game they still feel like they discovered a power that's in them when you persuade someone to do something when your words do the thing when you were the one who solved the puzzle about how do we make the agriculture grow quickly enough to feed the colony when you used your expertise your unique intervention you feel empowered you discover that you are powerful and it's the same kinds of power you wield in real life it's not the in the game I can lift a 50 foot sword and swing it around in the real life I can't so I'm powerful in the game but I'm powerless in real life it's oh I won this game by being really persuasive and by really knowing my biology or I contributed to this team project by being persuasive and knowing my biology that's true of me in real life too I am powerful you feel powerful as you leave that kind of game especially if it went badly this last thing I'll add then I want to hear what others say but there are you know students come to me over and over nothing is more powerful than when they had a plan in the simulation it totally failed they were defeated and then they had to recover and they had to get new allies now that they've been defeated and the other king has won right they have to find the enemies of that king and rally a defense and recover from setbacks and they feel so powerful realizing oh everything went wrong and then I turned it around yeah and I reached out to people and I figured out the solutions and we came with a backup plan and it didn't result in the ideal uh victory for us but it ended up in a compromise in which we were okay that is so powerful and games can generate that the because if one team wins and another team loses if the story continue and say okay the win was the midpoint now that your papal candidate has failed how are you going to recover and generate a new base of power and defense in the new situation where you didn't win the election in the new situation where you know the the first colony you tried to build failed and you're building a second colony that is so empowering in a way that no fifty put sword or giant robot ever is because you have to leave those behind when you leave the game you don't have to leave behind your ability to recover from failure and truly that's so cool so powerful the soft skills are what transfer that's that's that really answers how games can build resilience that last beyond the gameplay honestly I think it's it's less the good games really make it less about power but more about building mastery and autonomy to make the right decisions and to really you know learn something and become better at whatever you're trying to achieve that's that's something that is really unique to gaming versus more traditional ways of educating I believe you know to have that that's in a playful manner where it's easy where you can go back and what you can experiment again that's something that that really resonates I think Jessica you were trying to say yeah no it's so interesting hearing you talk about this this is one of the things that we're currently trying to we're currently working through with pathways is that we know from some of the media behavior change other types of media that we've used with our organization before that we had worked with we did use like soap operas and a lot of fiction and from comic books all these different types of fiction and what we found was that when things were so fantasy that there was no way like with superpowers and all this kind of stuff that people created dissidents between themselves and what what they were capable of and they actually didn't take the skill away and so one of the things that we're building and pathways around this world is like we want the world like it has to be it's little features so it has to be cool enough where like kids want to be there but also it has to just be like you have the skills that you have and how to reward some of these different skills so like when we have um so again everything you're saying with like okay like we're gonna you're gonna be able to create the avatar and the main character will reflect you and your backstory and then when you're going into the games instead of just having choices um you know um one two three we are thinking about how how to kind of do this kind of thing to reflect different strengths of different personalities and some of these soft skills and so let's say you have a certain amount of courage points and then you need to spin them on some of these choices and so we're thinking okay you have these three kind of categories of choices so you have um you have like the little humor icon because let's say because wit can be used to cut down someone and to max someone but could also humor can also be used to de-escalate a situation and then you have like the brain icon for those are a little bit more intellectual but kind of like quiet and then you have the action icon which is like okay i want to step in and you can step into the fight and make it worse or you can like get people around you to help surround the victim and stop it from happening and then when you have and then basically reward different types of traits that are powerful in different types of ways so there's not one way to solve something so let's say you you pick a gamble and choose a choice so you have that so it costs a certain amount of points but let's say you used empathy in that choice now we're going to reward you some points back and then on the back side you're actually going to have a um what you'll have is like your player stats and instead of having a stat that's full of agility and strength and like all this other stuff maybe we have some stats on like empathy and trust building and like courage and like some other things so that the young and we can actually say like this is actually your personality that we that we found by the choices you've made and being able to kind of again build this confidence and the sense of identity of this is who i am and who i believe myself to be this is i believe that i can transform relationships i can transform society that i have the power to do this i have these skills and um it's you know and again everything that you're saying aida was like we will allow most games are you have to defeat the enemy right because we've been taught right um someone has to lose in order for us to win but the but the way that the world works it doesn't actually work like that um i'm you know if i call someone a racist right when my argument in that moment but is that person any more likely to want to help me in my cause probably not but that's the person i need most and so within our game we're going to allow you to go down the path of like defeat the other person that's