Speaker 1:	Thank you, good morning to everyone. First let me thank Bob for that exceedingly gracious introduction and to thank Bob and Patty and everyone who is involved in organizing what I'm sure is gonna be a wonderful symposium. 
	Today I wanna talk to you a little bit about a topic, two topics actually that I have experience with. Liberal arts and game development. But I actually realized in preparing this, I don't have much experience with these two topics together, mashed up. I haven't done game development in a liberal arts context, and so I started thinking through the idea of "Why?" 
	Why that would have been when I was at school here, which was 2005 through 2009, and what's changed since then that makes me feel as though this is really a moment in which game development can arrive and make a big splash in the liberal arts? 
	So I wanna keep this kinda quick cause I actually brought a demo, the very strongly worded motion sickness warning applies to that demo and not my talk, so don't worry about that.
	But before I start I just want to give an overview of what I gonna be going over. The question to me was "Is it really a good fit?" Is interactive media development a good fit within the entire value system and pedagogical structure of the liberal arts? Some people might say yes but, to me I think it's worth asking because liberal arts offers something very unique that you don't really wanna dilute with this sort of knee-jerk, "Let's get more technology in the classroom, lets do more development, lets do more material production." 
	I wanted to think through "What are the things that game development and interactive media development in general can really do to enrich the liberal arts and really strengthen its identity, not dilute it?" So I wanna talk a little bit about my own experience while I was here, talk about what's changed since then, and on the level of students, how students can benefit from having more and more interactive media development programs in classes. 
	But then I also wanna spend most of the time talking about what interactive media development in general, game development specifically, can do to enrich the liberal arts. As I said, the question we began with is, digital media and the liberal arts, is this really a good fit or are we trying to fit a round peg into a square hole?
	So, I would characterize my own experience here at Swarthmore, I was a film and media studies special major, back in the days before it was an official major so congratulations to the department on that also. I would characterize my experience as a liberal arts film student dreams of making gigs.
	I arrived on campus with an interest in film, an interest in making film and possibly going into a career in film. It's a credit to the awesomely interdisciplinary media studies curriculum here that, through classes, particularly Bob's class in video game theory, but through the sort of media service class that we were taking, I became more and more aware that I have this life-long interest in games and that my more newfound interest in media development actually did dovetail with that life-long interest in games.
	I've been sketching level designs in notebooks since I was five years old, I've been thinking through game designs, but this always seemed like a hobby, not something that I would learn in a class room and go on to professionalize in an academic context. 
	The film and media studies curriculum here opened my eyes and made me realized that games are a legitimate form that I could commit to exclusively, even switching my interests from film to interactive media, but a few facts got in the way of me really using my time here as the time to make interactive media. 
	One of those facts is that games are very expensive to make. It took a lot of expensive hardware, expensive graphics processing hardware, expensive software tools, to make even a humble interactive experience. And at a school, at a small department, a school that has to use its resources effectively, it's not necessarily the best use of money to buy a $15,000 rendering station. So the tools that I would have needed to make, what was considered a recognizable game at that point, these weren't necessarily things that we had on campus. 
	Second, game developers really need a lot of technical expertize and I was not a computer scientist, I was a media scholar. This was something that was impressed upon me, every time I would try something I would realize that my low level scripting ability and object oriented programming language experience from taking a few introductory classes really wasn't enough to cut it in the field of game development. I was gonna need more help than what I could give myself if I really wanted to do this.
	And finally there was just the fact that games were really big projects that required big teams and I didn't have the money to pay someone to work on a project for me. If I was lone-wolfing it, to use the game of parlance, going in on a project, a film was something that was possible but a game really was not something that you could do and maintain your sanity if you were working on it alone.
	So really, I think this experience caused me to looked at how I can integrate my interest in interactive stuff, and in games, into the film experience that I was having at Swarthmore. And as Bob mentioned I chose to make a senior thesis video project that integrated Machinema, which is sort of a game derived 3-D animation. It was a mashup of 3-D animation and live action, and it was a real testament to the department, that the resources were given to support this, I spent many nights in the Beardsley media lab, rendering frames and working on these interesting software tools that I was very happy to get a chance to work with, because it was much closer doing this sort of animation project in a computer generated space, was a lot closer to the stuff that I knew I wanted to be doing later. 
