 All right, let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host, the creator of the forum, as well as your catherter for the next hour. I'm delighted to see all of you here today. We have a terrific guest with a fantastic topic, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. One last note before we proceed. About a month ago, we polled everybody to ask what you wanted from the forum and what things we should experiment with. And we have a few experiments coming up. So just to let you know, one of the things that people were interested in was tutorials. So a session that would basically be an interactive session that would teach a particular topic. We've got one of those signed up for January already. And we also asked about news sessions that are sessions where some experts would respond to developments in the past week. We have one of those scheduled for November. So just to let you know, we have more experiments coming down the pipe. Now I'd like to welcome this week's guest. I'm just delighted to welcome Trent Hergenraeder. Trent is a professor at RIT in upstate New York. He specializes in what I think of as just non-stop creativity. Trent teaches with games. He teaches with world building. He teaches with the nerdiest science fiction and fantasy. And he teaches people how to develop stories based on them and how to think critically about them. He's one of the most fascinating and innovative faculty members I've ever seen. I'm delighted that we have him here to talk with. Trent, welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks for the invite. Oh, it's my pleasure. My pleasure. Now, Trent, I just have to ask in order to kick things off. There are a lot of people to introduce you and I could ask you to show us your lightsaber collection. I could I could ask you to talk about your beard, which is very, very good. But what I'd like to ask is over the next academic year, 2019, 2020, what are the big things you're going to be working on? What's going to be taking up most of your brain? What excites you the most? Yeah, so what I'm working on right now, I just got tenure this year. So this is my year to sort of chill out a little bit, right? So I got my book out last year. That was sort of the big push and then promoting that. But what I'm planning on doing now, I've got the world building book, but then I've got the world building card deck that goes along with it that we can talk about and I've got examples if you want to see that. But there are two other parts to that. There's a character building deck and then a plot building deck that I want to try and develop and play test a little bit more rigorously. So the world building deck obviously came first. And once that went from prototype to sort of finished product, the other two just went on the shelf as I had to start promoting the book and doing those kind of things. So in this next year, I've got some students who are interested in working in procedural narrative and things like that. So trying to figure out how would we make like a cyberpunk plot deck? How would we make a steampunk plot deck? How would you make a Cthulhu horror deck or whatever? Trying to sort of break apart different types of genres, different types of stories with the ultimate goal being a game that you can right now, the prototype, you can play from beginning to end with three or four people where you start, you build a world, then you create three characters and then you tell a story using the three structure, using all the cards and it's all collaborative and it's basically just having a conversation with friends. And it takes about three hours to play, but it's not to the point yet where you can't you can play it without me like hovering over you, right? Saying, OK, now you got to do this, now you got to do that. So that's really the next thing that I'm looking forward to working on. And it should be a lot of fun. Well, that sounds terrific. Friends, we tweeted out the location of your book. And if you could just tell us the full title again. Sure, it's a collaborative world building for writers and gamers. So make sure you grab a copy of that. And that's it's a fantastic, fantastic and important book. And it looks like I have all kinds of questions. And friends, if you're new to the forum, keep in mind that I could interrogate our poor guest forever. But the key thing here is to hear your thoughts and your questions. So if you're really curious about what does Professor Hergene Raider mean by procedural gaming? If you're curious about how this plays out with the Curricular Committee, what does student evaluation say? How does this fit into pedagogy? This is your time to ask those questions. Just press that video button to join us on stage or press the text button to type me a question. I'm looking forward to hearing your kind of thoughts and conversations. Just to begin with, I have to ask, when you say world building, are you drawing on, say, the token heritage of subcreation and creating elaborate fantasy narratives? Yeah, to an extent. I mean, when I'm working with students, one of the things that I really focus on and the reason why the book title is Collaborative World Building is I find that beginning writers and young people don't understand that they don't have sort of an objective view of how the world works. We all have very subjective views based on our experiences and things like that. So my goal really with the courses that I teach here at RIT with the world building course that I teach is to get them talking about how they think worlds work and using some structures to help give an easy end to those conversations because they obviously when they get out of college, they're going to be working on their own and they probably have a million world building projects. The other thing I hear all the time is I've been working on this world since I was 14 and I always say that's great. But this semester, you're going to be working with other people because you have to have your imaginations bump into each other and young women and young men feel that gender relations work very differently and levels of equality and things like that. So that's really what I'm trying to do with the world building is sort of bridge critical thinking with creative production where if you're making a fictional world with other people, you need to sort of calibrate and figure out how you think our world works before you can make a coherent fictional world. But yeah, any genre? And by so far, you've been looking at, if I remember rightly, let's see fantasy, horror, science fiction, post-apocalyptic. Yep. Basically, when I'm teaching the class, the first one that we start out with is always the post-apocalypse because I think it's pretty easy to see how you can have one foot in our world and then one foot in a post-apocalyptic future. It could be a very near future. But then from that point forward, I do polls and say, well, what genre do you want to do next? And I've just got a library of short stories that we'll talk about what are some of the features. We've had interesting conversations about similarities and differences between cyberpunk and steampunk or post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, right? Because sometimes the borderline between those are very, very narrow. And I think students find it interesting to sort of interrogate what we expect from those genres. We do a listing on the board of all the things, all the markers that sort of call out, well, what makes a cyberpunk? And then we talk about, well, how many of those do you want to adopt and how many of those do you maybe want to turn on their head? Because you don't want to make it stereotypical of the cyberpunk world that we've all seen before. That's pretty dull. And just that act of getting everybody to sort of list them out and talk about