 And also, hello, Quinn. Welcome to Reclaim TV. I've never hosted one of these with a guest before. Very excited. But, yeah, this is going to be, I have it right on the screen in front of me, modeling, project planning in DH through games with Quinn Tombrowski. I came up with the title in case you couldn't tell. That's why it's longer than any book ever written. Quinn, thank you so much for joining us. To everybody watching, Quinn is the, let me just double check this, academic technology specialist. You work in the DLCL and the library at Stanford. And you're very kindly joining us here today to talk about the DHRPG. Yes, thank you so much for having me. I have the most acronym-tastic job title ever. I am the DLCL-ATS insider in the libraries, which is part of RDS, which is just like, you know, people's heads explode when I try to explain this. Basically, I do digital, I have a staff position doing digital humanities support, you know, partly in the library as part of research data services, but also in the division of literatures, cultures, and languages, which includes all of them, except for English, East Asian, and classics for various administrative reasons. It's a long story. But yeah, I really love what I do. I'm also co-president of the Association for Computers and Humanities, which is the US-based professional association for digital humanities. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, that's an incredible list of a lot of words. We just joked about a long stream title, but that's a long job title. I got it. I got it. And the members are very informative because academic technology specialists, it's a job title they came up with in the 90s, basically to like embed tech people in departments to like help them out with like all the cool new digital stuff. You know, there was a sort of shorthand kind of joking name for the group called the Cybrarians. Oh my God, that's actually great. You all should pivot to that. But yeah, I mean, we help people with all kinds of things as the years have gone on, that the position in my kind of position has focused more on research. But you know, academic technology specialists, like I get emails asking if I know the copier code or like how to fix a projector. And like, I don't, I really don't. I'm sorry. Those are academic technologies. I see why you're asking. I have no clue. Yeah, I as someone who used to work in a department called academic technology is it was like, Oh, what did they do? They do the technology related to learning like we're a college. That's that's all like, there's very few things not related to that. Yeah, the same here. Our department also had the fun thing of every single person specializes in a distinct thing. And so they're all very, very good at what they do. But it also meant that people would be like, Hey, academic technology, can you do your pilot, you work in academic technology, do you know anything about, you know, data science, like Python stuff? And I was like, No, no, you have to follow for that one. You have to go somewhere else. You know, I love it when our like, you know, organization structurally set it up to be like, you know, a terrible maze that like, you know, may have a minotaur in some of the corners, like, you know, just just for people to be able to find the support that they need. Then by the time they find us, they're definitely very relaxed and easy to work with. Yeah, it's it's you never have to talk someone down from the cliff before getting started. Right. Yeah, let's do a deep breathing exercise. Maybe you can use this in your classroom or we can use it right now. How about that? Yeah. On that topic, I'm gonna do the world's most elegant pivot. But we're talking about just working interpersonally, how you talk to and work with people. And I know one of the things that came up a lot for me, this was actually something that I kind of sort of specialized in when I was working in academic technology was helping people think through their projects before they got started. And yes, what that life cycle is going to look like, what it's going to look like not just in three months, six months, but down the line if you get burnt out or retire or someone else comes in planning for that. And that's never gonna happen though. They'll tell you that that's absolutely never gonna happen. They love this project and they will work on it forever and it's the greatest thing in the world. It's a thing we talk about like a lot around here too in terms of the context, of course, of web projects of sort of like, all right, so you're gonna start this. The first thing to think about is the end. One of the most important things to think about is the end and it's really easy sometimes for folks to be like, well, what do you mean? It's like everything ends. What are you talking about? Of course. And there's also this propensity when you get started with a project, it's shiny and new. You don't want to think about it ending and you don't feel like thinking about your own circumstances changing and saying like, no, I'm in the perfect place to work on this project right now. It's great. And even if I'm not the perfect place to work on it right now, I'm gonna be because it's so good and I'll make time for it. It's gonna be awesome. It's not how things work. Nope. Nope. Oh, I mean, it's really like it's a wonderful thing if you're in a position to talk to people about this at the beginning. That's like the best case scenario, because usually they sort of stumble in like slightly bruised like halfway through after like, they've already put in so much time and are like completely emotionally invested in this thing, but things aren't working. And then it's having those conversations retroactively and the cleanup job. Yeah. And the difficulty of having to sit down with someone who's like halfway in, they've poured so much time and energy and effort and ain't going, I don't, how do you, how do I say this nicely? I think that the way that you started this should have been different. We should try something else. And also this may not be a good idea at all or have any prayer of working. Yep. And yet you love it because you're so invested now. Yeah. And the idea of I'm extremely guilty of this. What is a passion project to one person is like, no, everyone's going to care about it. Like this super niche thing. Once I get it done, I'm gonna make everyone care about like my ex, like super personal passion