	But that still raises the question, "Why wasn't it possible to make a game at that point?" And I think for all of these reasons, there were some material barriers to being able to do that and support those sorts of projects at a school of Swarthmore's size. 
	A lot of things have changed since then, and I just want to go over them point by point the same order here. I mentioned that the hardware tools that were needed to create games in this time period were rather expensive. That has changed in the last couple of years. Today, a mid-range computer, your average off-the-shelf iMac, even most laptops that are mid-range and above, average mid-range PC Workstation, has the power, has the graphical guts, to do pretty powerful rendering, to run fairly graphic intensive software. This is no longer something that requires specialized hardware. You can have a normal computer and run fairly sophisticated game engines on it. 
	That raises my next point. The high level of technical expertize that used to be a barrier to entry to making games has really gotten worn down as a result of a lot of very user-accessible game engines. A lot of the ones that I list up here are actually free. Some of these are more sophisticated, they're 3-D rendering, they support more sophisticated game projects. Some of these are specifically for text based projects, some of these are more for scripting and animation and fully featured interactive experiences. But the point remains: there's a lot of things in the $0-1,500 space, there are a lot of programs now that anyone in this room could pick up and use and start using the built in modular components that are in there, use scripts that are offered by a developer community that's actually really robust for each of these online, and can start making stuff in a hands-on way without needing to understand programming in C sharp or coding in a scripting language even at a higher level.
	And finally, I think this is a big point, it's one that I will give you a brief summary of, but in the last four years we've really seen a major sea change in gaming culture, where we used to think of games as necessarily being these sort of large media objects. Packaged, often times these were things that you could only get in a retail environment. This was very much the state of affairs when I graduated from Swarthmore. 
	Since then, and I've put three texts up here that if you're interested in the real story, the more subtle shades of how this has come to be, I would recommend these books and Indie Game the movie of course, which is a really fun documentary about the kind of Indie Game culture. Three things I think have happened.
	One is that the proliferation of mobile devices has turned us all into gamers and has made this big space for mobile games, casual games, things that are much, much smaller than "Game with a capital G," that I would have thought of as a student, as what a game is. 
	There's also a much more recognized space for a highly personal project, in some cases things that are done by a single creator, this is really something that's only happened in the last few years. So I think it's important to note that games necessarily being these big media objects is no longer the case, and I think there's a very vibrant community around these games and this is really something that's comes to be a recognizable space in game culture.
	So the new reality is that you don't need expensive hardware or software to make a game, you don't need to be a computer scientist or a skilled programmer to make a game, and there's a vibrant space out there for these smaller works produced by smaller teams, or even a single creator. 
	What I'm meaning by this is that by today's standards, this would be actually a fairly large and robustly situated student development project. Two programmers, a designer, an artist, audio designer and a producer, with just a couple of PC's, some licenses for a game engine that they can work on, whatever art and audio software they wanna use, some headphones cause you'll be working in a very close space usually. Some materials to scan in art ... Literally that's the whole package, that's all that's needed now to produce something that's fairly high quality, that can be released to the community and be accepted as a finished product.
	I've worked on projects with much smaller teams than this and they've actually turned out quite well. So I would say that the state of affairs of needing 20 people to work on even a small game is clearly not the case anymore.
	So, I think there's a couple of obvious ways that students in a liberal arts context can benefit from having more opportunities for game development on campus. Obviously for students who know this is something they wanna do in their career, this is useful training for industry jobs. I think on a broader level, for media study students, we can really enrich the theory of interactive media through hands-on practice in the same way that we do with hands-on practice with making video content.
	There's really something about the material realities of producing within a certain medium, that students learn best from producing hands on. I've always felt that since interactive media is this very interesting, very fast moving, but also very challenging field of theory in media studies, that nowhere is it more necessary that students get some hands on experience with what is really demanded by this kind of creation than in interactive media.
	I think on a broader level, and this is something I'll go over a little bit more in the second part of the talk, game development really mandates collaboration between people that have different skill sets, and within a liberal arts context I think that can be a really powerful thing that serves as a glue between otherwise despaired communities on campus. 
	That includes collaboration between the humanities and the social sciences, and the natural sciences, but it also includes collaboration across the arts, which I think is an important thing, especially at a campus like this, where you might have at any given graduating year, a dozen film students, maybe less than a dozen dance students, a handful of music majors, and these are diffused and despaired groups of artist communities around campus that don't have much interaction with one another. Game development can be a way that all of these skillsets can be tapped and you can create a community between the arts on campus, and I think that's an important thing. 
