- [Narrator] We stand on the threshold of a great new age of exploration.

It's ultimate destination, the furthest reaches of the universe.

- [Announcer] 3, 2, 1.

[upbeat music] ♪ -[Wade Minter] All right, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the Frontier on the campus of Research Triangle Park, North Carolina for RTP180.

[audience applauds] You're correct.

Woo is the appropriate response to that statement.

Thank you for coming out here on a beautiful spring, like summer day or summer, like spring, like day.

I don't know.

Time has no meaning anymore y'all, it's still 2020 for me, but you are here at RTP180.

My name is Wade Minter.

I will be your MC as I am most months here.

Thank you for coming out.

I hope you have a great time and also a big thank you to our presenting sponsor.

That's right.

RTI International.

- [Audience] Woo.

- Woo is also the appropriate response to that.

RTI International's been making this thing happen for years.

We couldn't do without them.

We thank them for their support of RTP180 and all the other great stuff they do here in Research Triangle Park.

Now, for those of you who are here for the first time, or those of you who are veterans, what you're going to see is five speakers.

They're gonna come up and opine on their area of expertise for five minutes.

At the end of that five minutes, we'll move to a five minute question and answer period from you, the audience, which means get your questions ready in your thinking caps.

I will be coming to you.

You can raise your hand, flag me down.

We will get some questions answered for the questions that need answering.

Also, if you're social, you can tweet at us @frontierrtp.

You can hashtag us @RTP 180.

We may pull questions from social media, depending on how good your questions are.

No pressure, just so you know.

Now, normally, if you would come here during the day, you would see a place that looks a lot like this that's because you are currently sitting in the areas only free, pause for dramatic effect, coworking facility.

That's right here at the Frontier.

You can stop by any point in time during the day, post up, have some meetings.

This is a beautiful facility, convenient to everywhere in the Triangle, except possibly garner, but who's going there anyway.

[audience laughs] Shots fired.

All right.

Also, there's all fun stuff that happens here during the week.

We've got yoga.

We've got the box chart right across.

We've got all sorts of cool events, especially as the weather is getting nicer.

Now coming up on April 13th, we've got our on the menu, which is our lunchtime series for entrepreneurs to help you level up.

Our next one is coming up on April 13th from 12 to 1:00 PM, Burnout Prevention.

Woo, I might have to come to that.

How many people are burned out right now?

Everyone who didn't raise their hand is clearly burned out.

You should come to this.

It's fun.

But tonight our subject is gaming.

That's right.

We've got five experts on the topic of gaming.

They're gonna be here to show you what they know.

And now it is time for our first speaker of the evening.

He's a former pro athlete turned entrepreneur who runs an eSports gaming center in Cary.

Please welcome to the stage, Caleb Smith.

[audience applauds] - Hello everyone.

- [Audience] Hi.

- My name is Caleb Smith.

And like you said, I run a video gaming facility out in Cary.

And today I'm gonna be about eSports, the future of education.

So now when I said eSports, there are some of you in this room who had no idea what I was talking about, or may not have heard of eSports.

It stands for Electronic Sports, which is essentially competitive video gaming.

And there are stadiums being filled up with 10 to 20,000 fans watching eSports events.

There are also players making six and seven figures playing games, such as Fortnite, Call Of Duty and others.

And recently there's been a lot of buzz in North Carolina regarding eSports, especially here in the Triangle.

Back in November, there was a bill passed that offered incentive for publishers to bring the eSports events to the area.

In December at the Raleigh Convention Center, there was a eSports event hosted with 5,000 people in attendance, and just recently NC state received $16 million for the building of an eSports facility.

And now I'd spoke, quite a bit about eSports on the entertainment aspect, but there's also an educational aspect to eSports.

For instance, there are things that eSports can teach such as communication skills and teamwork, because most of these games are team based and have three to five players on it.

It's not, the solo person that you think just playing all night, things like that.

And there's also an educational component from, kids are very curious.

So oftentimes, when they're at my gaming center, they'll say to us, they're like, "Well, how do you not get hacked?"

And then that gives us the perfect opportunity to talk about cybersecurity and what a firewall is, or they'll look inside the PC and be like, "Well, what's that part?"

That's a graphics card.

"What's that part?"

That's a CPU.

And then they're intrigued and want to learn more and more about the different components that go into actually being able to do eSports.

And now there's been, for some reason, a stigma around gaming that it's antisocial and it's toxic, which part of that is slightly true, but it doesn't have to be.

[audience laughs] What we do is we work to combat that.

So for instance, more relaxation, less anxiety and STEM careers, which is what I just talked about previously.

And then also within the eSports as well, then we're able to talk about getting rid of the toxic behavior.

Talking about integrity, since cheating is a large issue in video gaming and teamwork, sportsmanship.

So what we do is we are taking all the negative things that people dislike about video gaming and making it positive.

And no, I talked a lot about kids and how we work with them and things like that.

But I've also worked with high school and college students as well.

Mentioning that eSports event that happened back at the Raleigh Convention Center in December, Esports Engine, which had put on the event, reached out to me.

And they were actually looking for staff members to work the event and they were paying them $15 an hour.

And that's an excellent way for people to add to their resume.

And in many colleges here locally in the Triangle are adding eSports and are reaching out, asking about internships and job opportunities.

And while there's so few of them, what we're working to do is create this workforce to produce more and more people that will be taking on these jobs, whether it be in eSports and also in STEM and tech careers.

And now I hope I changed some of y'all's viewpoint on gaming and eSports, and that you realize it's not just, the person sitting in the basement, eating potato chips, playing games, 12 hours a day, not doing anything with their life.

It's more than that.

This is about teaching valuable life skills.

It's about developing the future workforce.

It's about keeping kids off the streets.

Thank you.

[audience applauds] - All right.

Here's your chance.

