 Greetings. I'm Richard Garriott and I have been a member of the X-Prize family since its founding. And I am very excited to speak to you today about the challenges and potential of virtual learning environments. As some of the other speakers in the series, I myself am a bit of a non-traditional learner. In fact, I consider myself one of the first successful products of the self-taught through self-curated videos era. In school I was a BC student at best, yet I found a way to shine through independent self-paced projects like science fairs, which I excelled at. This allowed the faculty at my schools to give me the latitude to take on more independent projects, and I flourished with their great support on my independent exploration of computers. By the time I finished high school, my career as one of the very first ever computer game developers was already well underway. When I went off to college, as my business income soared, my GPA shrunk. And ultimately, with my family's blessing, I left school to run my first company, and while my family expected that era to eventually pass so I could finish my degree and get a real job, at this point I don't think I'll be returning to school, at least not as a student. I am an example of how, with the right tools and a motivated mind, one can in fact not only get the basics of an education, but ride to the top of a field through hard work and sufficient access to appropriate educational content. But I've also learned, by direct experience, about the competition for a learner's attention. You know, whatever the platform, whether it's videos or computer screens, potential learners are bombarded with other non-educational uses of the same technologies, often produced at even higher levels of quality than much of the educational content. This makes leveraging these platforms especially challenging. Let me illustrate this with some stories out of my own games. The computer games that I'm best known for was a role-playing series called Ultima. The series started in the late 1970s and is responsible for modern use of the term avatar, which I will discuss shortly, and the series also spawned the first massively multiplayer online game, or MMO, with a game called Ultima Online, and its successors continue to this day. Through more than 40 years of creating that game series and its follow-ons, I began to recognize the power of role-playing. When I would get fan mail, even for my early primitive works, I realized that players were reading and interpreting my work in many unusual ways. As humans seem to do, they would often speculate, fill in gaps, and interpret a broader meaning than I had ever intended. And while this was generally harmless, I quickly realized the impact I could have by laying a more purposeful foundation in my work. You know, my earliest games had simple stories about hunting monsters, gaining power, and defeating a primary antagonist. But players quickly learned that the shortest paths to victory often included morally questionable activities that the game allowed. For example, you could steal from the shops in my games, and while the guards would chase you off, players still exploited these behaviors all while supposedly on the path of being the savior of the people. And at the end of all my games, my personal character in the game Lord British asked players to write to me in the real world and tell me of their quests. I then and now send players to write to me a personally signed certificate of their accomplishments. Interestingly, most who wrote to me after winning in these early games also told me their stories of cheating. So I resolved to make my next game in such a way that while I still allowed a moral behavior, the world would respond more realistically to directly show that a moral behavior would lead the in-game society to decide that you were not their savior, but in fact a rogue unworthy of helping, often working against you. The characters that you might steal from would quickly quit helping you and ultimately work against you in the game, and in this way, cheaters never prospered. You know, at this time in computer games, your persona that you played was generally referred to as your character. Your character might be an evil alter ego and thus you might enjoy pretending to be evil. But for this game, I wanted you, the real earth human, to feel responsibility for the actions of your character. And I had come across the term avatar in Hindu text describing the term as the human incarnation of various gods while they visited earth as the gods avatar. I adopted this term and created a game fiction that not only called your character your avatar, now in my fictional world, but your avatar in the game world also started with a psychological profile test that created its initial conditions in my game world. This was the first use of the term avatar in computer games, but as you know, this term has now become quite ubiquitous. When this game was released, it became my first number one bestseller, and to this day it is seen as a watershed moment in gaming. Many people wrote to me about how much they learned through playing the game, how their actual personal morality had been affected, and in fact, the New Yorker magazine recently published an article called The Computer Game That Led to Enlightenment, as this is the 35th anniversary of the publication of Ultima 4, Quest of the Avatar. You know, the game showed me that by making the play experience relevant and personal, not only can I make an even more successful piece of art, but also that this new interactive digital art form had potential far beyond what I had ever imagined. All the games that I've written since have attempted to speak to players at a deeper level, to speak to current issues and real-life problems, and all of those stories are recast as deceptively as possible into my medieval realms, but they're all packed with as much learning as I could possibly cram in. So throughout the decades, I've often been asked, you know, why don't you or others just make one of your AAA games as a full-on educational experience? And for many years, I started to believe that this was just not possible. And for years, the market at large failed to produce very many AAA educational experiences that rose to the level of self-sustaining financially. And I believe that this was largely due to the competitive landscape when trying to captivate someone's attention on these digital devices. Now, I've been in this industry from its inception to the current day, from a time when bringing in $100,000 of revenue in a game was an exciting new threshold across. Yet today, now the costs to make a AAA