	So, the questions is "How can game development serve the liberal arts? How can it serve institutional imperatives, how can it serve the broader public, and how can it really advance the agenda of the liberal arts in culture?" Just a note here, you'll notice that I'm shifting fairly fluidly between the terminology of interactive media and game development, for me that's just sort of natural because that's the field I'm interested in, but I think as I start to show some examples, you'll see that what I refer to as games are often times more like game-like objects. So keep that in mind, game development doesn't necessarily have to be fast-twitch and kind of pure pleasure, it can also be more tricky and hard to distinguish, hard to categorize media objects, but I'm just gonna say game because interactive media is a mouthful.
	So I've talked about three areas, pedagogy, research, and outreach. I think pedagogy is probably the most obvious thing that's going to be affected if you start making serious moves to integrate game development, interactive media development into classes. Obviously teaching students to make games is a pedagogical challenge in and of itself and there will be, I think, interesting advances in pedagogy that come out of tailoring game development initiatives to different sized student communities. And there can be really interesting stuff, I think that this is actually an interesting field of research for education researchers as well, since this is a new and unsettled issue within media programs.
	There's also the potential to teach with games in a classroom, and there's been movements in the last few years to sort of establish and conventionalize certain practices that are really persuasive games that have a social agenda, or have a political agenda, or a teaching agenda. They go by various names, some people say "Serious games, games for learning, games for change, civic games," but there is this sort of movement afoot to say that games themselves can be objects of pedagogy. 
	Further, completing the circle here, teaching students to make games that teach can be a really useful way to instill the skills of rhetoric and persuasion, and really start to think through what it means to cognitively convince somebody of something, how you should order arguments, and how you can actually frame those within a media context. I think that this is something, especially for a school that has a strong commitment to social justice, I think this can be a really powerful way of spreading that message and also teaching students how to deliver that message.
	I brought an example of one such program that, one of these game-like object that I suggested, that I made at MIT with my research group, The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab ... Just to give a bit of background on this, this was a project with a fairly explicit social agenda. We wanted to see whether interactive narrative framing could be a useful way of spreading a message about social discrimination. Specifically we were looking at this phenomenon called micro-aggressions, which are subtle every-day social slights, verbal indications, that make a person feel as though they are being "othered," or being in someway discriminated, or assumptions are being made about them. So if I a native speaker of English, of color, is complimented on their English speaking skills, that's something that, it's actually sort of subtle and it's hard to say what really has happened here. Is this discrimination? Is this an inadvertent slight? Is this an intentional "othering" of an identity? And we just realized that a complicated issue like this, that's far from a subtle matter, is actually an interesting thing to explore in games, because games are about exploration, they're about experiencing a complex system, and trying to understand how that system works just with various fragmented experiences within that system.
	So the game that we created was called Mimesis, and I'll just bring it up ... And show you a little bit of it, to get a sense of how these sorts of experiences can be framed. This was a game that was made with a small team. two programmers, one designer and one narrative writer. So a four member team ... Can everybody see this? I'll try and blow it up a little bit. So I'll actually skip this prelude, which is part of our user testing, which I'll talk about later. Games can be a really good way of getting research data. Let me just skip through this survey and give you a sense of what an interaction looks like in this system.
	So the idea that we were working with here is basically "Can we start to teach people about the subjective experience of being on the receiving end of these sorts of verbal slights, and can we expand peoples understanding by actually estranging them from the normal social context?" So we came up with this mysterious underwater environment, the protagonist is a mimic-octopus, who is a species that can change the way they are to fit in and get by. 
	One of the technical questions that we wanted to ask was "Can you frame an interactive narrative in a way that users aren't picking their responses from a list of options, rather, they are changing the emotional barring of their character?" And then the character based on the emotional barring that you set creates whatever the natural response to the last line of dialogue would be. So it's a slightly abstracted and detached sense of control in an interactive narrative, but as you can see there's an encounter happening. I can, for example, click on the octopus and change its ... So I'm gonna make it happy, and you'll see its internal thoughts are sort of naïve and happy.
	Because of a combination of factors, my changing its emotional, it's internal emotional state to a more positive state has resulted in its giving an oblivious response within the conversation. There's actually a number of different higher order response types, so the one we're seeing here is oblivious and you'll see that the color has changed to code that to the player.