Here's your chance to get questions answered about the world of eSports with Caleb Smith.

Raise your hand if you got a question, I'll bring the mic out to you.

You realize this isn't TV and I can't see all of you, right?

All right.

We got a question right here, down the aisle.

Question, first question of the night about the eSports gaming industry.

- The event that you hosted back in December, was it for, at the Raleigh Convention Center, was it for Halo Infinite?

- Well, we didn't host that, but yeah, we helped out with it and stuff.

Yeah.

That was Halo Infinite event.

- [Man] Oh okay.

[mumbles] - All right.

Lots of games out there in the eSports industry.

Oh, we've got some swag awesome, next question.

- [Man 2] I enjoyed your presentation.

I teach.

So when you say this is for education also, what made you start this thing anyway?

And what were your original goals for it?

- Well, I really enjoyed playing video games growing up and I liked the whole competitive aspect of eSports and what I wanted to do, from having been a professional athlete and knowing the whole process that it takes to get to that level.

I wanted to recreate that within eSports.

And then I learned that there was a larger market for just the casual gamers.

And then I learned that there was even a larger market for the whole STEM education aspect.

So we do still focus on the eSport side in players that, wanna play collegiate professionally.

But since there's such a large market of people who, enter us, especially the parents, they want their kids, learning something and if they can learn something, doing something that they enjoy.

That's the best of both worlds.

- All right.

Other questions?

We've got a couple over here to your right.

Just a big line of folks here.

All right.

First question.

- Hi.

I enjoyed your talk.

So thank you for that.

And on your talk, you talked a little bit about high school and college students, how that prepares them for the workforce.

But I was wondering if you worked with elementary and middle school age students, and if they are in your track out camps or playing Roblox and Minecraft at your facility.

- Yes.

So about 80% of what we do is with elementary and middle schoolers.

And we haven't tapped a whole lot into the high school and college market yet.

And what we do.

So we have camps and workshops, both.

So workshops are after school.

That happen about 90 minutes.

They come in with an instructor so they can do things.

Currently we have Minecraft, in the future we're planning on adding AI, Cybersecurity, and then the camps we've been doing those since last year in the summer.

And same thing with that, that's just a full week where we have different lessons and really cater to the people that come through summer, very high level advance and know how to code in script.

And the others that are just beginners.

- [Wade] All right, we're going right behind for our next question.

- All right.

My name is Theo, I'm a big fan of eSports.

Even looking back 2012, the scene is completely exploded.

You can just look at it.

You can watch your favorite professionals play on ESPN.

And a lot of that success goes to Twitch and YouTube.

My question is thinking forward, maybe 10, 20 years, where do you see eSports going?

What do you think the future will bring?

- With eSports, it's definitely gonna keep growing and getting bigger.

And when we look over at Asia and Europe and how much larger they are, North America has a lot catching up to do, which is part of why it will get bigger.

And then I really do think that VR and the metaverse will have a lot to come into within eSports and only the future knows.

- [Wade] All right.

Any other questions?

We have one from social media, if not.

The question from social media is, "These eSports teams, "how do they compete against each other?

"How do they form and how does a team operate?"

- So at the grassroots level eSports team forms just by buddies getting together and be like, "Yeah, let's play."

And there's this online tournament.

Or there may be an in-person tournament.

There's a LAN center nearby.

And then as it goes up, so for colleges, people that go to college, they get, they may get recruited or just at the college.

They'll be like, "I wanna play on this eSports team."

For the professional level, it's really, they look at players who have competed, actively competed.

So the people I know, I mean, they're practicing about eight plus hours a day.

And then on top of that, they will play in a competition at least every other weekend, if not every weekend so that they can see to get better, build up their resume and then hope that someone actually finds them in a semi professional, professional org.

- All right.

Let's give it up for Caleb Smith.

[audience applauds] Just a quick survey, 'cause I'm curious how many people actively watch eSports as part of your entertainment diet, anybody here?

All right.

We got a few, few.

We got a few.

This man knows what I'm talking about.

Excellent.

It is time now for our next speaker of the evening.

She's a 21 year veteran of the feature film, animation games and comic industry.

Please welcome to the stage, Kaye Vassey.

[audience applauds] - Hi everybody.

Hold on one second.

I know the clock is ticking.

I've already been told to listen for the bell.

I have a tradition that I do anytime I give a talk, I always make a selfie with the audience.

Sorry y'all I'm gonna go this direction.

So 1, 2, 3, say cheese.

- [Audience] Cheese.

- Perfect.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

We'll see if this works.

It does.

So as was introduced.

My name is Kaye Vassey.

I am a lead technical animator with Epic Games over in Cary, North Carolina.

You may know us from a small Indy game called Fortnite.

I was the lead technical animator on Fortnite that brought it to market and sort of helped it turn into what you see now as battle Royale.

Currently, I am on the special projects team and working on things like MetaHuman creator.

And so what I want to talk to y'all about today is basically how to be a MetaHuman creator.

So a couple of questions, what is MetaHuman creator, if you don't know or haven't heard about it and how does it work?

So essentially what it is is a tool set that was created by Epic.

That allows people to create photo real high res human characters for use in your content creation pipelines.

Once you have your Epic account, you will go into MetaHuman creator and you will make a MetaHuman, which I'm gonna show you a process for very quickly shortly, you will then move into Quixel Bridge, which is also Epic software and then ultimately into Unreal Engine, the best game engine in the world.

So the MetaHuman creation tools, once you're in the web front end for this, you will pick from a plethora of human beings that are sort of a mishmash of 3D scanned data that has been gathered for years and years and years and years and years through various projects.

And you will get to start with one as a character to sort of begin your creation.

You can just take that character and run with it or you can edit it.

And that's what we're gonna talk about next.

You can customize things like the body type and height, clothing, outfits, as well as shoes and facial features.