title have reached over a billion dollars, and the revenues of AAA games are often in the multiples of billions of dollars. You know, computer gaming-related experiences are now far bigger economically and by social impact than all movies, television, books, theater, and other forms of art combined many times over. eSports now commands as large or larger audiences than physical sports. But it remains a hit-based business. If you make one of the top 10 products in a winning category, you can win big. But after that, it gets tough fast. And the majority of computer game-like experiences do not make returns commensurate with their costs. Because of the profoundly difficult competitive race for the consumer's attention, anything you do that is not laser-focused on how do I reach the top 10 as great risk into reaching the top 10 and thus financial viability. You know, I regularly tell people that as someone who sees the potential power of interactive education that the price of entry is so high and the odds of earning back your costs are so low that to try and make a self-sustaining educational AAA product that was commensurate with its costs was folly. You know, people would then often lobby me to consider making a budget experience with donated money. But my answer remains similar, that no one would play or stick around in an experience that didn't compete with the AAA alternatives on their digital devices. And for many years, this seems to have remained true even in hindsight. The good news is we finally seem to be moving beyond this limitation. Computing devices have finally become so powerful and the reality engines that we create for them have become so readily available that just looking and playing well is no longer one of the key challenges to developers. And finally, since competing purely on graphical bells and whistles is losing absolute dominance, we're also seeing great massively successful experiences that both abandon the best reality engine look and contain great content that bridges the gap from pure play and begins to move into focused learning. Now, my favorite example of this bridge is Minecraft, which I expect most of you here know well. You know, I happen to love Minecraft not only because it's a great game, but because it's organized in such a way that the players can quickly move from being pure passive consumers, which they are in most gaming experiences, to actual contributors. You know, first using the world editors to reorganize their own play space, but then by making mods to the game, some even will add their own code to the game and ultimately share or even sell their mods to others. And so Minecraft remains one of my most highly recommended experiences for parents to buy for their kids. You know, recently developers began expertly crafting MMOs with a strong educational focus. My favorite current example is called Adventure Academy, which was recently launched by Age of Learning, the makers of ABC Mouse. You know, and while I was personally critical of the slow tech used by ABC Mouse, kids didn't seem to mind. The product did very well and the company's new offering is great across the board. It is a beautiful integration of all the classic MMO features, which encourage and reward participation in educational quests. The rewards that kids earn and share, they can share their constantly improving avatars on homesteads within the world. Which brings me to this final section, you know, where we are today. You know, for decades, I've claimed to simultaneously be one of the world's greatest virtual reality enthusiasts, hoping beyond hope that we were close to seeing AAA MMOs in virtual reality, which I hope to be the first to create and have throughout my career. You know, in fact, a fun little side fact is that I was the inspiration for James Halliday, the creator of the Oasis in Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. But simultaneously, I was always sad to realize or come to the conclusion that true self-sustaining AAA virtual reality worlds for profit or education remained even further off. I was usually convinced it would be ten years or more, no matter which decade you asked me that question. You know, today, I actually believe we have the pieces necessary to finally begin to truly open this door. Events like this today are a great sign. You know, the newest light wireless virtual reality headsets are also essential. The quality reality engines that are now broadly available are essential. Still, I would argue that the door is just open a crack. It remains to be proven whether we can open it wide and keep it open, but I am now finally hopeful. But remember, any new experience, pure entertainment or educational, are competing for the same audience hours. Only the really great content will ultimately survive. Fortunately, we now have examples of all the pieces. We have great examples of educational experiences driven by AI. We have great educational experiences in compelling open social MMO environments. And we now see great VR experiences as well. I hope and believe that we all, as members of the XPRIZE extended family, can manifest this reality. And since I hope some of you listening will either make or support a team in making this reality come true, I offer a few brief tidbits from my lectures on virtual world creation. For example, do your research. You know, good fortune in my mind is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Another adage I like to chat about is that no one enjoys an experience that does not run well on their machine. You have to make your experiences stable, fast, and fun in that order. Obviously, if it's not stable, it won't be fun. If it's not fast, it won't be fun. And a final one is that, you know, this work is hard and often bigger teams don't help. You know, your development when you start one can either be on time, on budget, or on quality. And you can only pick two of those. The third one will often go far out the window and support the other two. You know, with that, I will begin wrapping up here by repeating that, you know, I really believe that the challenge and opportunities are both great experiences, which are deeply meaningful, personally responsive and connecting humans to humans for the betterment of all are now possible. This is the time to demand them for our students. This is the time that creators can create them. But the realities of the hit based world of digital experiences must still be met. No half baked ideas will see the light of day, only the best skilled creators driven by passion, supported by strong mentors, and sufficient capital will lead us to this bright future. So I thank you.