	You go through a couple of serial engagements like this, and the narrative actually tracks what's happening, tracks your trajectory of emotional responses, and starts to deliver customized content to you in terms of the between chapter text that appears on the screen and also epilogue text that appears at the end, and gives you a more reflective, poetic framing of the experience. That could be an experience of assimilation, of alienation, constant marginality, centrality and identity, and we find different ways of shading the epilogue, shading this text that you see on screen, in a way that without being too didactic and on the nose, starts to get at some of the the real social themes that are embedded in this game about sea creatures. 
	So this is just an example of how you can start with a pedagogical aim, like let's get people thinking about the issues of social discrimination, and you can actually design a complex system that might get at those issues in a way that people who would usually not respond to didactic lecturing on the subject, they may actually just have fun within the system and start to get the same ideas anyway. So I think that's one of the powerful teaching potentials of games in general.
	Also, feel free, there may be some times for questions at the end, especially if we've got some time to play the game, but also feel free to throw out questions about any of these projects if you have them.
	So moving on to the next potential area of impact, I think that games for research are actually a very powerful application of the form within academia. Games that start with a research question usually end up much sooner having a compelling application for that research question. And that means that the ideas of the research, the results of the research can be communicated to people immediately, and fairly broadly, I'd say more broadly than the usual journal publication. You'll reach people who you would not reach otherwise through a journal publication. 
	I work in two labs at MIT, the MIT Game Lab, and the ICE Lab. They both have a research games approach, but it's actually a different approach. At the MIT Game Lab, we look for what we call product owners, which are people not necessarily from within media fields or game development fields, but people from any field who have a research question, that they think games might be able to explore or express. 
	Within the Game Lab, we've done games with historians, cognitive scientists, we've done games with physicists, computer scientists, obviously, they are always full of research questions about things like AI, human computer interfaces. But it's actually interesting to see how many potential areas there are in the social sciences and humanities as well. 
	At the ICE Lab, we actually have our own research initiative, that has to do with the blending of computational practices and theories from social psychology and cognitive science. So we're specifically looking at how cognitive categorization, at the sort of psychological level, has social ramifications. When people categorize people by their identity, or the sort of phenomena that emerge from our natural and evolved desire to put everything we see into boxes. 
	So while a lot of our games kind of have a social justice agenda, we actually perceive from a more neutral scientific standpoint, which is just that there are certain subconscious cognitive practices, which are externalized in society in ways that can cause discrimination and all other sorts of social ills. But our research always proceeds from this basis in cognitive categorization and social psychology, and application in game development and computer science techniques.
	So one of the things that we find in ICE Lab is that the projects we make and get out into the public are a really useful way of testing our theories. We start with a theory, we build a theory into the game, and then we put it out into the wild and see if our theory had anything to it or if it was just sort of a flight of fancy on our part. 
	If we build data gathering systems into our games, then simply getting them out on the web is almost like a snowballing sample. People share that, people start to play the game, and the whole time, we let them know, for ethical reasons, but the whole time we're recording data about their experiences within the game, their choices within the game, and that's actually a useful body that we can then apply qualitative and quantitative research practices to analyzing. 
	One of the big advantages, and this sort of mirrors the advantage for students of joining departments together, one of the big advantages in terms of research is that by promoting these collaborations between departments in a certain campus, between fields, between even different schools that have often collaborated on a project, there's the real benefit to producing and sharing, kind of generating exciting new knowledge that's not necessarily interdisciplinary, but there's also this sort of fringe material benefits of this, which are that at this point in time, these interdisciplinary projects, especially the ones that bridge humanities and social sciences with the natural sciences, there are more potential funding sources for this, and there are more potential publishing venues for these sorts of works.
	So it can be a material benefit for people that position themselves in a way where they have a foot on both sides of this disciplinary divide, and I've actually worked on projects that were funded simultaneously by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Association. We've got NEA grans, MSA grants, MSF grants, so you see ... There are a lot of people who are interested in this from different places, and they're all willing to give money to new research projects that seem exciting. So as we all know, in academia, it can be very difficult to find funding, and I tell people, it might sound cynical, but, "Make a game." It's a really good way of getting an external funding to take notice of your project. 