the enemy let's try to get them kicked out of school let's try to like ruin them or like whatever and you're probably going to hate this person and you can go down that path but then you'll see what happens and you'll probably actually need that person at the end of the day to solve the mystery to solve the conflict whatever it is and so there's so much um kind of interesting things that you can that you can go into and you can use and like we're still play testing a lot of this ourselves um but again this is how there's so many ways that you can see if you make impact with these games you can have your baseline testing but you can also see how choices evolve over time um and then with our game we're going to be able to you're going to practice these different types of Gavrian techniques without without it feeling hopefully very practicing it should feel like entertainment um but those are confidence and then you're going to be able to unlock missions through in real life and so we're hoping to see that some of this transfers of uh being more confident to be able to talk about some of these issues and then see when they unlock them if they will go do them in real life and i'm really excited to kind of see how how that all plays out yeah i have a couple concrete examples of exactly what you mentioned which i'd love to say but i'd love to hear what kisha wanted to say first oh i think no i just wanted to let jessie go i think i've talked over her so you're fine go ahead and uh oh well you've reminded me uh in the first of two different things so just where you were talking about how you know in a lot of games we're very powerful in an adversarial way but it can be uh developing other kinds of skills that are exciting you know i'm in the middle of running another game right now it's a tabletop and text-based game but it's a really powerful and very grim game but i mean the the players in there i've had players you know literally jump out of their chairs and bounce up and down with excitement i've had players cry uh and i have one player who his character has achieved amazing stuff he's re-engineered his entire country he's literally turned himself into a god the thing he cares most about the player is his friendship score with the character's best friend he cares about that so much more than the rest because it's rich and relatable and the best friend character is a very powerful character he was more excited when he reconciled with his best friend than when he turned himself into a god which is a good example of how powerful these kinds of stories can be which relates to a movement within the science fiction and fantasy world which is sometimes these days referred to as hope punk uh if you're used to cyberpunk and other sorts of punk hope punk but we've noticed that there are so many very dark narratives there's so much grim dark there's so much you know the conspiracy turns out to be worse than everyone thought there's so many plots where you know you're learning that there's a some kind of conspiracy what is it doing it's doing something terrible um that that uh narratively it's incredibly powerful and surprising when what turns out be happening is people are being good uh and i can use some some famous and some non-famous examples of this but many people saw the film The Martian and there's that moment at the beginning where they realized that they left him on mars and we have the people at the computer seeing the pictures and they say well left him on mars 24 hours to inform the american people of that because that's our legal duty so better prepare the press conference to reveal that we've left him on mars and it's really surprising right because in every other story they would cover it up or in the film interstellar where they come across this secret compound and the secret bunker what are they doing in the secret bunker it's the good guys and they're going to save humanity a full of doctors and medicine it's so surprising that's what never what turns out to be the case and we're in a point because narratives have been so dark that we can tell stories that are more surprising and therefore more powerful and also by having the opposite right and there are these observations people make about how we have so many disaster movies where after the disaster also everybody turns into a terrible person and we have micro games you know murdering each other we have so many versions of the trolley problem whereas real life isn't actually like that and real disasters people tend to pull together and each other gumbo and help but that's not what we depict in real confrontations a lot of people try to make peace and come up with a solution that isn't a versus b somebody has to go down that is cooperative even when google was testing the google cars and everybody's braced for the trolley problem right everyone wants to ask about the trolley problem the self-driving cars because we're so used to the idea that the universe is going to make us make these grim choices and then they ran millions of simulations and it was never the correct answer to hit the pedestrian it just isn't actually true that that happens it's always the better choice to protect everybody that's the way the real world turns out to work but because we discuss the trolley problem so much because we discuss conspiracy so much because we discuss zero-sum adversarial so much we assume it's the way the world works when it isn't if we tell more accurate stories where people are better not only is it therapeutic and educational it's also more exciting narratively yeah yeah because it's what i will expect relatable i love how you've touched on a preferred future state but the telling narratives that like you said are relatable and jessica i absolutely love that you're working towards creating that preferred future state within your game and everything you're doing with your team to make sure that you have empathy and you have this idea and correct me if i'm wrong here you have this the space where the player can see exactly who they are in the game right and and applying that to that narrative it is brought up about real world's consequences and and what will happen um that's more realistic i think is an amazing way to get into that preferred future state rosie and danisha i want to give you both the opportunity to talk about your vision for a preferred future state as we're reaching at the top of our well you know what i really wanted to tap right into what aida said i'm so glad you brought that whole idea up of changing the narrative because i do feel like that's exactly what's going on in this moment that we're living in in real life um you know i'm an african-american woman and you know