So body customization, you'll see, you've got height, body type and skeleton type to choose from.

Clothing customization, so you can choose to customize shirts and tops, bottoms and shoes.

If you are savvy, and you're a 3D artist yourself modeler, and you love making game content, you can also use these assets that will come into Unreal Engine as a template to create your own, which a lot of people do.

If you sort of start hashtagging around on LinkedIn, you'll see a lot of amazing work for people out in the world for their YouTube channels and things, making outfits and capes.

And it's amazing, but in the tool you can click through here and dress your MetaHuman, how you choose based on what we've provided so far, with more on the way.

Facial customization.

This is where it gets cool.

So you can choose between the skin, the eyes, the teeth, makeup, as well as blending.

And by blending what I'm talking about is, you're seeing that little GIF or GIF all depending on the audience, animation moving right there, you'll notice at the top, there's a little sort of family triad.

So what you can essentially do is drop other MetaHumans into those spots and then blend your MetaHuman based on the sort of facial features/genetic traits of the people that you drop into that area.

So you're essentially mixing and matching DNA at that point.

You can see a little bit of that happening in the brow area, on our character here.

So let's talk about animation.

The tool provides a facial ROM and a body ROM, ROM stands for Range Of Motion in case you don't know.

And that is just the character doing funny faces and things like that to make sure that everything is working properly.

As you can see, this is the facial ROM for our character after everything was blended on the previous screen.

It's very cool.

So you will need to also have Quixel Bridge and you can go and get that from the same login that you would have for the Epic marketplace, the Epic Ecosystem, Unreal Engine, all of it.

Once you create your MetaHuman on the web front end and you send it to Quixel Bridge.

When you log into Quixel Bridge, you will see your MetaHuman listed in your, My MetaHumans area and you will basically pick how and where you want it to export based on where you installed Unreal Engine.

And you will get it into Unreal Engine.

Once in Unreal Engine, this is where the fun starts because we already provide you, what's called Control Rig, Control Rig is technology in Unreal Engine that is used to animate characters.

I can talk for years about animating characters.

So if you have questions, definitely ask, the long and short of it is you have a 3D puppet with bones and controls.

We are providing you those controls.

That's the little boxes in red and blue that you see on the character.

And when you load it into our linear content creation tool sequencer, you can actually pose the puppet and move it and animate it, just like a 3D animator at a, an animation studio.

The body controls come with every MetaHuman that goes into Unreal Engine, as well as the facial controls.

So it's a little bit hard to see, but off to the screen, right there, you'll see that there's some yellow sort of controls floating in air, that will actually control the face of the character.

So you can see the sort of half smile grin thing that our character Emery is doing here, was done just by grabbing sliders and moving them around.

And once you get through that process, you too can create an awkward yearbook photo [audience laughs] of a MetaHuman provided for free by Epic Games for any of your content creation needs.

And so normally when I give talks, they are 12 to 24 times the amount that I'm speaking tonight for five minutes.

So I flew through that.

So let's do Q and A.

- It is indeed time for Q and A.

[audience applauds] You have an expert in the field in realistic 3D modeling, get your questions.

And we are gonna go right here first as I make my way and not kick your stuff Kaye.

I apologize.

- You can kick it.

- Can I kick it?

- I got my phone up here.

- Hi, one, that's a really amazing tool.

Do you think, and later on down the road, this could be used to make more stylized characters, kinda like how team Fortress or Overwatch are a bit more different than the actual normal human.

- I mean, absolutely.

I think it it's definitely possible that that is an avenue that could be explored.

Right now we're definitely sort of tackling the photo real human aspect of it.

And if any of you have seen the matrix piece that Epic released for the release of the last film, this technology was running that as well.

And so I think, we're, once we sort of get, to that point, then you can branch off from there.

But that said, the ladder tools that I showed control rig and the facial board and stuff, you can completely set that stuff up yourself if you know how to model and rig.

So it's totally possible.

Yeah, of course.

- All right.

Next question.

Coming here from this center aisle.

- Hey Kaye, thank you.

First of all, this is amazing.

My question is what type of, I guess, horsepower will your PC or workstation is gonna need in order to run something like this?

It seems very sophisticated, but I was just curious.

- I mean, I'm not gonna lie to you.

You can run it on some lower specs, but I highly recommend top of the line if you can.

And especially a graphics card, top of the line graphics card, which, even all of us in games, we're all like still trying.

Did you find one?

Did you an find an NVIDIA card somewhere?

Where did you find it?

So it's tough out there right now, but I mean, I have run the tool.

I mean, the tool's a web front end, so you can go make MetaHumans on a laptop, but I definitely have had Unreal running on laptops and it gets pretty hot and there's lots of fan.

You have to hold the laptop down while you're working on it, but it's possible.

[audience laughs] - [Wade] Sounds like it's time to get ready to Bitcoin mine.

All right.

Next question.

Coming over here.

- I think I see a hand up on this side.

Did you find one there?

Okay, sorry about that.

- Hey, so my question is, I think the MetaHuman creator is like really cool and innovative.

Do you guys have plans on kind of bringing this kind of concept to maybe environments and environment creation potentially, having procedural environments, things like that.

- I know that there is work being done in that area.

I don't know that it is exactly like this tech.

I will say, it sounds like you may know about Quixel and what they provide.

And so the idea of kit bashing an environment with Quixel assets is sort of top of the line right now.

Like that, we do a lot of that and a lot of people in the world are doing that, especially since it's free now.

And so I would start there, but I hear what you're saying.

And that's a good question.

- All right.

Next question.

Coming from your left.

- So let's say I absolutely completely despise Epic Games products, specifically Unreal, and you really, really want to use it in other game engines or other 3D software.

Is that possible?

[audience laughs] - Unfortunately, the way that I showed it, no.