thing. The project is going to be so good. Everyone will just look at it and know how good it is. And that's, that's kind of, yeah, very much related to right, like thinking to the end of a project. Like one end of a project is that it is a failure, doesn't get traction, right? Maybe your project depends on that. And so it's thinking about like, is there a soft failure? Right? Can it just be done? Does is damage done? Is it very costly? Like what does that look like? You know, it's, it's hard to encourage people to go down that path with you. Yeah. I mean, even, even getting people to think about like, can you make this a project that can be done? Not saying that you'll ever stop loving doing all of this. I'm not gonna, you're not gonna assume, but just, just hypothetically, can it be done? Can it be completed at all? Yeah. It's completion and end state that is possible with the way you have conceived of this project. It like, it actually does take some work to get people to like the point where the answer is yes. Yeah. And again, the world's most elegant pivot, but to that, the reason why it's in the title, the reason why we asked you to come today was to talk about the DHRPG, which is a a tabletop RPG slash course that you developed to help people model and think through what it means to plan a project, a DH project with an eye towards the future. And not just like budgeting and Gantt charts and research resources. And if I do these set of steps, it will produce this project, but like life doesn't go that smoothly. And there's factors outside of whether or not all your dependencies are met. And certainly like all the dependencies you're likely to think of the first time you're doing a project is like, I mean, at the end of the day, it fundamentally comes down to people. And people, it turns out, are messy and complicated. And they don't actually slot in as well like into those like project management templates, as we all have to sort of choose to believe. 100%. And that was what I found really interesting and cool and fascinating. Part of prepping for this, there's a paper that you wrote a couple of years ago, and part of my prepping for this was to read it because I went into a little bit of a fugue state. But in it, you talk about there's other sort of DH RPG inspirational games that were similar that I'm now forgetting the name of, but that focus less on the people aspect and more on, all right, what resources do you need to do and things like that. But so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, I guess, the inspiration behind and the creation process for the DH RPG. Yeah, it's kind of a funny story. I ended up actually doing the research about what other things had been done like this when I wrote that paper. I was maybe dimly aware that there had been some card games and there had been other things that people had done, but I actually found out the details of those a whole lot later. There were two sort of direct inspirations for this, and one was my own childhood playing the D6 version of the Star Wars role-playing game with my best friend and her older brother. That was just one of those really formative childhood experiences, and so drawing on that in part. But there was actually, this would have been in like 2018, 2019. I don't know if you've ever come across the children's book press here, but it's an analog book. There's no digital fancy thing about it. It's a series of circles and other things that tells kids, okay, press the big button to continue, and the kids poke at the page. You turn the page and things have changed, and they're like, okay, now shake the book. The dots explode and there's lots of explosions. It's interactive and stuff. Totally not the sort of thing that makes any sense whatsoever as a play for children, and yet that is what some people decided to do and adapt it into a play for children that actually ended up being one of the most profound pieces of theater I think I've ever seen. I went back and saw it three times. By the end, the kids were bored, but I was still just focused on this. What they turned it into was the story of two characters sort of notionally pulled from the audience and into this sort of strange situation. They go into this scenario. They're all trying to do their best to help, and they make a bunch of mistakes. Things get completely irreparably screwed up, and there's an opportunity to try again. The characters re-enter the scene, and they try to make better decisions to help and still screw it up and then reboot it and try again. It's all about all sorts of great lessons for the aid and underset about persistence and resilience, and it's okay to make mistakes, and sometimes everything goes to pieces and that's okay. It's a learning opportunity, essentially. When you fail, it's over, but it doesn't have to be the end. Yeah, exactly. Even if there's not really an opportunity to fix that situation the way you want it to be, there will be an opportunity to try something again where you can build on what you've learned. That was core to the way I imagined the class, where we would play through this game until about midterms, and then we would somehow reach the end, and then we would play it again, and the characters would make different choices. So that was the idea. The reality was a bit more messy, I guess, proving my point to my own chagrin that we have never gotten close to completing it by halfway through. In fact, we had eight characters this last year, and by the end, we were just getting down to the last handful of days, and it was still January in the game's calendar, and we actually had to play a couple quarters as single turns just because we were so short on time. And the structure of the game is it's modeling one year of real time in the game, and you guys are playing through a project over the course of that year. So if you're looking to get through a whole year by midterms, and you're in January by finals, I didn't like that whole part of the game, which is too bad, because I really liked that idea, and I need to think of this some way to bring it back in some manner. But that part of doing it again didn't work. And so what I was able to offer again in lieu of the ability to try again was the satisfaction of a complete character arc for that year, for those characters, for those projects. So we played it through to the end, and no one knew how things would end for their character until the