um i know right now we're we're as a community changing the economic narrative you know um so and we're changing the narrative in a way that is much more empowering and um i really really kind of appreciate what you're saying because i that's something that i notice in movies and and uh music you know there's just the darkness factor just aids to the fear and everything that's going on right now so i that is so empowering um and that that's one thing that i that was one of our questions was to to think about how it can you know things can be impactful beyond gameplay that right there being able to truly change the narrative for what's really um the truth about things it's just not a trajectory to to hell kind of thing necessarily you know it doesn't just have to be particularly when i know i'm here and i know most people around me are like me who are more good and looking to do good you know you know so youth that was still is tremendous yeah i i'm very very encouraged by that and truly even in my classroom when i've allowed my students to just you know just at you know really be themselves and just add to a project they they struggle with that because of some of the things you just mentioned uh jessica about how um that the opportunities to um exercise that uh on a day to day and you know students in k-12 studying are in school probably more well prior to covid in school more than they're with their parents and whatnot a lot of times you know and it has quite an impact on them so for them to to get into a have an opportunity a choice and then the choice they actually make is beautiful it's a beautiful thing to see it really really is so so yeah very good point nita great and so rosie your vision um for a preferred future state within gaming as it pertains to mental health and well-being um do you have any final thoughts there sure um so i think that there are a lot of mainstream games now that touch on the topic of mental health um like although with their suicide scene that they have there's there's a bunch of them that have characters that have uh you know certain um traits like depression or other things i would love to see more of that but in a more accurate way because now it it's always it's not somebody has depression or somebody's stressed out but it's somebody's crazy um and it's it's less you know somebody has um issues and and feels terrible and doesn't know how to react to things but it's they're mentally ill and i think that really being able to portray these characters more accurately when we then do choose those characters that would be something that i really love to see more in gaming the other thing is that i think that there's a lot of gamers and a lot of players that want to do something good and that's a trend really going up we see that in our game where you know so many of our players actually come to us and then want to help us make the game better um so i would really love it if more of of not just indie gamers but also bigger games would actually really take that seriously and and take the input of their players who are wanting to do the right thing into the game and create different narratives and stories around you know real situations i think that we can that we can use more of the real world within gaming so that then it is easier to take what we learn in games back into the real world that would be my my preferred future state if you will agree excellent excellent so as we reach the top of our hour i'm so saddened but filled with such gratitude that i had the opportunity to grace this stage with your brilliant minds um and to be a part of this amazing discussion today um for everyone in the audience and everyone watching our live stream i want to make sure that they have an opportunity to follow your work and that we can still continue this conversation because as we've noted today we we have a lot of work to do um but we're getting there so if all of you could just share maybe like your twitter handles or digital spaces you can follow and keep it to date um that'd be great way for us to close out well i'll start um you can find me on linked in at um my full name kisha um waddell and i'm also on twitter at dr kisha waddell and then certainly you can follow me on facebook and with the black blockchain consultants uh for me it's even easier shadows edge is the name of the game and around that there's the dot com for the website you can find shadows edge on instagram facebook etc all of those including website will then also lead back to me into my profile and we have a direct email if somebody wants to contact us that's feedback at shadows edge com and um you can find wicked saints you can follow us on twitter it's wicked underscore saints and on instagram it's good saint studios um so you can find us there you can find me on both instagram and facebook or on twitter as well jessica murray no space and it's murray with an e and of course our website so wicked saints dot studio and there you can also sign up to beta test our um pathways for when it comes out um and everything every email that goes through there i'll see and so um yep please feel free to reach out and or sign up for our pathways game you can find information about all the things i do at adepalmer.com you can find my history information via university of chicago's history department you can find my novels starting with uh to the lightning which is the first volume too is in too much to like the lightning first volume of terra ignota i also have a blog x urbay ex urbe.com where i blog about uh how history works the most recent post is a set of uh healthy work habit and self care guides customize covid which i produced from my university and the would synthesize uh national research with my own chronic pain experience uh to get give guidelines for what the who has recognized as a global mental health epidemic uh and the second most recent one is about the black death and covid and what we can learn about what the aftermath of covid will be like i'm looking at the black death answer it's more complicated than most of the short op-eds have been giving you which is why my version is a 10 000 word blog post uh as for exo terra the current game uh where the students are creating a terraformed exo planet you can find that at voices dot u that's the letter u chicago dot edu slash exo terra so voices dot u chicago dot edu slash exo terra though if you email me i will of course point you at anything you like and my email is available on aida palmer dot com twitter is aida underscore palmer thank you so much for joining us and again it's such a pleasure to continue the conversation uh and i'm looking forward to it thank you all thank you thank you for having us