[audience laughs] But, as an honest person, I'm gonna, I will say that once you have your MetaHuman assets in Unreal, you can definitely export them out as FBX, if you know what that means then.

Awesome.

But there's also a lot of free tools for getting models of human beings.

But if, you can definitely get the geometry out, you can definitely rig it and go to town.

For sure.

- That got weird.

All right.

[audience laughs] Last question I'll be coming over here.

- Hey, there I'm a super nervous at this.

I think I understood.

And I think the gentleman over there answered the question, but is there, so the metaverse, is there any way that Facebook could hire you guys and have characters modeled and be as photo realistic as what you're offering over there?

- I mean, we sort of, okay, well, you said the buzzword metaverse and since we're sort of spearheading the metaverse my guess is the other people who are moving toward a metaverse probably are not gonna wanna come to us, but they should probably watch us.

So, definitely.

Yeah, my pleasure.

- All right.

Give it up for Kaye... - Thank you.

- Vassey.

[audience applauds] You never know what you're gonna get here for our Q and A session, y'all.

And some, possibly all of our speakers will be hanging around after the show, when the bar opens back up.

So if you have questions that you weren't able to get answered, if you just wanna trash talk, some of our guest employers more, [audience laughs] if you have more of a comment than a question, I don't know, those will be available for the folks who stick around after the show.

God, that was fun.

All right.

It is now time for our next speaker of the evening.

He works as an IT specialist at Shaw University.

Please welcome to the stage, Elroy Seegars.

[audience applauds] - One correction.

I went to Shaw University.

I actually work for EPA.

And why did you put me behind her?

- [Wade] I don't man.

I don't even know.

- That's a tough act to follow.

First of all, I wanna get a show of hands, who has an iPhone here?

Raise your hand real quick, if you have an iPhone.

Great.

Wow.

Put hand down.

How about Androids?

Great.

[audience laughs] The reason why you have what you have is because it's one of two things, IT or planning, Field of Dreams, if they build it, y'all gonna be in those long lines waiting to get that brand new phone.

And you know you will 'cause I've been there before too.

So the thing is in IT for EPA, we work very closely with the Research Department and it's good because they allow us to help them out far as doing their projects.

And one of the things we work with them on is working on their high performance computers, HPCs.

We allow them to share time on those computers in order to do their projects for modeling.

And they have these huge data sets, real huge data sets, and they can spend hours and days running their models at any point in time.

So the thing is when it comes to gaming, 'cause this is about gaming night, the researchers wanted to be able to figure out how can we take what we have and show the public, what we do in the lab.

So they came up with this game called Generate and it can be played at any level, elementary, high school, college and communities if you want in a community event.

So our game is really because I work for the EPA.

It is centered around then environment.

But the neat thing about this game is, is really a collaborative effort when it comes to kids.

So this game here is, helps you to understand the impact of air pollution, greenhouse emission, and also the impact of water.

Now the big picture is this right here.

I'm gonna get the gaming, gimme a second.

The big picture is it talks about the primary energy resources and how it converts it over the end user sectors and also the end user services that it uses.

So whew, now I can get to the fun part, the game, there's between three and five teams and it can be a few members and every team would get this here board, it's called a grid, kinda like a power grid.

And there are the pieces that you'll get in your bag.

So each team does not have the exact same pieces.

I could have two nuclear or somebody could have one coal.

So it's done that way so you can see that it's not always equal and you gonna be able to see the difference between what one team has and another, to create communication.

In the top right hand corner, you see a number.

That number indicates what it takes to build that type of thing.

The bottom right hand corner is 29.

You see nuclear it's with it, to run it throughout the course of the year.

And the left hand number is the air pollution that it gives back to, carbon dioxide.

So when everyone gets, when they get their bag, what happens is this right here.

You gotta take your piece, put it on this here grid, fill this whole grid up.

And then once you fill your whole grid up, you take one person from each team and they come through the front and they talk about the impact to what their grid is made of, the nuclear, the fossil energy, renewable stuff.

You see over here what says fossil energy.

You see some numbers, that's green, that's carbon dioxide.

For the first round, we zeroed that out because we wanted the kids just to understand how the game works.

The second round we multiply that times one, and what we do, after they, go through the first round, you would be amazed of how the kids become very competitive because there's a first place, second place, third place, fourth place and fifth place.

So they understand, "Hey, why did this person got more wind?

"And I got more nuclear.

"I got more coal."

So it starts that competitive edge.

But in doing that, what happens is they begin to, plant a seed in their mind to understand how the environment works for the future.

So this game is really about planning.

So once they get through the third round, the numbers in the left hand corners they'll multiply times two, three, or four.

So by this time when you get to the third round, it's really about the kids trying to understand, "Hey, I want more pieces.

"I want different pieces."

Because you start to give them more pieces between each round, the first round, the second round, you may give them things like the windmills and solar panel.

So they begin to do a matrix.

They begin to say, "Okay, let's take this in.

"Let's take that out."

And you have a different result.

And then you say, "Hey, what did you get this time?"

And they begin to talk about the impact to the environment.

The neat thing about this whole thing.

The kids are learning all along.

It's a game board, but they begin to understand the impact to the air pollution, carbon dioxide and the water, because they understand that, hey, this is about the future.

So you're planting the seeds.

Can you imagine your kids around a board game, learning about the environment that's gonna impact the future for years to come?

That's a neat thing about this game.

It does, even though the game is called Generate, it generates the juices [indistinct] and between the games and the sessions, these kids, they really go after it.

They understand like, "Hey, I need more pieces.

"Can you give me more pieces, let's barter."

They exchange.

And then between all of that, they actually are explaining why I need renewable energy.

They explaining why I need less coal.

They are bargaining pieces between the games.

So they're learning about the environment.

Can you imagine your kids are actually understanding what the environment's gonna look like in years to come?

It's a powerful tool, even though it's planting a small seed of understanding about the environment.