final dice rolls. Yeah. I have so many different things on my list, but... Well, I'm really interested in how the first iteration of actually playing it happened. Who did you gather to participate in this? What were their reactions to it? Or were there sort of people naturally like, oh my god, yes, I want to hear this. It's a really small class, and it has to be. Just because the more characters we have, I mean, just the time increases. And eight, I think, honestly, was too many for this year. But no, I did a little bit of play testing. I got some pizza and wrangled together some people who I could twist arms to come try this out to see, is this even vaguely remotely going to work? So I had... There's a character sheet template, and there are skills under each different header for skill types. There's disciplinary skills, how good are you at some kind of academic or technical subject specialty? There's interpersonal skills, like how well do you relate to others? There's management, sort of self-management, like can you focus and get things done? And there are different kind of allocated amounts of skill that you get in the template depending on what kind of character you choose. So one of the important things in getting our team set up for this is whoever is in the room, you want them to be playing a different institutional role in their current one. They're probably already reasonably good at being an undergrad or being a grad student or being a librarian. But let's get them into the headspace of a different role. So this year we had an undergrad from outside of the humanities altogether playing the humanities senior department chair. We had the grad student playing the PI who's always an assistant prof who has to get tenure. Our undergrad was playing a senior librarian. Our senior librarian was playing an undergrad. And we give everyone their character sheets, kind of like constraints of like the different skills that they can have given where they're at. And then they build a character. It's been really beautiful to see the ways that people build characters as a way to try out different identities for themselves or like they capture something about themselves. But people become very, very attached to their characters and one another's characters. It's kind of a beautiful thing. That's the thing. It's really common to see that in RPGs when people create characters is there's usually like a thread that you can pull from or connect from them to a character. And sometimes it's many, sometimes it's only one. And it's really interesting to see, to hear that in this context, because I imagine there's some vulnerability. The traditional Dungeons and Dragons, this is a fantastical setting where this is obviously extremely close to what we do here. It's very close to home. How does that play out? Do you feel like it was harder for people to step into that and role play or no? The first time we played through it definitely took people a little while to get into it. I don't know if it's just the dynamics of the people in the room, the fact that there were more grad students who knew each other better in this particular group around. But this time, people played hard from the very first round. And it was just really beautiful to see how people committed even to just the most extreme version of these characters that they've created. And just really making the choices the characters would make, even if they were slightly self-destructive, even if they didn't really have the project, but this is what this character would do and that's what they're going to be doing. That's really fun to hear, because I think also in terms of thinking through vulnerability, one of the things that you run into with any starting off your campaign, starting off with a new group, or even if it's not a new group, starting a new story with your old group is trying to go, all right, this is a new character. How do I get into this? How do I feel about this? And there is that vulnerability and the idea that people are able to sink into their characters and make dedicated decisions with, I assume they're not total strangers, but with a group that's been brought together by a class and with a topic that hits much more close to home than I am an elf wizard and I will cast Fireball now. Yeah. I mean, there's also, as part of the assignment structure of the class, there's a series of role-playing game reflections, whatever, complete six by the end of the quarter, where it's like, okay, so how is your character feeling right now with what's going on? What are they worried about? How well do they think this is going? And then part two of this assignment is pick another character. What are they worried about? What do they think is going on? Do they have any clue? And the undergrad might be like, yeah, this project is great. I'm doing these things. It's going to be really cool. The faculty member tells me it's going to be really cool. Meanwhile, the faculty member is like, oh, this is a disaster. So part of the idea of the class is that the skills that you need to do project management well, but I would argue even more, larger picture, to be a good leader, what you need are empathy and imagination. And that really gets to the core of everything else. You can learn, but those are the things that need to be at the heart of things if you're going to be working with people in a way that turns out well for you and them. Yeah, 100%. And I'm also thinking now of the role that communication plays in terms of thinking, all right, where is my character reflecting, okay, where am I versus where's my character versus all that, but then also to be able to say a different character that's not mine, that I'm not I'm not the one embodying that character, imagining how they're feeling and empathizing, putting yourself into their shoes. It feels to me also to some degree related to how well are you or how well is the other player communicating where they're at. And whether that's, a lot of characters are not necessarily good communicators, but in terms of you're working with the other people at the table. Well, and there's I mean, it's always interesting because you have situations where like someone tries to like put themselves in another character's shoes the same week that the person who is that character writes something too. And like, sometimes they're not at all aligned, which itself is a good and useful lesson here because even