the things that they think make up those genres end up being really rich conversations in and of themselves. So it's only if the class is really, among other things, these classes are about genre and understanding what's in the show. Yeah, absolutely. We have a question that has just come up. Here, let me flash this on the screen so people can see this. This is a question from Sierra Adare, Tassie Woopa, and Sierra, I really hope I pronounced that correctly. How do you get students to buy into gamification of a course? Yeah, I think, to be honest, I've got the opposite problem in which these classes fill immediately, they fill with full wait lists immediately. And once registration opens within about 48 hours, I start getting emails from students saying they can't get in and is there any way that I can do over-enrollment and things like that. So it's not just there's a strong game design program here, but I think only about a third of my students are actually game designers. I think it's just in the water with this generation. They understand that games can do a lot of different things. And the way that if you're working in games and learning, like I'm assuming other people in this group are, you know what you're trying to do is align your learning outcomes or learning objectives with rules and games that will help you leverage those. You use the rules and you use the games, not because they're fun and it's going to be enticing, but because those actually do a better job of teaching the content in many ways than more traditional methods. So just to use one example, the classes that I use, one of my classes is called game-based fiction and we use role-playing games and structures of role-playing games to teach fiction writing. And the idea is to get them really immersed in a character's viewpoint. It's very different than the traditional mode, which is read a short story, talk about it, try and write a short story and then critique it. I find it's been much more successful and students understand different concepts of perspective and questions along those lines and other aspects of craft. When they're doing role-playing games and then want to write about their characters, I feel much more connected to it in my experience. So you're teaching as well fiction and storytelling? Yes, yes, that's what I, it's more, I mean too, one of the things that my degree is, my PhD is in English with an emphasis in creative writing, but it is slowly over the years, it's sort of using language, but it's become more about narrative design because very, very few of my students, I think two and you know, whatever it is now, 10 years of teaching have gone on to MFA's, but I have a lot of people who are entering creative industries, they make films, they make 3D animations, I've got a number of students who are working Blizzard, you know, they're level designers on World of Warcraft and things like that. So talking about how language is always really important, but it's not very important for me to teach them the structure of say a traditional short story, right? I do that in some of my classes, but it's more important for them to think about, well, what makes for a really rich character? What makes for an interesting setting? What things do I need to think about in terms of what this character is going to do? What kind of obstacles they will face in this setting? So it feels really liberating for me to not feel constrained by those old genres and it's sort of exciting, creative writing in different pockets now, those walls are starting to break down of poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction. I think the digital realm really blends and blurs those things, especially when you start bringing in visual elements and audio elements. So yeah, there's some really pioneering stuff going on, creative writing and higher ed too. It's a little bit spread out, but it's really exciting to kind of know where to look. It must be and just let everybody know, just in case you aren't impressed by Professor Hergan reader enough, he's published multiple science fiction fantasy short stories just on the side. Yeah, the funny thing is like my love really is short stories and it's sort of a form that either is completely obsolescent or is obsolescing, but yeah, that's really my favorite form. Ideally suited for podcasting as well as for reading on the phone, I think. Yeah. So we have a question that's come in on video, so let me bring in a long time participant, Tom Riley from Boston. Hello, Tom. Hello. I'm working at use of story specifically on our climate crisis. And the idea is that very soon, probably during the next presidential period, we're going to hit a big driven point and it's going to be all hands to the pump. Every concept, everybody get to work on addressing a million different problems, different ways. To get that started, it looks like we need stories. And I did write a book, got a book published of about 10 science fiction stories, hard science fiction, written as a teaching aid, but the book's so expensive that yeah, and the people, the young people today, science fiction stories ain't it. We're now writing technical papers and plays, screenplays. The question then becomes does your thing specifically cover not a dystopia, but a push hard to address climate change universe? So you're asking whether it could be used for that, the world building system that I use? Yeah, whether it is used for that and is that, do you have any students at least been interested? So I think most of the students that I get are pursuing creative projects more so and I wish we would get a little bit more of the critical side in there. I can show you real quickly, I've got the cards here. I've got, so there's world building deck that accompanies the book. You can use the book separately or the deck separately. You don't need them, but they do inform each other. There are 14 categories under the headings of governance, economics, social relations and cultural influences. So they look, this is the card for rule of law as one of the governance areas. Wealth distribution is one of the factors in economics, religious influence is one of the cultural influences. And then finally we've got race relations which is one of the social relations. And then everyone of those cards gets a number from one to five, meaning that one means there's hardly any of it, it's a very weak force in the world and five means that it's overwhelming when you're in that world, it's unavoidable, right? So if you had a religious influence of five, then you would expect to see that religious influence bleeding over into the governance area, right? Like maybe their founding documents would be based on religious texts and things like that. And then finally there's two categories for trending and stable, so each card, each one of those 14 categories gets a number and then trending or stable. And you can either use them to model the world which is really interesting when I say let's model Rochester, New York and see how people use those numbers. We do it, we'll watch films, play games or read stories and I'll say everybody model that world and what they find out really quickly is that the numbers don't really mean much and the categories don't really mean much in and of themselves. It's how you yourself are choosing to define those, right? So that becomes the conversation is what did you mean by rule of law? Because I gave it a three and you gave it a five. So how is that different, right? So then they have to talk about what those numbers meant, how they individually define those categories and I have them do that in isolation so then they can compare what they came up with. So one of the concepts I think to address this question that I came up with in terms of there was the dean had asked for some sort of first year classes for