	So I brought another example of a project that I would say pretty clearly proceeds from a pure research question, and we've framed it within a game-like media object, and its helped us to get it out there, this is still unpublished work, so just keep in mind that this is in a fairly unpolished state. But to give you a sense of what we're working with, this is a project that is exploring the question of group membership in a society. We want to improve upon the current approach to group membership that you find in a lot of computational systems, which is basically identifying which box to file someone in and then filing them in that box. But we're proceeding from the idea that there's actually more going on within a society in that there's a discursive context within group memberships are understood and are negotiated, that you're not the only one who decides what group you belong in, in a society, other people's .... You know what, this is not going to work because I'm not online. But I can sort of explain a little bit and send a link out.
Speaker 2:	I mean you can grab the ethernet.
Speaker 1:	Oh, is there? 
	So this game is an experimental interface for interactive narratives that we're framing within a somewhat recognizable social network-like interface, and the theme of the game is basically that people are constantly making taste statements about their musical preferences. As characters within the system are making statements, you're also making statements, you're responding to them, they're responding to you. 
	As a result of these different indications of which genre you like, and which subgenre you like, your social network profile starts to change in appearance, and the people in society start to individually categorize you differently based on what they've observed of your tastes.
	So this is just one application, as the text is a little small, but I'll just give you a sense that you're on what appears to be a familiar social network interface, and there's a mix of your real world information and information that gets generated by fictional characters. And you're prompted to like and dislike different things, the version we're working on now actually is a bit richer in terms of multimedia, so you'll get YouTube videos that you can actully watch and decided whether you like it or not before you make a statement about it.
	But over time, you'll find that the society's observations about who you are and who you belong to will start to change in fluid and unexpected ways, and at the end of the experience, we give players a visualization to let them know, computationally speaking, where we were positioning them throughout the entire narrative, and how the decisions they made moved that position throughout the experience. 
	So, what are the advantages of addressing a pure research question about cognitive categorization in social group membership ... What are the advantages of doing that in a game-like object? And I think for us, one is that we can frame things in a way that we pull in peoples experiences in other media. 
	So in this case, social networks is being a place where discourse happens, and it's sort of a social panopticon where everything you do, people are observing and you can observe the things other people do. We don't have to explain that in some sort of "in text," which would be difficult and long-winded. Or in some other way, we can just present people with what looks like a largely familiar interface, and we find that they take to it like ducks to water. We can give this to any sort of people, as I said we're constantly scraping information about their choices within the game, which gives us more data to research, but there's this sense that once you give people a system to work within, they'll actually do what it takes to figure out how to work within that system.
	That's something that's really useful and powerful when you've got an esoteric research question, we don't really need people to know that we're thinking about the prototype theory and the roshe framework, and talk about social categorization based on sailing examples and stereotypes and prototypes ... People don't need to know that in order to engage with the system and start to get some meaning out of it, and I think that's a really powerful thing. It's a democratizing principle. This is something I wanna talk a little bit more about, because I think it's a very important area of potential for games. 
	So this democratizing principal, I think, is the thing that makes games a really, really powerful form of outreach for a liberal arts institution, and in multiple dimensions. What I've put up here is this characterization of the idea: If you build it, they will come. Gamers are a vibrant community, and they're always looking for new games to play, and they will find whatever it is you put online. This is something that continually amazes me, that with not only no marketing budget, but often times no marketing initiative whatsoever. We'll check back in a week after we've put something on our website and we tweeted once about it, and we've got 100 play-throughs that we can analyze.
	This is something that I think is fairly unique to games. There's fan cultures about various media forms, but in my experience it was never the case, even though I did, for example, every time I would make a film in my undergrad film program, I would put it up online, and I would share it with people and those people would watch it, but I never got the sense that people were coming to it from who knows where. This is just an interesting phenomenon with games that if you make something there are people who feel passionately about this medium and are always looking for new things to play, and they'll find you.
	I wanted to show just a couple of slides worth of pictures of some of the outreach initiatives that we do at the MIT Game Lab, we have a commitment to interfacing with the community, and also to bring in members of the community from other institutions and campuses around the North East. 