sort of with the best intentions and efforts of like trying to understand where other people are, like we're working with imperfect data in the real world too. And sometimes it's a miss, sometimes it's a hit by accident, but these are the actual things that you encounter when working on a collaborative project. Even if you get all of your planning documents right and you have your meetings and your agendas and things like that, it's like what happens when things go off track. Yeah. And I'm just imagining like sitting down with your character sheet for the first time and knowing that you're going into this this game and this course with this is going to be an exercise in things won't always go perfectly. And we're going to learn from that and we're going to experience that and also sitting down with your character sheet going, but how do I do it good? How do I do it best? Yeah. So there's I try to give them some hints about the kinds of things that their characters might be doing. So there's the obvious thing like the the the technical librarian will be doing technical things to put some points over there. But also if your character needs to do any writing and that's all of your grad students, your undergrads, all of your faculty characters, the way we modeled writing was it's a two role combination. So one is management, which is to say can you actually get yourself to focus and write some words? Or are you just going to screw around on the Internet? So role number one, like did you write anything? And that's based on the management skill. But wait, it's not over. Like maybe you had a really successful like writing day, like you wrote a whole bunch of things, like you got full points for for your like writing as such, then you have to roll disciplinary, which is to say were the words any good. So yeah, I mean, like it has happened, like these tragic situations, where like a character who is like much beleaguered and like never gets time to like work on her book gets a really like gets out, you know, her mother-in-law watches the kids for the weekend while she like runs off to a cheap hotel to like have her own personal little writing retreat. And like, you know, gets a lot of words written. But, you know, it all traces back to like, you know, some some scammy source that like ended up being, you know, she just have to throw the whole thing out. Yeah, I just want to say I roll with disadvantage on management almost every role in my life. So, but I'm really curious how. So like, one of the things that struck me looking at this, like, sorry, just like looking at the the actual main website and looking through like the skill guide and kind of how those things work is sort of how deep in some aspects this the simulation of this goes. And so I'm kind of curious how you landed on like what to include and what not to include essentially, because obviously you have to have a limit, right? You could have, for instance, like a simulation of like one of the one of the things I thought was really cool is like in the activity points, you have like, hey, like if this character has children under the age of 10, they have a 20% reduction in activity points they can spend in a month. And that I was like, okay, like I have a I have a four-year-old somewhere. Oh, yeah. Okay, I get it. And that's great, because even writing that in the rule is like, I imagine part of the point of, you know, saying like, Hey, this is a thing that probably people don't think about. But how do you stop? How do you limit that? You know, Oh, no, I mean, like you like, I think that I mean, it wasn't too bad because the things the things that are in there are the things that matter to me. It was like, I am not trying to like model absolutely everything. I'm like, I will I will flat up say that I did this very selfishly. And this reflection of like my life and my experience of staff. And that I mean, and that makes perfect sense. And I can also see that reflected in the skill guide where staff get no advantages. But yeah. So yeah, the power differential thing, the charge like, that makes sense to me, based on my experience too. And I mean, I mean, I like that though, because obviously you can't pretend to understand that that would be pretty presumptuous. So and and again, you it would not be possible to simulate everything, right? That's that isn't so. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. I just I was kind of struck by like, wow, some of this goes really deep. And what was included? Was there like a committee decision? Like, what was this? It was opposite of the committee. It is like me and my frustration. But I think that you have talked at some point maybe about the idea of going back to having people from different areas on campus, different, you have the undergrad and you have technical librarian who are the players and they're all changing and exchanging roles. The ability to say, oh, this might not be modeled. But hey, you're you took my role, you should know that, you know, as the librarian, the start of term is going to be a big rush for you. That was really, really useful. This is why I love having like librarians in the room, too, for this kind of thing, because, you know, each sort of each round is one month of the game. And so we could actually just like, turn the librarian and be like, it's August. What are you doing August? Like, what does August look like for you? And then the student, you know, who who's playing the librarian takes notes. It's like, well, you know, I had plans to do a lot of project work, but it turns out I guess I'm going to be prepping reserves. So my availability on the project will be somewhat limited. I'm just really I there's it's words. But I think another another concept that ended up being, you know, just really important was was this idea of activity points in time, where like on a certain level, like, all characters start with 20 activity points, 24 hours in a day, you know, all the days in the month, like, we're all facing the same amount of time. It doesn't feel that way, though, in practice, which is why, you know, as you mentioned, Taylor, the the discount for people with kids and the discount goes down like as the kids get older. Yeah, it's good to hear, by the way. That's good news. I mean, I have I have three, you know, age 10, eight and almost six. And yeah, it's it's definitely it's definitely getting easier. To the point where, like, you know, the