students that may show them the broad range of the way that liberal arts can sort of address problems. And one of the ideas that I had was alternate Rochester's because this is already something that I do in terms of making post-apocalyptic Rochester's and things like that. I also have a class that we do steampunk Rochester. So we go back to the 1920s, inject a steam technology and ask, well, how does technology affect society? How does society affect the technologies that are being developed? But my idea was you could do three Rochester's. You could do a historical Rochester from whatever era, you know, 19th century, you could do the present and then you could do a future one. If you want Rochester to look a certain way, a utopian future, what are those categories that you would need to start getting to move in certain directions, right? Just to achieve that. And then how does that even happen? How do we even make these things improve? So one of the big things for Rochester is it's extremely segregated and that the money in this town is also very segregated. So that's one of the things that you would say for a utopian future, you'd want better wealth distribution, then you'd have to ask, well, how do we do that? Like what are the mechanisms? We just can't magically make it a five from a, you know, meaning total equality. So how do we get there? In terms of the climate, I think it would be something similar in which I also encourage people to swap in and out their own cards for the categories that they think might be more interesting or useful for them. So I've worked with a professor in public policy who has adopted this to run some sort of simulations in which they will model the world in which they think it is as a group and then he'll randomly pick one category that just flips to the exact reverse, right? And then says from a policy perspective, how would you need to intervene and start building policy to take into account this black swan event? So it can be used for a lot of different reasons and a lot of different ways and for a lot of different age groups as well. I've got teachers who were using it in middle school. And again, it's how you introduce those concepts. I think there are ways to simplify it and there are ways to add even more complexity to the system. But the idea is that structure invites people in, right? If I say, okay, well, here are these 14 structures, give me a one to five. It's really easy, right? It's like taking a survey. The hard part is when you have to start justifying what is it that you came, like why did you say it's a three? Why did you say it's a four? When we're looking at movies or books or whatever, I'll ask, well, what's the textual evidence that you would point to to say, you know, that race relations are bad or gender relations are great. And I think you can do the same thing if you ask somebody to, you know, model present-day Cleveland, right? Well, why did you come up with the numbers, the numeric values that you did? Another thing too that we do, I'm just doing, I'm doing an independent study with a group of five students on advanced world building. And one of the things that I'm asking them to do is thinking about almost like network permissions, what things does a world inherit from the next larger world up? And then, you know, start thinking about the world that may exist within that world. So using Rochester as an example, if we build the world of Rochester, well, what's the world of Western New York and how is it different and how is it similar or the Northeast or the United States compared to say South America or other countries or other states. And then on the other end, we can also say, well, campus is out in Henrietta. It's very different than downtown Rochester. Are those effectively separate worlds that we crossed through? In how many world are we crossing through when we drive from one side of town to the other? So those ideas as well, and that's where you can use that same system to be able to say, well, here are the structures. How radically do they change when we move from place to place and where are they similar? And then always, what are you, how are you justifying your opinions? How are you justifying those numbers that you came up with? I'm just, go ahead, Tom. Get ready to get the society's teeth kicked down their throat. I think we're right on the edge of a tipping point. Yeah. For writing fiction or screenplays, they're supposed to have a rhythm like, and so they're called beats. I am writing the beats for a massive, we gotta do it, no options, climate crisis world. And if anybody's interested in that one, I need to work my ideas against other people. Thank you. Well, it sounds great. It's a great question to bring up, Tom. And also, I wonder about using this deck, a modified form of this to look at, say, a given city over the course of the next 75 years and then bringing in different cards or different functions, everything from, you know, flooding to extreme. Well, actually, it's a given world. That's true. That's true. We're all in this together, folks. Well, thank you, Tom. Thank you. Friends, you can see it's really easy to ask questions either through video or through typing things in the question mark. So we'd love to hear more. As I say that, another question has come up. So let me just bring this up. This is from Charles Finley from Northeastern. He asks, do students implement their worlds in VR platforms such as the central land or are the worlds limited to the design? So when we're working in the world building classes and then this upper level class, the one that, so the world building is a 300 level class. The game-based fiction, the one that uses role-playing games is a 500 level class. We usually start with a little bit of world building there can be fan fiction elements into that as well. But there's a different level of world building that happens in both of those classes. In the 300 level class, we're really talking about concepts and then trying to capture those concepts in language because I am an English and a creative writing instructor. So that's really my area of expertise is trying to figure out how do you make the language really sparkle? And I argue that if you're making a film, you're gonna have to write some sort of synopsis, some sort of treatment that is going to sparkle. So all that language stuff works. But for the upper level courses particularly, a number of students are using the world that they build for their capstone projects for games that they're designing. I've not had anybody do anything in VR yet. Another big one is, and I really encourage this, is their own tabletop role-playing game campaigns. So they'll build a sophisticated world that they will then take to their friends and they'll play D&D in it, right? So really it's open. They have not yet had a situation which I'm saying we are doing this project for this reason, you will build a VR world based on this world that we have that we're going to create together. But I would love to. One of the things that I would like to propose at RIT too is making like an alternate campus where you can just have a fictional layer that you lay over the campus and the buildings become sides of the village or whatever it is. And I think that would be really easy to then have an AR layover or maybe have some sort of VR representation to it as well. So there's lots of exciting potential. And then the question always just becomes time and kind of get more people to do it. And that's why I'm always really excited to sort of proselytize and say, well, this is the way I do it. Why don't you check out some of this stuff and try it yourself and drop me a line and let me know how it goes, right? Because different people will use it in different ways. And it's just really exciting to be able to see how different people