	One thing that I wanna point out about these pictures is just the diversity of the people who come out to these events. All ages, men and women in more equal numbers than you would think, given the gender representation in the field of commercial games. What you notice is that people are really involved with the games themselves, and whatever is in the games, they're fully locked into it. This isn't like sitting in a room and listening to a lecture like the one you're listening to right now. When you're in it, it's just you and the game, and that's a really powerful, I think, direct form of address that ... It's possible in other media forms, but it almost seems natural in games, that if you've created a halfway decent game, even if you've created a broken game, people still wanna play it and figure out how to un-break it through their own play.
	This is one of my favorite pictures, the one on the right, the staff of the event where we were having this, at one point we noticed that they had all taken to the computers and were playing the games themselves, which I think just shows this is a media form that has a lot of interest and a diverse community around it. 
	So to me, a big surprise was this game that I designed and produced at the MIT Game Lab last year, which proceeded from a research question like all of our games, we had a physicist from Michigan State University who wanted to know "Can we do a real time visualization of special relativity?" The warping of space-time, and you know, light speeds. What we made was this, sort of, artistic, expressive, sort of representation of an engine that we made. We had two undergrad physicists who were also computer scientists who spent a while making and then portion to a game engine called Unity, this open-ended framework for relativistic distortions in 3-D space.
	But then rather than just releasing that initially as, "Here's our engine and you can make physics visualizations with it." We made it a real point of making this accessible to a broad age group. We had a character as the protagonist, very artistic watercolor based art style, a kind of imaginative frame within which to explore this very rigorous exploration of physics, graphics, and visualization. If we have some time, actually this game is installed on these computers and I'd love for everyone to have a look at it.
	What surprised us is this really caught fire in the popular press and in the gaming press, we had a lot of glowing attention from mainstream, both somewhat specialists with popular mechanics and Discovery Channel, and these sorts of avenues, but also fairly broad-based media outlets, NBC News and the Boston Globe were interested in this, and also the gaming press really liked it, and we got a lot of our best attention from gaming blogs and gaming magazines that directly addressed the communities that were interested in this.
	So I think that was great, and it certainly added an important point of transition for the MIT Gaming Lab, it was great that we got this good attention and glowing press. But what really made me proud was the way the game took a life of its own in the online, and on the internet community. We put a trailer up on YouTube, expecting it like most of our Game Lab trailers, to get a few hundred, maybe 1,000 hits, and as of this week we're past half a million hits. It's still getting comments every day, people are sharing it and liking it every day. 
	There's also over 100 and more every day, I get a Google alert every day about this, there's over 100 fan-made videos, tribute videos, lets play videos, there's a community around this game that we didn't really do anything to foment. It just sort of came up around it in a fairly organic way, and we also built a twitter hashtag into the game where people can share their high score, and it's still very active. It gets posted to every day, and we're here six months after the release of the game.
	This is actually very interesting, because we had this sort of fairly dry research idea about physics visualization, but I think what this show is that by making a conscious effort to make this more accessible to a broader audience, the audience came. And they came in greater numbers than we ever would have thought. 
	So, to conclude, I think small game development projects are now something that a campus of this size, and even a smaller size, most liberal arts campuses I think can support them. And it has material benefits in terms of building a campus community across disciplines and within the arts.
	I think ... At its core, the values of game development are very consistent with the values of liberal arts. The values are collaboration, free inquiry, dialogue, communication, these are really what sustain a healthy game development project, and I think we could agree that these are also the values that sustain the liberal arts.
	Games, as we've seen, can promote social justice causes in a powerful and direct way that actually can cut through people's filter, can cut through people's resistance to having messages in a social justice ... In themes ... I do feel that we've reached people with some of these games that do not usually engage at length with issues of social justice. And I think to really do this complex phenomenon justice, we need to talk more about what that means, and whether there even is a distinction between people who are aware of social justice causes and people who just haven't been activated yet. But I think it's clear to say that games are an expressive medium that can address some of these issues. 
	Games and integration of games into existing media curriculum can enrich media pedagogy, but can also enrich pedagogy in other forms. And I think also the ability to advance diverse research games and to break down the barriers both within a campus, between departments, between fields, between groups of students and groups of faculty and staff, but also games can break down the barriers between the ivory tower and culture at large. They can bring people of all ages and all walks of life into a space where you're talking about, kind of, high concept research ideas, and really cutting edge media work, and I think this is a way that the broader community can interface with the liberal arts, understand what we're about, and actually get involved with the day-to-day work of learning more about the world that we're in. 
	So, there's a little bit of time for questions and I thank you.