Even though these kids are around a board game, as you see, that's part of the grid, even though the kids are around a board game, can you imagine this is around a board game today, but years come, they could be in the board room, making decision about our future, your kid.

You may not see it right now because trust me with my kid.

I didn't see it either, [audience laughs] but he's in the Air Force today.

And he is doing great.

And we're proud of him.

But this game is so impactful.

It allowed us to go into communities.

I have a fan here.

He was just telling me, he's one of the speakers, that he actually played the game.

And I said, "You may know more about the game than I do."

'Cause I only played it twice.

So, and right here, I say drive through reason why I say drive through.

because this is the IT part.

I love my job.

Why?

Because I love working with researchers and part of working with researchers.

They allow us to work with them on planning.

And I said, planning is the big part.

As long as we're allowed to work with them on planning, we can do anything.

So I always tell the researchers don't just drive through and tell me what you want.

Come on in, sit down with me and let's create a plan in order to do what you need to do to get the results you'll look looking for.

So that is the biggest thing that I love is I love my job.

I love working with researchers.

So I think that's about it.

[audience applauds] - All right.

- [Elroy] No questions.

I'm done.

[audience applauds] - Now's your time to ask questions about a government agency using the power of gaming to help teach, raise your hand.

I see both of you, but you've had your questions.

I'm gonna, let's see if anyone else wants a turn.

All right, we got one right up front here.

You look familiar, but okay.

Nevermind.

- Where can you get the game?

- It's actually online, but if you want to, I can make sure that you can, there's my information right here, you can hit me up and I can make sure you have access to it.

And the neat thing about this here game is that before COVID it was only in person where COVID made us pivot.

So now the game can be played virtually.

And it's actually a 22 page document that I had to read between this week and last week to give this all in five minutes.

So I did it.

Next question.

- [Wade] All right.

Also, we're giving out some swag for everyone who asks questions in case you're wondering, 'cause it's not clearly obvious, these are dog bandanas.

[audience laughs] Also great for cats I'm told.

All right, next question.

Did you have a question here?

All right.

Question right back here.

- [Woman] So you men...

It's on.

- [Wade] It's on.

- Oh, it's just me.

So I mentioned, you mentioned that the game is available online, but I'm a middle school teacher and I would love to use this, but I don't have time to cut out all the pieces.

Is there a way that I could get it pre-made?

- Are you a teacher?

- [Teacher] Yeah.

- Yeah.

She's on the pay, y'all so we all need to chip in, help her print out this stuff.

[audience laughs] 'Cause you know my son's a school teacher too, trust me.

It ain't, you ain't making a lot of money, but it, once again, I would say, if you wanna reach out to me, I'm pretty sure we have resources in order to help you to print out those things.

Because like I said, we do go out to schools.

I love to volunteer.

I go to different schools and speak, not about EPA a lot of times, I try talk about myself.

But if you just reach out to me, I'm pretty sure I can help you out.

We have a lady by the name, Kelly Witter.

She goes around to a lot of the schools and she does provide those kind of resources in order for you to play those games.

- All right, next question.

Coming from the front row here.

- Actually, this isn't a question so we can keep the bandana for the next person, but you need to talk to the eSports guy.

[audience laughs] - I do.

Why?

- Because he's gonna show you how to put this online.

So you don't have to cut out parts.

- See the thing about this here is.

You're right.

That's the government at its best y'all.

[audience laughs] - [Wade] True facts.

Other questions about how you can gamify learning, even in the context of a government agency.

[audience laughs] - I'm here on the wrong night.

[audience laughs] - Can you add like 3D models of the nuclear plant and animate them blowing up and stuff?

- You can do a whole lot of things.

If you... - [Man 3] 3D print it.

- 3D print it.

That I don't know.

I'm gonna talk to the Epic person.

And we're gonna figure this thing out.

- All right, give it up for Elroy Seegars.

[audience applauds] - Thank you.

- And we're moving on now at a perfect clip to the fourth speaker of the evening.

She's a video game industry producer with 26 years under her belt.

Please welcome to the stage, Heather Chandler.

[audience applauds] - Good evening, everybody.

I'm very happy to be here.

I actually worked with Kaye on Fortnite as well.

And it was great to see her tonight and see what Epic's up to.

Today I wanna talk about how you can use games to celebrate and share culture with a game that I worked on with a large group of people called Choctaw Stickball.

I could talk for an hour about this experience.

So I had to condense it down into five minutes.

The top line is, is that the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians was interested in creating a game around their culture, specifically a game called Stickball, which is something that they play and enjoy with all the tribes and stuff in Mississippi.

Stickball is a game that is several hundred years old and has been played by tribes to help settle disputes between communities and things like that.

This is a painting of just some Stickball players from the 1780s, I believe.

And so you can see here, they have very little protective equipment and they use, [audience laughs] and the game is across between lacrosse and rugby.

They have have the two sticks that are called kabocha, probably not saying that correctly.

And they have little scoops on the end.

And then there's a small ball called a Towa.

And basically you have to grab the ball and then throw it and hit a goalpost that's about two inches wide.

Back in... Several hundred years ago, the playing field was kind of loosely defined.

You would have several hundred people playing this at one time and it could be a hundred foot long or several miles long.

This is the modern version of Choctaw Stickball.

And so I wanted to show the contrast.

They still play the game today, but they actually have standardized rules around it.

This is a game that they play on sort of high school football fields.

And there's 60 people on the field at a time, 30 people on each side, you can see that some of the, they still don't wear the protective equipment.

And some of them have the skirts or apron that are a call back to what the players had on from the painting I showed you.

And you can see right at the bottom in the middle, there's a little orange Towa, which they're all trying to grab so that they can throw it and hit this pole.

That is on the other end of the football field.

Going to a Stickball game is very exciting.