use it. Indeed, very, very exciting. I love the AR aspect to really turn your campus into a different layer. We have more questions coming in and by the way, we also have more people coming in. So hello to folks who've come in over the past few minutes. Good to see all of you here, like people like Keith McIntosh and Genevieve. So we have one question that has to do with integrating ideas. And this is from Gabrielle Maylock at Southern New Hampshire. How can you integrate your ideas on teaching with games, fan culture, world building in an online learning environment? Yeah, I think it's actually not that difficult because a lot of the work that we do in the conversations that we have, I mean, most of my classes, I try to lecture as little as possible and really want the ideas from the students to sort of be the central part. But like the way that I run the world building class could very easily be done on discussion boards online. I sometimes wonder if the conversations aren't as rich because people may self-center or self-censor rather or delete things when you're having a discussion and people start to get a little heated especially, they may blurt something out that someone says, oh, well, doesn't that sort of suggest that you think this about this topic or something like that? But I think it can very easily be done. I mean, we use Google Maps to be able to create these fictional layers over actual real world places. So I think most of it, the discussion could be moved to the discussion boards. What I'm trying to figure out for spring is I can never do the same thing twice. I'm trying to figure out if I can do sort of like a play-by-mail role-playing game campaign that doesn't require a Game Master because one of the things that I've covered over eight or nine years of now doing this and presenting at conferences, the number one thing I get is that's great but I could never do it because I don't understand role-playing games enough and whatever. So what I want to try and do is create a sort of package deal in which if you're interested in it then you hear the rules that you could use to be able to roll this out for 20 or 25 students. And it's basically just, I mean, this is the great thing too, especially with the fan culture. Students are already doing this in fan fiction, right? On fan fiction sites and they do their own play-by-mail sort of things. So it doesn't really matter for me if we're doing Star Wars fan fiction, we have done Game of Thrones fan fiction. What matters for me is that they're grappling with the idea that your characters are gonna be socially situated within this environment and they're gonna have different opportunities based on maybe their class or their race or their religion, that not all characters have the same opportunities. So that's sort of like the core of it. And then looking at the language. So the content doesn't really matter, right? And this is where people will knock fan fiction and it's like, well, fan fiction that is using Marvel superheroes is really no different than students who are trying to ape literary tradition, right? It's not like the literary beginning writing is all that much better than the fan fiction. So my perspective is let's just look at the language. Let's look at the ideas. Let's not go to stereotype. Let's make this complicated because that's the thing is I'm not a big fan of commercial fiction either, right? I like the good genre fiction. The things like China Mieville is one of my favorite factors because it's just a bewildering array of complexity and diversity in his writing. And that's what I want my students to understand going back to one of the things you said earlier, Brian learning about what makes these genres interesting, right? It's not the commercial side that is the most schlocky, you know, dime store kind of novel. Those can be fun, but that's not the kind of writing that I want my students to be doing. I want them to be doing some of the intellectual work and drawing from especially on a STEM campus from their backgrounds in engineering and other sciences, computer science and start to extrapolate and bring in ideas that they have from their scientific backgrounds into the world of the arts and creation. So this is an engineering campus primarily. Are your students mostly traditional age undergrads 18 to 22? Yes, I've not. So I did my undergraduate or did my graduate work at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, way more diverse. I had lots of returning students, lots of students who were coming back from the military or job changers in their 40s. I don't think I've had a single non-traditional student while I've been at RIT. I think everybody pretty much fits within 18 to 22 years. So that's another thing too that the more diverse the group that you're working with, more rich world you get in the end, right? Because you get so many more perspectives. So sometimes it's hard if you have a lot of people who are coming from a similar background to sort of encourage them to think about the world in different ways. We have all kinds of topics that have come in and I have all kinds of things I want to run by you. But let me remind everybody that you can join with your own questions, turn on your camera and then you can join us up here on stage, like Tom just did, or if you can't type in a question like Sierra's done, then Gabrielle, then Charles. We have a question that came in via Twitter actually. I just want to run this value. This is from Dan Lasota in Alaska, an instructional designer, and he asks, I'm hoping to learn some techniques in making games for education that avoid the trap that in order to achieve a learning objective, the game avoids fun. So how do you make these learning experiences, how do you make these learning games actually games and fun? Yeah, so I think that's, one thing that I encourage people to if they're not experienced with game design because I'm not an accomplished game designer by any stretch of the imagination is to think about games where you can easily see the mechanics of the game and the rules of the game could be applied to the content that you're trying to teach what your learning outcomes are. So this is something too where I've been talking some professors here that I think they're going to try it either this year or in the spring to have their final project be like, I've got a friend who's a French historian and she's got this class on the French Revolution and her final project, one of the options will be make a French Revolution game, right? And it's not just your key goal or whatever. You'd have to come up with some way of using those mechanics that would reflect that you're able to take the content and then put it into a game. And that way you don't have to worry about if nobody in the room is a game designer. You don't have to worry about balance. You don't have to worry about those kind of things. And there are so many different kind of, I mean, this is sort of a tabletop gaming renaissance right now that there's so many games. And if you go on board game geek, if you go on other discussion boards and just ask, I'm looking for a game that maybe pandemic, if you're not familiar with that game, it's about trying to keep a global viral outbreak contained. Could you use that perhaps for the content that you're looking for because we already know those games are super fun and just be able to sort of map what you wanna have them get out of it onto the game itself. So that's one easy way, probably easy entry point into making educational games. Well, I understand that's a good one. And there's a wide range of those, pandemic and centers of Catan, Slyster, different areas. My son and I got very excited about terraforming Mars, which is an educational game that was designed by a high school science teacher. And so they've done