the grad student playing the PI who had two young children, you know, similar ages to what mine were last time, just had like a really punishing set of roles, like because of that. And it was almost like unfamiliar to me now. But like a sort of a big echo of like, Oh, right, I remember those years. But yeah, we all we all have the same amount of time on some level. In reality, with the constraints we have, be it, you know, small children, be it elder care, you know, be it like other responsibilities, the amount of time that that you actually get to choose what you're doing, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. For other characters, like, they can make all kinds of choices, you know, and they can they can allocate their time to the project or or not. And so then sort of seeing how this plays out from one character to another kind of as we go around the room is an opportunity for for thought and and discussion. You know, who has the like multiple young kids, plus the big teaching load, plus they need to write their tenure book, they want to be able to keep their job. And who can decide to like spend a lot of time like rolling for a hot apple engineer boyfriend on Tinder, and then go on like a fabulous cruise. So is there is a if for the faculty role is is getting tenure like a mechanic in the game, like, can they can they fail and leave and okay, this is the this is the final for the the PI. So the PI is always a pre tenure, you know, assistant professor. And so they are in charge of like, you know, kind of shepherding this project, but also getting tenure. That is that is at least sort of notionally the the success criterion for this character. And and yes, like that's the final role is the final d 20 role for tenure. And I try to set up like kind of a set of tears, there's like, you get tenure things are great. You know, you get an extension. Yeah, you can try another time. Try again. Yeah. You know, you don't get tenure, but like, you know, you can get a lecturer position in the university, you don't get tenure, you can get a staff position and the like you are unemployed. So yeah, yeah, that's that that's even again, probably amazing, depending on you know, who you have playing the game. Like, again, my experience is that most people who aren't faculty don't really understand how tenure works and how stressful that whole process is and kind of up to chance. So like it being represented by dice rolls, very, very accurate, at least in my observational outside. There's penalties and stuff, depending on if you don't finish your book. I mean, we are our PI this time, you know, like did actually manage to finish everything and like, you know, managed to get just like a pure d20 roll on on this thing. And she ended up with a staff job. But you know, it was it was interesting, like the the student playing the character, you know, sort of thought about it and is like, you know what, like, this is actually a lot better for her. Like she spent this last year, like really, like, you know, not doing right by like, you know, her marriage, her kids, her family, everything else in her life, trying to get this thing. And like, it's super disappointing after she managed to like do all these things and didn't get it. But you know what, like, I think this is actually better for her. And that was that was the conclusion. Kind of coming out of that for that character and that student, which I thought was was a kind of insightful reaction to what was sort of objectively from a certain set of standards, her character failing, but maybe like her character just set herself up for a much better life. Yeah, learning, learning something about what you want from not getting what you thought you wanted. Yeah, essentially, there's and that that's interesting too, because I always feel like, especially like undergrad students and possibly sometimes grad students, like have been and like the the the college experience kind of, I think, cultivates this because the people you're looking at, like faculty did do this, but have this like, I have a path, I've decided my path and any deviation from that path is failure. And it's like, most people don't work that way, actually. But it's not not that that's like, I'm not like, this is a thing I went through too, right? So, you know, so it's kind of interesting to see even that played out simulated or whatever, or folks coming to terms with that through the mechanics of the game, because that's a really hard thing for some people. Some some other people just kind of adapt, but some people really have a hard time, you know, coming to terms with what that means for them. And that's like, well, you know, no, I changed my mind or I changed my path, and that's that's valid and probably good, hopefully good. And even understanding what these different paths like look like on a day to day or month to month basis, I mean, part of part of the goal of this is to like, leave people more informed about like, you know, what does it look like to be a grad student if you're an undergrad or like, what does it look like to be a librarian or what does it look like to be a faculty member? You know, this this time we also had enough people that we had a department chair. So like, what does that look like? Not not that I have like a complete picture of that, but you know, talk to some department chairs and, you know, you sort of see things, you know, secondhand and, and, you know, just just getting a sense of, you know, one of the things about a university that really I find really striking still is how opaque its workings are, you know, even to people who are like deeply embedded in it. Like the university does not really want to be understood like kind of institutionally and organizationally, like it's not to the advantage of the people who run the place for everyone to understand how it works, why it works, like where the like different levers of this thing are, like, everyone can easily just sort of go through the day like, I'm on my path, I'm doing my thing and not ever like taking a step up to be like, like, how does, how does any of this work anyways? Like, like, you know, who's in charge here, actually. And, and, and, you know, we have readings talking about that, like, what is a president? Like, what is their job? What is a board? Which unfortunately, like these things are getting more, more political these days, and like are actually starting to like, be