I was allowed to stand on the sidelines 'cause we were invited by the tribe to come and observe, talk to the tribe, talk to the elders, find out everything we could about Stickball because they wanted to work with us to help them translate it into a video game.

And so you're standing on the sidelines and people are getting tackled and you have to, I had to run away one time because they broke through sort of the boundary that they'd set and toppled over on the benches.

They also have, each community has a team that will come and play these games.

So it's very ingrained in the community.

This game is played by young and old, men and women.

And every year they have a fair where they have their big tournament between the various communities like Pearl River, Bacchiro.

Each group also has their set of drummers that come and stand on the sidelines and they're drumming there's people in the stands.

It's very much that energy of the high school football game.

So you could imagine it was somewhat of a challenge just to figure out how to translate this into a game.

We had, we were working with the tribe and they were funding it, it was in an initiative they were interested in doing, because they wanted to get kids excited about STEM.

And they thought that video games was a good way to do this.

They also wanted to use this as an opportunity to showcase Stickball so that they could share it with other people that were not aware of it.

And also it gives the community a sense of pride to have a sport that they play and enjoy actually represented in a video game.

So we used the Unreal Engine that seemed the best choice at the time.

And the tribe itself didn't have a game development team.

So we hired some developers that worked in Los Angeles and they flew out and were part of this whole big group where we had, the chief was involved.

We had the youth were involved.

So we talked to the middle school kids and the high school kids, and everyone came together initially to kind of brainstorm what they thought the game would be like.

And because it's a sports game that in real life features 60 players on the field.

That was one of the big challenges is like, how realistic could we actually be with the technology limitations we had?

And if you do play video game sports games like Madden or NBA, you know that there's a lot of AI involved in setting your teams up and running the plays.

And we certainly didn't have the time resources or money to invest in programming AI that would, do all of the, what all the Stickball players would do.

So we instead decided to create a multiplayer game where we would do five versus five and we modeled the characters and put in just sort of the basic Stickball rules where you would have 10 live players that could get together in a local area network, five on each side, and then they could play the basic game where they were able to pick the ball up and throw it and then hit the goal post.

The tribe was very involved in looking at all the iterations of the game that we did, in fact, the field in the game is modeled after the field that I was showing you pictures of with the players.

We had to make a few concessions because this is a video game.

So you'll see the UI element that allows you to aim the ball.

The ball of course is larger.

So that it's more visible than it might be in real life.

And of course, just having five players on each side, it makes it a little less, it makes it easier to see the ball and what's going on.

The main things that they wanted us to try to capture was that feeling of kinetic energy and excitement, because it is very much like a football game in the sense that you're tackling people.

So it really is a big deal when you tackle somebody to feel like you really tackled them or that when you throw the ball and you hit the goal, that that really is a big deal.

And it doesn't happen very often in the game.

These are as a side note, once we did sort of the modern version, they were interested in having us put together a different game mode that was based more on sort of fantasy culture things.

So I just wanted to show you a couple characters that we modeled.

And if you remember the painting that I showed you at the beginning, you can see that that middle character was inspired by that.

And in this mode, each one of these characters had different abilities based on sort of what the character was.

So the bear character was, really good at tackling, the character inspired by the horse was very fast.

Character inspired by the Eagle could jump really high.

So we created a mode that was not based on realistic Stickball at all, but that the characters could do really cool moves.

As they tried to run through an environment that looked like a wooded area and hit these goals.

Ironically, we found that when we play tested it with the tribe, that they prefer the modern version of it, because it was what they knew and understood.

And it was the part they were most excited by.

Once we had the prototype done and we had talked with the tribe, we wanted to showcase it at the fair, the Big Choctaw, the fair that they have every year in July.

So we went in July, 2019 and showed it to everybody in the community.

And we had a place set up with 10 machines and people could sign up for slots and the fair last for three days.

And in that three days, we had a line out the door the entire time, and several hundred people came and played and really enjoyed that experience.

This is an actual Stickball team that's sitting down and playing it.

And I didn't have any video, but just the video of people cheering and just having the best time playing this game is really amazing.

And you can see that's their coach.

This is I think a middle school team.

The guy on the end is a professional Stickball player.

And he is the one that has to protect the goal, which is that large post he's probably seven feet tall.

And that is his daughter.

And you can see here that this is a game that appealed to all ages.

So she's sitting there watching him play, and then he's playing with a couple high school boys.

I thought this was a great picture.

This was one of the young ladies that was part of the Choctaw princess pageant thing.

And just to show how powerful it is when communities can see themselves reflected in their games.

And it's really important to go and find opportunities like this so that you can spark that excitement.

We did do special programs, kind of as a quick wrap up here with middle school and high school students where we went and taught them the basics of sort of game development and several of them I'm still in touch with, and now are planning to when they go to college to study how to make games.

[audience applauds] - All right.

Now's your chance to ask questions?

No.

Why are you running?

[audience laughs] You can't get away that easy.

Now's your chance to ask questions about representing culture through games.

Well, I'll go here, then here, then there, 'cause that's closer to me.

First question.

Oh no, he just gave me a high five.

Awesome.

- My question is [indistinct].

[audience laughs] My question is in reference to setting something up like that, if we wanted to bring your skill set to another culture, how, what's the, how is that gonna, of course we'd contact you.

What's the range, if there's a cost attached.

- Yeah.

There is a cost attached to it.

And I guess it really depends on, I mean, obviously you should, I'm happy to talk with you after to kind of find out information.

We have the group that I work with.

We've had different people approach us in this particular example, the tribe had some money that they wanted to use specifically for this program.

In other places, we might be able to find grants or something to help fund something like that.

- All right.

Next question.

Coming over here.

- I was wondering if you had thought about pitching it as a side quest to a MMO that might have the server space to see what it would be like with a full 30 on 30 team or 200 versus 200 group, because I mean the dynamics of the game would change with more people.