terraforming Venus and added more experiences. So meanwhile, as Tom pointed out, we're terraforming the earth in some ways that are pretty terrifying. We have lots of questions that are coming in. And Ryan, I'm gonna put your question up. If you wanna follow up in video, let me know. This is a question, a very practical one. He's a central Methodist. He's another English professor, watch out. Is in terms of deliverables and assessment, what kind of documents are produced at the end of your semester? And do they distribute their materials to local audience? To start on the end of that, they actually distribute their materials to a global audience. Almost everything that we do is available on the internet. And I do encourage, I tweet things out, I'll post them to Facebook. And that's too, this idea of the class next semester. The Play by Mail campaigns can get really large. And that's one of the things that I'm toying with is can I have friends, colleagues, other people create the sort of the NPCs that the students in the world, their characters will have to interact with. I think that could be a lot of fun. But really breaking down that idea that the classroom is this bubble that doesn't have anything to do with the outside world. Like really, there were, they can anonymize it if they use whatever handle that they want. And sometimes they come up with some very creative ones. But then that allows them to be able to work without really worrying about, is a future employer going to Google me and figure out that I made this homicidal maniac character or something like that. So on the first part of that question, a lot of it, the big question that I sort of asked throughout the semester is, did you show up to work? Did you, I asked you to make, to participate and add so many words to the meta narrative of the story of the world. And can you show me where you did that? And I have peer assessment and things like that. I asked you to make three locations, three characters and three items that exist in the world. Did you do that? Did you do that on time? So a lot of it is beam counting and just sort of looking to make sure that they stayed engaged. And that's one of the things too that's a struggle on this campus particularly is they just get crushed by other projects in coding projects and computer science and other really heavyweight engineering problems that are a project that they're working on. And these are sort of the fun elective, right? So it's sort of the first thing that they're often coached in fact to let go. So that's really at the end of the day, I'm looking at quality, whether they are able at the end of the semester to be able to revise. I have a lot of reflective assignments and even though the final product may not be the quality that you'd wanted, a short story that worked out as well as you'd wanted. But what did you learn? What did you think about? What were the decisions that you had to make? One of the things that I love doing for the 500 level class, the role-playing game class is I do oral exams at the end. And we do teach story structure in that. And what they need to do when they come in is tell me, I give them the floor and I ask them basic questions. What do you think is working in this story? What do you think means work in the story? And that's how we open up the conversation. I've got my notes on what I think was working and what I think was not, but it really avoids, I mean, they're scared to death about doing an oral exam on their fiction writing at the end of the semester. But it really motivates them to actually think, right? So many times with creative writers, especially people who are working sort of on their own, they just kind of sit down and start writing whatever they want. And I think there's value to that. But the things that I'm trying to reinforce throughout the class are these aspects of critical thinking and thinking about, well, how is your character different than the character that they're standing next to, right? How do they view the world differently? So what I've found is, I mean, I think probably the most accomplished short story that I've ever had students produce, it was a collaborative effort from two students that was in a Star Wars fan fiction class. And they wrote this beautiful story of these two characters who were both sort of emotionally closed off and worked together out of convenience. And then if you know the sort of Star Wars mythos, they go into this cave to find kyber crystals and they both have sort of semi-religious experiences with the force and they come out really transformed and they're able to have a different kind of relationship. And it was super sophisticated, right? And I was like, wow, this is well written, both students just really hit it off. I'm like, this is the best thing that I've ever seen students put together. And I mean, maybe that description makes it sound a little cheesy, but really trust me, it worked. And at the end of the day, it's like, well, you can't do anything with this because it's Star Wars, right? It's copyrighted. So there's nowhere really that you can do it. But again, those kind of moments too, really have shown me that I've gotten way better results out of students with these approaches than I have with other approaches. Because especially when I was in graduate school, I would teach a little bit more traditional creative writing and I had some students say that they wanted me to do a class on science fiction, fantasy and horror and how to get published in short fiction because that's my background and I did it. And within three weeks, I'm like, this sucks. Nobody is into it. They don't enjoy it, right? They thought they were going to like it, but they don't. So what I find too is with the collaborative aspects, if Brian and I and one other person are creating a world together and Brian suddenly uses that weird, empowered screwdriver in his story that I created, I'm suddenly way more interested in seeing how that appears in somebody else's fiction, right? So if you start doing that at scale and there's little pieces of you all over that world and there's little pieces of everybody else in the class all over that world and they're being assembled in ways that you would not have foreseen or imagined, that creates real excitement and a real draw for them to work together. And the other thing I say is that, when you're working on, if you do get a job in the creative industry, which so many of them do, they're not gonna say, okay, 23-year-old, why don't you write me a story from beginning to end with all your new characters and all your new world building, you know, and all this stuff, they're probably gonna have to be in a team that will either come up with that or even more often, they're gonna have to be able to figure out, well, if I'm working for World of Warcraft, how do I build a level that feels warcraft-y enough? So that's where some of the aspects of the fan fiction come in, is if you're working in that entertainment industry and you would get hired by Lucasfilm, right? Well, how are you gonna build assets or come up with narrative ideas that are complementary to what already exists? I think these are actually much more important skills and things that most people in creative writing ignore. But I think these are really important for equipping these students, not only to be savvy 21st century media consumers, but then also the producers. How do you fit? Because as we've seen is Disney takes over the planet with Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar, right? Thinking very critically about what makes for good stories in those worlds, how can you participate? How can you own some of that or at least be able to take ideas from it and make it something that's personalized? So if you have to work on how to train your dragon six, then it's gotta