relevant to people in a way that maybe they weren't before. But just trying, trying to have the students leave with a more informed view of like this behemoth that they are, are part of. I was, I was just going to say, and thinking about empathy and defining failure, there's on the large scale, what is this institution? How does it work? Who's, like, in charge of what and who's got jurisdiction over what? And then on the smaller scale, I think people often have this sense of everybody else knows, but I don't know. But if I ask, they'll know I don't know. Yeah, and that's, that's a, that's a whole life thing. But it's especially something you that gets played out in institutions, right? Because especially, like, I mean, at least I had this conception when I was like in undergrad, but I think, I think it's very common, which is that people think because of the structure of a university, they think it's of a grand design. And it's mostly not like there is parts where that is the case, like very specific parts where it's like, all right, like maybe there's a faculty senate and then there are rules that are okay, fine. But like, you know, what departments exist and what they do and who works in them? God, no, that's, that's barely even informed by history, usually, like sometimes is, but honestly, not even that. It's usually just what made sense at that time. And then we're still doing it. That's the nature of my job, too. Like, I support all of the languages, cultures and literatures, except English, because English is too big. And like, that's the many faculties, everything else. So obviously, like English has to be something else somewhere else. And when they combine, like all the small language departments into like this mega department, the East Asian department, like revolted, apparently, and like managed to make a successful like pitch the provost to be out of it so that there was actually like a great schism at some point in the past between East Asian and my department. And that's why I don't work with East Asian literature. And, and explaining that to someone who just needs your help is makes you sound crazy to them. And you're like, no, I mean, I understand. But like this is what it is. You can take my classes. I just can't do anything with you because of some decisions made a couple of decades ago by people who didn't want to be combined. Yeah. And we can both agree that this makes no sense. But also it is the state of things. And you run into the idea of this person going, but, but you work with languages. Why can't not yours? Like, but, but I need you to help me. Why aren't you helping? I can't help you. But why though? I don't have a good reason for you because a good reason doesn't exist, but I can't because of history things and yeah, decisions made by other people. Yep. I'm now entirely convinced, by the way, I just put this in discord that we need RPG based career guidance counseling for high schoolers. And, and, and we, there needs to be some incentive model for that to exist because you need one for I think every possible career path in order for that idea to work properly. But, but holy cow, that would be an amazing way to conceptualize that type of thing to me anyway. Yeah. And I think it's, I'm now thinking of like the advice is like, go and do informational interviews and talk to people in the fields that you're thinking about and see what their experience has been. And that's good. And that's related to the idea of your working with people who have perspectives on the thing that you're trying that you may not know about. But it's also not quite the same as no, you're going to sit down and spend a term living a year in the life of someone who may not be exactly the same as the person that you're interviewing. And it's connected with the RPG thing of like yeah, this is a game where your main responsibility as a player is to think critically within a very wide set of rails, like a very, very wide. But like that is the mechanic, and we're going to make you do that. And if you don't do that, you're not really playing, you know, so connecting that to talking with someone, right? And that's where you mentioned, the idea of like, okay, so you have someone playing a librarian, you have a librarian in real life playing someone else, and they can learn right there, right then and there. Yeah. But making the decisions and taking the actions and thinking critically makes it so much more immersive than sitting down with someone saying, okay, can you tell me about the last two years? Like, can you just give me your story over the last two years? Like, there's stakes and there's consequences to having to make the choices. Like, you know, do you, you know, go, like, do you try to build this, you know, new platform for your university internally? Or do you outsource and contract with someone else to do it? And then what are what are the consequences that's played out? Yeah. And that that that personal connection to there's the empathy for your fellow players and for the fellow characters. But then there's also that personal connection of this isn't my character isn't me. But in some ways, there is a lot of me in my character, and that personal investment. And I feel like I'm just repeating everything that you've already said, but that that sense of the real I am making consequences that have I am making choices that have consequences for my future in a way where I have to plan and try and think through and anticipate what might happen, but also life is random. Yeah. No, we had we had a really great a student this time who, you know, she wanted her character to go to grad school. And she was she did a really great job from the very beginning, like, you know, cultivating a good relationship with like the the department chair, and sort of became his like go to undergrad. And then she, you know, applied for grad school. And, you know, he wrote a really good letter and and all of that. But yeah, I mean, in the end, she she still had to roll like everyone else. And that for for the for the undergrad, it was the the d 20 roll for did you get into grad school. And we did this a little bit earlier than the end. Because if she didn't get into grad school, the grad school she wanted, she basically was going to like, nope out a spring quarter, she was going to be completely depressed, and would not work on the project or really do anything else. And in her labor was really going