And I think that that would be a great way to just shake out some of the possibilities.

- Yeah, absolutely.

We were definitely interested in taking this game a bit further and getting more people involved.

I will say, unfortunately, the pandemic kind of halted some of those plans because I showed you, we were at the fair in 2019, but then the project's been on pause basically for two years during the pandemic.

But yeah, they, we were definitely looking at things like that or looking for ways to bring this to more people so that they could play and experience it.

- All right.

Next question, coming to you from the center aisle here.

- Hey Heather.

So when you are developing games, how much of it is, I mean, this is obviously based in a lot of reality and a lot of historical and cultural, you wanna make sure you're true to that, but in all your game development, how much do you go out and really kind of try and create realism within your games and observe stuff in real life versus create fantasy and imagination outta that?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

I think it really depends on the games and sort of what the goals of the game are.

When you're working at a game at, like Fortnite, they kind of already established sort of what it is they wanna do.

And that's a very fantasy cartoon thing.

For games like this, it's just a question of, what are they interested in conveying and doing so certainly you're taking inspiration so that you can be culturally appropriate with the things that you're doing.

It really kind of just depends on the game.

- All right, give it up for Heather Chandler.

[audience applauds] See even the dog liked it.

All right, folks, we're moving into our final speaker of the evening.

He's an educator, researcher, evaluator and game designer with the Museum of Life and Science.

Please welcome to the stage, Max Cawley.

[audience applauds] - Hey, thanks Wade.

I was just desperate to not go after all of my very talented friends and colleagues, but there is one really good thing about going last and it's, there's no time limits.

[audience laughs] Ooh, wrong way.

- [Wade] We're gonna discover if that's true.

- We are going to find out if that's true.

Yes.

My name is Max Cawley.

I'm a, I design games for science learning at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North Carolina.

I'm here this evening to talk like many of my colleagues about why games are really excellent use of your time.

All of my colleagues so far have talked about why this is true.

I'm here to talk specifically about why games are such powerful and important learning tools.

Games according to professor at Arizona State University, James Paul G are their own semiotic domain.

They're a type of literacy.

And I think this is a really powerful way of looking at and thinking about games.

That like other types of literacy, mathematics, or reading or writing, they have its own set of rules that you have to work at, that you have to practice that you have to work towards mastery.

Games are their own semiotic domain, just like those.

And because of that, games are always these novel, new and interesting environments that are really powerful learning tools.

So unfortunately, when we think about games as learning tools, we sometimes can go about it kind of backwards.

And we think about learning through games as needing to cram in a bunch of things for people to memorize.

In my case, lots of science games designed for curricular learning unfortunately start from the place of what words do students need to memorize to come out of this.

We call this model chocolate covered broccoli, 'cause you should really start making a game by thinking about what's your learner or what's your gamer is actually going to do with their time during the game.

And if you start instead with thinking about what learning is gonna come out of it, your learner or your gamer is going to understand that you didn't start from a game.

They're going to know that you're serving them chocolate covered broccoli.

And this model does not really fall in line with what we know about game design.

It also doesn't really fall in line with what we know about how we learn.

This is Vygotsky's zone of proximal development because all of you here elected to come to some fun evening about gaming and not a graduate level course.

We're not gonna go over this.

Instead, my way of conceptualizing, of thinking about learning is as a struggle from again, Vygotsky's five pillars of learning.

Learning is a lifelong struggle to make sense of the world.

And luckily for us game designers, games can really be boiled down to, they can be defined as basically struggle commodified, right?

And we'll talk a little bit more about that struggle here in a second, but because games are this really ripe new opportunity to have this small little struggle for yourself, there are always, always, always valuable opportunities for learning.

And the cool thing is this is true.

Whether you are playing a game that we understand and know and conceive of being something cool and valuable a space we already associate with learning like chess.

It's also true for first person shooters.

It's also true for games like Mario Kart.

There is learning inherent in those games as well.

So when we start thinking about gamifying, something like let's say science curriculum.

Again, I am at a science museum.

There are all of these different game like concepts that you can apply to start creating games out of these science concepts.

One of them we're very familiar with is competition.

Another one is role playing.

Another one is scarcity.

Another really good one is strategy.

We're gonna come back to that one.

There's one really, really important game like piece that we sometimes forget to put in.

And this really vital one I would pause it as more important than all of the rest of these.

And that one is play.

[audience applauds] Thank you.

I would also say that if you are making a game that includes all of these other game-like concepts, but you are not including play as one of those game-like concepts.

We actually have a word for what we might call that game and that word is a task.

And you might think to yourself when you're designing a game, am I making a game or am I making a task?

Again apropo of nothing.

If you're making a game without play, you are probably making chocolate covered broccoli.

Number one, we think about how people learn in informal spaces like museums, learning again, boils down to those intellectual and emotional connections and sometimes, and very short touch points that you have with learners.

You might only have time to create this powerful, emotional connection to science content.

And one of the most powerful emotional tools that we have in a game is frustration.

[audience laughs] My favorite game designer, Bennett Foddy, who created games like QWOP or Getting Over It, codified these 11 different flavors of frustration that I find really excellent to think about.

I've picked three of them, but I highly suggest that you go and look at all 11.

One of my favorites of his is, "Nearly there, but not quite."

Another one is "I don't know where to start."

Another one is, "I've been here before."

And sometimes this is that you have to start all over again.

Or as in the case with this game, when you get to the next level, you actually start whole game all over again.

If Bennett.

If you are watching, by the way, I've come up with three of my own base around board games, which is mostly what I create.

Here's one of them, "Someone else had a good idea on their turn."

This one's really frustrating to me.

"I thought it was strategy, "but turns out it's just chance."

[audience laughs] This one needs no explanation.

[audience laughs] Frustration is a really, really powerful, emotional tool that you have in your games that leaves a really powerful impression.