fit in and you can't just do it from scratch. Right. There are a lot of different points here. And if I could just ask you to go back up to something you said earlier, you were talking about one of your students being interested in procedural narrative. If you could just quickly tell people what procedural narrative is. And if you could say, there's an example of a student doing some really creative work on some challenging technique. Sure. So procedural narrative is a term that's used a little differently in different fields. And the way I use it may not be the way that other people use it. But generally speaking, procedural narrative, like in video games is that there are things that will be randomly, there'll be a table of characteristics or something like that that will be drawn randomly. And the world that I'm playing in will end up being procedurally generated, randomly generated in a way that'll be different than every other person who is playing that game. So Minecraft would be one example of that, right? In which the aspects of the world are procedurally generated. So the way that it works for me in the example of using the world building deck which I showed before, we procedurally generate the world. Sometimes either we'll model or you can sort of half model where you set a couple of the values and then you shuffle the rest. Students almost always go for the full Monty where they wanna shuffle all 14 and create that randomly. So that's the way that I talk about procedural narrative. And when we get to characters, like I've got a deck of positive traits, a deck of narrative traits, a deck of motivations and a deck of things that connect the character to the world and then also a deck of relationship cards. So I shuffle those up and then each character gets one of those cards and then we build relationships between them. And this also, I mean, one of the strategies for this in thinking through the rationale for this is coming up with a story can be really hard, especially if you've not read a lot or you've read a lot of things that are very commercial and very stereotypical. So this gives you all the things that you need to get a story rolling that you may not have thought about before, right? You can't plan for it. And that's also where the collaborative aspect comes in. If you deal out, like I tend to play, when I'm play testing, I'll do a lot of solo runs, like a solitaire run through. And I'm an experienced storyteller so I can find stories all over in these things. But, you know, a lot of times there'll be three or four students who will be crouched over the table and like, where are we finding the story in these random things that we've been delivered? And to me, again, that aspect of finding story, I say that in my classes all the time, it's really important because that's what we do on a daily basis. If I come home and my partner asks me, how was my day, right? I don't say, well, I woke up and then I had breakfast and I took the dog for a walk. You know, we pick and choose. We decide what part of our day was interesting. It starts shaping a narrative around that. We find the story of our days. That's one of the things that I'm trying to teach students to be able to do to be way more flexible rather than thinking about hero's journey, which that's where they sort of taught that's the one and only kind of story, right? The hero called the duty and goes out and saves the world. It's one story structure out of many different possibilities. So that's where the procedural part is, you know, randomly generate it and then find the story in this. And this is where the character deck is, the world building deck is sort of universal. The character deck is universal, but then the plot building deck, you need those elements that are genre based, right? So what would be in a cyberpunk deck? What would be in a high fantasy or epic fantasy deck, right? So you may draw a sword in one and you may draw, you know, like a data chip that you plug into your head in another one. But the idea is you deal out all those things for the plot building deck. You get plot points, characters, locations and items and you get them all out on the table and you start building scenes around well, what would be an interesting conflict between the characters that we created 15 minutes ago to get this story sort of moving. So that, you know, basically those structures are what helps them and allows them to have entry and they don't have to come up with everything. The procedures are such, the rules are such that they're given the material and then they have to figure out what to do with it. That sounds like a rather bit of a prop in the morphology of the folktale. You know, you have these pieces and you get to see them but you're really pushing them towards creatively building these links up. Yeah. Let me, if I can, turn the conversation to look ahead a bit. I'm trying to imagine what your kind of pedagogy and your curriculum would look like in say five years. What are some of the dreams you'd like to realize? I mean, I'm assuming an AR Rochester, multiple games, you know, post-mortem project in Western and gamer firms and so on. What else do you see coming up? What are some of the changes and expansions? Well, one of the things that I know this campus prioritizes at least in sort of the marketing materials but struggles to do on a day-to-day basis is break down some of these disciplinary silos, right? And let faculty work in a much more fluid way than rather trying to account for every hour do we have the student contact hours, right? Most of the people that I work with are not trying to get out of work. We all make ourselves work more than we probably have to. But this is where I'm excited about, you know, if there are opportunities to be able to build things that are truly interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, I'd love to set up an advanced world-building course where we bring in an economist, a political science professor, somebody from history, right? And then start getting into, because I'm not an expert in any of those areas, right? But really start getting into, you know, philosophy second and third layer, sort of like, what do we mean when we talk about world-building? And then what are we gonna do? Like how can we get, I already have these things out on the internet, but unless you're somebody's, you know, aunt or parent or whatever, it's probably not making that big of an impact. So then how do we package this in something in an app or, you know, an interactive experience or something that will actually have an impact besides the group of people who are working on it, right? So I know from talking with students who have taken my classes over all these years I still have students from my very first time that I taught a class like this at UW Milwaukee still come back to me today and talk about very specific moments in that class where they're like, that's never left me, right? So that's great. That was great for those 25 students and I'm working with students usually now at RIT in batches of 20. Well, how can we break that wall and have say a thousand people in Rochester somehow be able to interact? Can they build parts of this world? Can they claim ownership? You know, in my own utopian thinking if you have a rule set and you have some technology that gives them some structures where they could log in I think we could start building things that going back to Tim's question earlier they have a fictional veneer but they're actually getting at social issues other issues that we're trying to solve through using fiction, right? Through using fiction and through moral or ethical decisions that you could perhaps put in front of characters to be able to think through. So those are the things that I really get excited about and there's a lot of energy for that in