to be critical to like the project getting done. So her getting into grad school ended up being like a high stakes thing for everyone, even though I'm not sure to what extent all the characters realized this. And she she got into her dream grad school and was super excited and like the project got done. And yeah, what was it like in terms of the the running it as as the the DH master as the DM, the like, I obviously you're, you know, you're helping people with the sort of the mechanics of it and kind of refereeing and things like that. But like, I'm kind of interested in like, were you writing a narrative? Like, like how did that work in terms of advancing thing? Okay, I would. Okay. So my favorite part of this time, you know, we had a women and gender minorities in DH, you know, working group at the last in person DH conference before the pandemic. And we had like this witches hat. And like everyone in the group like signed it. So I brought this witches hat with all the signatures from from the conference, like with me and like I would, we would have a discussion of readings to begin with. But like the game would begin when I would put on the hat. And no, this was in a certain level, this was the most wonderful like minimal prep class ever. Because in whatever we had the readings, I prepared the syllabus in advance. But like every Tuesday and Thursday, I would just walk in the room and like be there for whatever was going to happen. Honestly, the hardest part of it, for me was okay, we have this sort of dynamic of the regular dice in the wild die and some people have more than one wild die. And so you roll. But if you get a one on the wild die, which is a different color, then you have to, then you have to go and roll the d 20. And like whatever you did, even if you got like best score ever on the other d sixes, all out the window, you roll the d 20. And then something good or bad or medium happens. Depending on that role. And honestly, the hardest part for me was thinking about what are some good things to happen when people got a really good d 20 roll. I can like I can think of lots of like terrible things that happened to people. But like what like what's an amazing thing that could happen. And some sometimes sometimes I would I would end up just like asking around the room. I'm like, All right, I, I got nothing here. Have you ever gone to the archives and just had like the best thing ever happened? Like what was it? And we decided together. Yes, but I can imagine that that would be difficult. I mean, that's even difficult in again, like like D&D and usually in the context of combat. But that obviously like, not usually, but, but my point is there a context where it's easy and context where it's not right. And something like this, I think it would be harder because it is there. I assume there isn't combat. Okay, actually, all right, so maybe bureaucratic combat. Absolutely. There's bureaucratic combat. And then this is where some of the power roles get going. We're like, you know, the undergrad can like sort of like try a Hail Mary and like roll a d 20. And if they get like a super high score, then then the undergrad maybe can get a bonus over like administrators or faculty kind of through the means of like the student newspaper expose route. But oh yeah, I mean, there's there's there's that kind of combat. This this time the closest we got to actual physical combat was one really bad role for the for the department chair, who had taken his whole family to Prague. And the the teenage son, you know, sort of managed to like sort of sneak out and go to a bar and got into a bar fight and you have to go fail out as kid. But yeah. I'm just I'm just the thing of trying to figure out what good things what a good thing is feels very real to me because Taylor, you mentioned D&D, I'm thinking of every time where like you roll a d 20 and you get that one. And you go, all right, well, the worst thing that could happen from you failing this skill check is pretty evident because you're trying something and you fail. The best thing that can happen is success plus what what is success plus what what what goes on top of succeeding at the thing that you wanted to do. Well, there's usually like a thing in the moment. And sometimes you can have like a meta meta about the game consequence to right where you can like some some systems. I'm not sure if it's the Star Wars system that is here, but I played it. I don't even remember what it was called where you would get like, if you had a real successful role, you would get like a basically a chance to it's kind of like inspiration. Like you get a chance to re-roll something later. But yeah, like thinking that through like in in real life, we're sort of happy like like this is probably where it starts getting tricky on on the way dice work in games like this because it's sort of like, no, what we want is for my intention to work. We don't want that to be completely rare. That would be sad. But but but but definitely, you know, things surprise us and go better than expected in real life. So yeah, I can imagine how that would be a difficult part of this. We're getting reaction to the idea of bureaucratic combat. Oh yeah, bureaucratic combat. I mean, also like, you know, like convincing people convincing people in a certain convincing someone to do something they don't want to do is a form of combat. And we do have this like with the PI. And this this year, we had a grad student who was like from a different department, super checked out just like not into this project or any of it. And so there were there were times that like the PI had to convince her to do things. And there there actually is like a sort of a sub role of of interpersonal for convincing people of stuff. There's there's also charisma, which which comes up a lot. So the way the way we model teaching is you can sort of go about it one of two ways. You can roll for charisma or you can roll for preparation. And so then every activity point you spend preparing for class like gets you a bonus. And then you sort of like role management to like, you know, did you did you, you know, have have a well prepared and sort of like adequately executed class, like the students responded to, you know, well enough. And so yeah, like, like figuring out how to make these choices, you know, do you prepare for class or are you busy trying to write your book? And you're going to wing it and hope that