Now, a lot of federal agencies, when they fund stuff for learning for the general public, we often call these broader impacts, rely on novel communication strategies.

That again, may not be reading or writing or traditional ways that we think about literacy games are also a communication tool.

They are a great way to connect people with sometimes complex science learning.

In one case, a game that I designed called Hot Lane, we took on a, a piece of complex science learning that was about this phenomenon right here, which is everybody's favorite experience.

Universally hated standing in lines.

[audience laughs] It turns out that over the course of your lifetime, you likely spend between one to two years standing in line.

Really cool.

Now close your eyes.

You don't have to close your eyes, but again, picture that emotional connection that you have to this complex science, right?

How do you feel right now?

Just thinking about standing in line, some of the research that goes into this actually suggests that standing in line and your emotional reaction to it actually doesn't really have very much to do with how long you spend in line.

It has a lot more to do with some other factors, including how bored you are in line, but also including the other competitors that are around you lines that turns out are already sort of game-like you are already kind of in competition around other people.

So our game Hot Lane, again, tried to go out and recreate some of this emotional experience of standing in lines.

So that we can think about what kinds of lines designs people got the least frustrated with versus the most frustrated with.

It turns out again that when you are standing in line, it is not necessarily efficiency that matters the most to you about that line that you are in, it is fairness.

It is the slight of other people around you maybe getting one over on you by getting into line a minute or two behind you, but then geez, you look over and they're already being served for some reason.

[audience laughs] There is absolutely nothing more frustrating than that experience.

And there is actual excellent ways to mitigate some of this stuff.

Now I'm probably just about out of time.

I can see somebody about to ring the bell.

So we call it strategy when you're good at it.

Right?

One good question.

And this is a win-win because I think you get a dog bandana if you ask this question, but you could ask, tell me more about Hot Lane.

Tell me more about this game.

[audience laughs] Okay.

Thanks.

[audience applauds] - All right.

Who's got questions about broccoli.

All right.

We got one coming right over here.

- I think it's great what you're doing, but how do you make these accessible to visitors with disabilities, students with disabilities?

- Really excellent question.

Yeah.

Fantastic question.

A lot of the games that we are creating are designed to be played within classroom spaces or within informal science spaces.

So some of them include, interpretive tools that are outside of necessarily needing to read things.

Some of them also include interpretive materials for folks that are visually impaired or that are unable to hear.

This is a really excellent question that I don't wanna spend a huge amount of time on, but I'd be really happy to talk with you more about it after today.

Thanks.

- All right.

Other questions, got one right here.

I'm gonna scooch around this side.

- How do you add learning to non-educational games?

- I'm sorry, could you say that one more time.

- [Wade] The question is how do you add learning to non-educational games?

- Oh, what a good question.

I would pause it that every time you play any game, you are learning, you are working towards mastery within that space, right?

So even in a game where you are not perceiving yourself as learning, most of the learning that you do within your lifespan, about 95% of it happens outside of these formal environments.

So every time that you step within that magic circle of a game, you are giving yourself this really wonderful opportunity to become literate at whatever it is that game is trying to teach you.

And in many, many, many cases, there are already learning opportunities built into just about every game.

And I'll perhaps some of my other colleagues that were up before me can back me up on some of that too.

- All right.

Next question.

Coming front end center here.

- Tell me more about Hot Link.

- Oh, excellent question.

Wow.

[audience laughs] - [Man 4] That's so weird.

- That's so weird.

I wonder how somebody new to ask that question Hot Lane essentially put you against very directly the other people who are standing in line around you.

Time in this game was your commodity, but you could spend more money to move yourself into a gold or silver line where you, there were perhaps be fewer people in front of you or perhaps the line for some reason would move more quickly.

But there's always going to be these other things that happen in line around you.

Maybe the receptionist gets a phone call, or maybe they drop a pen or, there's all sorts of reasons why you would have to miss your turn.

So really the way that Hot Lane ends up is that, and this is true.

Also it turns out for standing in line, the more that you switch lines as is the case in this middle one here, the more time you actually spend to stay in line over the course of your lifetime.

So there is really excellent design when it comes to this model that we have here, as they use in most grocery stores versus the serpentine line that they use in a lot of stores, fast food restaurants now.

Because this one over here tends to at least be fair, which it turns out as one of the most important things in line and some line designers, some people who do a lot of science behind queuing have really figured out that one of the most key things you can do is actually just take the focus off of all of your competitors off of all the other people in line, by giving them something else to do.

So there are places where you might stand in line for hours and hours and hours at a time.

But if you're occupied, if you're not looking at, if you're not thinking about your competitors around you, the people who are in line around you're are less likely to look at yourself as being in competition with them.

So if you're designing a queue, give them something to do, and perhaps think about doing the serpentine way of moving through the line instead.

- All right.

Ladies and gentlemen give it up for Max Cawley.

[audience applauds] - Thanks man.

[audience applauds] - All right.

Y'all how about this gaming edition of RTP180.

[audience applauds] This was a lot of fun.

I don't know about you, I had a good time.

Now for those of you who wanna stick around, the bar will be opening momentarily, wait for it, wait for it.

But I need to tell you that next month April's RTP180 will be about Failure.

That's right.

They're interviewing my mom about me folks.

[audience laughs] It's just gonna be 30 minutes of that, but failure, we'll be talking about all the aspects of failure and the good and the bad of it.

That's right back are at the Frontier on April 21st.

Doors open at five, the show starts at six.

Beer will be flowing.

The passive voice will be used.

A good time will be had.

Now, some of our speakers will be sticking around.

If you have other questions, please feel free to politely go up and ask them.

The bar will be opening up.

On behalf of RTP180 presented by RTI International, I've been your MC Wade Minter, saying thanks for coming out.

And have a safe journey home.

Good night y'all.

[audience applauds]