a campus like this. The question though is just always how to transform that into some actual product. Just doesn't seem like things work well enough and it's mostly unfortunately got to do with can I get scheduled in a time in which my class meets at the same time as this other professor or I can't teach this class this semester because I'm required to teach something else. Those wind up being the biggest roadblocks. So hopefully that trend of departments and disciplines melting would be great, right? I wonder about in terms of public science and in terms of outreach or getting people who are anxious about a lack of scientific literacy might really want to follow this out. Yeah. We have a question that came in from a longtime friend of the program who couldn't make it today for scheduling reasons. Tom Hames wanted to ask, what do you think of the convergence of gamification and design thinking? He was referring to the recent pair of books from a couple of authors about design on bound and wondering where do you stream the gamification design thinking? Yeah, I think for people too who are not as familiar with this area, gamification is usually used where it's a badge system or a warrant system where the game element, so it's like math blaster, like my kids will play that on the iPad in which you're zooming along in your spaceship and then there's a space octopus and you need to figure out these math problems, right? Five plus 10 is 15, right? Has nothing to do with the space squid but you can't shoot the space squid until you solve all the math problems, right? So that tends to be more of a gamification approach or having a leaderboard instead of having a leaderboard for your class so people can see where they fit along with their peers. That's more of a gamification process. Game-based learning, which is where I tend to do all of my work is much more about aligning those learning outcomes with game mechanics, right? So what kind of games, and this is where you probably can put this together on your own, the reason why I use role-playing games is because it's deeply about the character's perspective that you're in, right? When you're playing a role-playing game, you form a bond with this character that you've created. So that's what I'm trying to get them to think through when they're writing fiction is really get that perspective. But I think really, one of the things too that I talk about with my students in my classes all the time, and I think this is going to go back to the design thinking is intentionality, right? What is it that you want this to have to succeed at at the end of the day? And a lot of times what I'm finding too is students that come up with things that are clever but aren't very sophisticated. And that's where I can introduce them to other avenues, other ideas, other faculty members, point them to other faculty members and other disciplines and say, can we get this to that next level of complexity to think about, well, what is it that you want it to do? And this is why as well like in classes and so many of my colleagues are starting to do this is to go towards projects at the end of the semester, right? Where it's not just writing a paper where you submit it to the professor and that's the only person who ever reads it because then the intention is to pass the class, right? If you allow people to do a project of their own choosing, they have to think about, well, how is this gonna work, right? How much time do I have to put it together? What's the scope of this problem? What are the ways that I'm gonna be able to reach a different audience than maybe just this one instructor who is assessing me? So I think that design thinking can also be used in a very buzzwordy way just like we're disrupting education and you're doing all these other things and it's like really just sort of marketing copy to be able to sell some new book or product or something like that. But I think if you start thinking through, when I think of design thinking, it's about those inner relationships and the interconnectivity of all the different pieces that will go into whatever project is that you're working on and being really intentional about it, right? How is this one piece going to affect the rest of it? And especially all of these things only multiply, I think when you start doing team-based projects because then you gotta work with other people and not everybody can get their own way which is a really, I know, group projects can drive students crazy because some of the students are lazier, right? Some students are pushier, but it's a skill that they're gonna need when they go into their professional careers. They're gonna need to know how to cope with those things so I don't lose too much sleep over not allowing them to do, like in the world-building class, many of their faces fall when I tell them everything we're doing this semester is collaborative. You will not be working on a world with fewer than four other people. They're really disappointed, but then by the end of this semester, in rare cases, they end disappointed, but in most cases, it's like, oh yeah, well now I can go work on my project by myself. How big are your classes? 20 students for creative writing classes and then for the lit and media classes, 32. Okay, so some are seminar-sized and some are a bit bigger than that. Yep. For instance, we're almost at the end of the hour and so we are, this is your last shot to ask Professor Hergan reader a question and I know some of you have been chatting about some different ways these projects can be implemented and where these can possibly go. So let me just remind you, you have one last chance to fire off a question, again, either through video or through typing in a question. So I'll ask one in order to give you a minute to scramble and think of a good question, which is, you know, Eric Zimmerman, I think, I was suggesting that the 21st century would be known as ludic century, century games, the gaming becoming our highest art form succeeding film. I wonder if what you seem to be describing is a version of that, that more and more people will be participating in games, more and more faculty across the disciplines, more students and then more people from outside, from, you know, the local campus, the area, Rochester and so on. How far does this go? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think it's one of these things that I've been asked before too, because of my work in role-playing games, like why is there this renaissance of Dungeons and Dragons? Because we're not getting just a big upswing in their sales and Dungeons and Dragons is sold more with this recent fifth edition than any other edition, and I'm sure several of the editions combined. But we're seeing, you know, books coming out where people are reflecting on their youth and when they were playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I think it's generational. I think it's also with video games in that I grew up, I was born in 74, and we had an Atari 2600 in the house, we had a Colecovision, we had a Nintendo. Gaming was part of my culture, just growing up, that was just around me all of the time, in a way that it wouldn't have been for my parents' generation. I mean, they would have games, they would have monopoly and things like that, but it was not nearly as ubiquitous, and it certainly was for me, and I think that when you realize that other people have those same experiences, that it starts to sort of break down the walls of being afraid of talking about these things or thinking that they're silly, and I think that's where we've reached right now is that first generations of D&D players are now in their 40s and their 50s, and they're in control of editorial content for newspapers and magazines, and they're professors creating courses and these kinds of things. So