your like charisma score is good enough that you can get through with reasonable teaching evaluations. I think what you just said would have helped me a lot my freshman year in a teacher ed program. So just just pointing that out there that you can roll for charisma or roll for prep. And some people just have the, anyway, I'm going to stew on that for a couple of weeks. But yeah. And because you said the teacher evaluations at the end of things, the idea of you can do a lot of really good prep work. And there are going to be some students who did not engage and did not have fun and didn't get what they wanted out of the course. And that's not something that good prep can fix. But it might be something that charisma can fix. And vice versa, you might have students who showed up and went, listen, I don't care how, how funny or how cool the professor is. I want the syllabus to be posted two weeks ahead of time. And I want to be able to do my readings two weeks ahead of time. And those students are probably rare, but I imagine that charisma would not get you much truck with them on an evaluation. Yeah. No, I mean, it was, I also taught, in the fall of this class on AI, and it was very experimental, very much, we were making it up because we went, especially as the landscape changed. And we put a lot of work into this course. This course ate my whole fall. And the final capstone to this, I actually created a weaving of all the course data, all of the readings, all of the students' grades and everything. I've seen that. I've seen you post about that. It's beautiful. Yeah. No, it was a lot of fun. It was really cathartic. But the way it ends, in this sort of like long sort of like spirally thing that looks a bit like guts, was a student who wrote this 1200 word email, not even asking for a grade change, because we had those too. Those are also in the weaving, but a 1200 word email about how the class had failed her and like came up short of her expectations. And like, that is the end of the weaving. That was the end of the experience, like, and sometimes that happens. But it's okay, because we can try again. There's always another semester. That's true. Yeah. And it's hard to know what that particular student is going through too, right? Obviously, what they said, you can learn from that too. But as you frequently learn when teaching is you have like a view of 10% of what that student is up to. And it all matters. 15 if they go to office hours. Yeah. Yeah. Pause. I just noticed that your shirt is dice, and I love it. It's dice. There's also sort of like a digital glitchy swirl thing. It's one of my dice dresses. I have a few of them for use. Yeah. I was trying to dress for the class or meeting I have. And so I need to keep a few dice ones on hand. It is very, very good. I like it a lot. But bring back on topic from that. This is going back a little bit, but you mentioned two different things, which was the idea of the wild die is a different color from the other dice. And you were teaching this course starting in early 2020 and then going into the pandemic. Yeah. The first time I ran that, we actually had to vote. The students voted in early March about whether we wanted to allow COVID in our universe. Like, is this worth including or is this just like one of those things like the news cycles, whatever it'll be or like like hardly worth thinking about. And it was a narrow margin that COVID was allowed in this universe. And then that ended up, we were all sent home before the last class. Maybe there was like one to two classes where we all went home and it all happened. So suddenly, I didn't send dice with the students. So I had to do all the rolling. I like took a sort of like tubular thing and prop my phone on the top of the tube with the camera aiming down. And I would sort of like roll within this constrained areas. We had like dice cam logged into Zoom back in the days when no one was still really sure how to use it. And so I had the pressure of all the final roles on me. But this was the end for both the students and their characters. There was a student who just barely managed to get across the border before it closed. Because they the character had been like at a conference or something. And they had to roll for all kinds of things to be able to get back into the US. And then it was complicated because the character is like husband, wasn't a citizen. And so was this going to be a problem? And yeah, it was really nice to be able to end the class this time around without all of that hanging over it, because like it was really like just kind of like it sort of felt like the floor dropped out from from under us with this game as with everything else last time. Whereas this time it sort of felt like we were able to like bring things to a conclusion in a satisfying and not world ending kind of way. Yeah, I I'm just thinking about the thing that you said about voting and the idea of do we let this be a thing that follows us into our model of the real world? Because it's a model of the real world, but also we're kind of living in that right now. So maybe we don't want to also model it and the yeah, we didn't know we were going to be living in it for a while. I think I think if we had known we would have like let the before times end peacefully, but yeah. Yeah, we didn't get no idea. This was a fantastic conversation, Quinn. I mean, thanks so much for for joining us and talking about your work around this. I think we could I think pilot and I could grill you with questions for another couple hours, but we are we are over time here. So I will recommend folks who are watching this live or watching the recording later to check out links we put in the discord for Quinn's website and also the DHRPG website. And I don't know if you have anything else you want to mention before we sign off for for today, Quinn. Yeah, I mean, the the benediction I offered the students at the end of the quarter this year, I actually went to my dice box and I took out like, you know, three dice like two regular color and one wild one and I handed these to each student and and told them that like, if you feel just completely stuck and you don't know what to do next, grab some dice and roll them. And, you know, as as advice goes, I can think of worse. Love that. That's a really good note to sign off on. Thank you. All right. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. See you, everybody. See you.