I think the students today get it, and I mean, this is where too, one of the earlier questions sort of alluded to this. When I'm saying I'm teaching with games, they think it's cool, but they don't think it's weird and they're not suspicious of it, right? They wanna get in because they think it's like, okay, that makes sense, let's see how it works. So I think as the generations, and this is where too in higher ed, the generational divide between some of my older colleagues who, you know, they wanna lecture, that's the way they learned and that's the way that they wanna do it. And then some of the people who are more recently graduated and are looking in more innovative ways, there can be tension there as well, of course, between what is the right way to be able to teach these concepts. But I think games are just gonna be another lens in which we understand our world, and as more people get on board, I mean, I'm not a game designer, but I've made a game, right, it's the same thing where people like, I'm not a writer, but I wrote a novel, right? People do that all the time. So yeah, I think it's gonna continue, and it's really gonna be for the next generation to determine where games go. I mean, I think Gen Xers have done a pretty good job bringing them into the light now, so we'll see where the next generations take it. I'm about eight years older than you. So I remember as a teenager, the D&D panics over, James Dallas Egbert, and one of the worst time of Hanks movies of all time. Yes. Maze and Monsters, I think. Yes. We have a great question, another follow-up from Charles Finlay. He asks, this is an ethical consideration. How do you consider the validity of the consequences in the real world of these games? And he's thinking about, does the knowledge support and reward the decision based on real world knowledge? And Charles, if you wanna follow up with that, please, please feel free. Yeah, so I guess I'm a little confused. So the result of the work that the students do, does that have real world consequences or how do I measure those real world consequences? Is that sort of the root of the question? Yeah, Charles, if you can do video, let me know or if you wanna type in another follow-up with that in the chat to me, please go ahead. I can answer that question very briefly because I don't have great data. Like I do qualitative studies at the end and students are able to be able to express in their own words what they've learned and what they got out of the course. I do not ever claim that I am improving their critical or critical thinking or empathy or things like that. Not because I don't think it's happening, but because I'm not trained to measure it. And that's where again, like having a collaboration with could we build a role-playing game course just like I do in my creative writing classes with somebody who is in ethics or moral philosophy or things like that and then try and have that outcome and then have the group that will go through it and then measure how much that happens, right? One of the nice things about teaching and creative writing is no one really expects anything of you, right? It's art. They're not expecting us to have students come out and write stories for the New Yorker. And if there's anything else we do, collaborative, digital, it's all gravy, right? I mean, it's just sort of like a nice art class for students to take. So the stakes in creative writing are really, really low as well. And I'm always hesitant. I mean, I know from having talked to students that the critical thinking improves, but I'd love to be able to measure that somehow. It's just not my area of expertise. That's a whole different level of assessment. I think Charles is asking along the lines of what gamification does, both for good and for ill, and what does that teach us to do? And then what kind of behavior do we simulate? However, we're right at the edge of the hour. We have just burned through an hour of the forum. Let me just ask, on behalf of Charles and everybody else, Trent, how do we keep up with you? How do we follow all the different projects? What's the next step? It's, you know, if you wanna friend me on Facebook, feel free, that's where I actually post a lot of questions, a lot of ideas to my network to say, you know, what do you think of this idea or that idea? I'm also on Twitter at T. Hergen-Raid, no R. I can't, I'm over the character count. So T-H-E-R-G-E-N-R-A-D-E is probably the most sort of public way to keep in contact with me. And then, you know, I try to go to conferences that are games in education, although the Game Learning Society GLS Conference that was at Madison, Wisconsin, stopped running a few years ago and I think a number of people who are really into this are still trying to find a new home. But yeah, if people know of other conferences, meaningful play is one that I'm just gonna start going to the CUNY Games Festival. It happens in January in New York City. So trying to figure out, do we have a critical mass here? Are there other people who want to adopt these things or at least talk about it? Drop me an email, right? You can find my email address either on my faculty profile or it's just my name, Trent Hergen-Rader at Gmail. We had an email from Sue Boll who runs the serious play conference in cheese. Yeah, absolutely. That's another one. So we can follow up with you that way. Let me thank you for being both a terrific guest but also an inspiring faculty member. Thank you. This is so exciting. I really look forward to seeing where you go with this next. Yeah, great. Thank you very much. It was one of those things that I had to wait. My advisor in graduate school was Stuart Malthrip and he's very on page with all of these things. I really about it. And before he arrived, there were a lot of questions about, you know, from other faculty and members about what the hell it was that I was doing. So I'm always very thankful for him to be able to, for him to come in and use his position to be able to say, no, this is good stuff. And then being hired at a university that also allows me to do these things and I'm lucky in that regard. And as are your students to have you. Stuart's a great guy. If you talk to him soon, please tell him I said hi. I will. Thank you again. We're gonna follow up. I think next year we're gonna bring you back to see what else you've been up to. Great, it sounds great. Thank you so much. But don't go, friends. We have information about the next week and make sure they share this with you. Next week's guest, we change gears to take a look at students today based on the most cutting-edge, extensive research available. We have Doug Shapiro, really lucky to land him as a guest. He's the director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which does terrific work about the demographics, the identity, the classes, the enrollment of students. So he gets to really dig in and learn more. And there on the slide, there's the link to the signup session, chinding.com.slash, login.slash, event.slash, these Shapiro. Now also coming up, if you'd like to find recordings of this session and all others, just head to tinyorel.com slash FTFarchive and you can see all of those there going back almost four years. And if you want to keep talking about these questions about what does it mean to have students make role-playing games and collaboratively build worlds and how do you support gamification and how does this actually play out in reality, then let's keep talking about this. We have groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. We have a group on Slack. On Slack, very reactive on Twitter. We'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, thank you all for the terrific questions. We really appreciate the conversation. We look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, take care. Goodbye.