Melody [00:00] 

Welcome to the Game Master Certification Organization's interview excerpt podcast series. Hi, I'm your host, Melody Rainelle. We are currently interviewing Hawke Robinson, a professional GM, a therapist, and many other roles he's assumed in his lifetime already. In this particular episode, we will be talking with Hawke about rules, flow, and the profession of being a Game Master; and what is a Game Master? So, let's get started. To start us off Hawke, would you please tell us: What is a Game Master?
 
Hawke [00:40] 

So, the Game Master has multiple hats to wear. One is the facilitator, another may be the Mentor. Again, with the BECMI  [Basic, Expert, Companion, Master & Immortal] model, you're less dependent on the mentor model. 99% of role-playing games rely on massive front-end loading of learning, not differential learning, and the mentor model. And so in 99% of role-playing games, the tabletop role-playing game experience… the GM is the facilitator and mentor to other players, unless your group rotates between GM's all the time. They are the rules' arbiter right? Every- pretty much every role-playing game says: "Ultimately the DM gets to be the final arbiter of the rules," so that's where the referee aspect comes into it. They are the- may not be the world builder, because if you're reading from a module that somebody else who built the world, but you're certainly a co-conspirator in the world manifestation. The instantiation of the potential. So the world has been built in this paper. It hasn't been instantiated until you, the GM and the players, go through it, and bring it into life to its own variation of existence, right? Before it was a potential state, now it's living up to this variation of what it could be. So as the GM in conjunction with your players, you are the world instantiator for this adventure. So those are pretty heavy tests, right? And there's a lot of prep work in the majority of role-playing games that puts so much burden on the Game Master. And that's unfortunate because it's not necessary. That's part of what limits- why it causes so few GM's to be available. It's a real bottleneck in the adoption of this wonderful hobby. So games that are more GM-less or rotate the group around and their roles more, that is maybe, in part, a response to this shortage of Game Masters and good Game Masters, again, because I think 99% of role-playing games are fundamentally flawed in their introductory design, right? They're fine once you get rolling. The introductory process for role-playing gaming, there's this weird able gazing of the entire role-playing game industry, keeps doing the same thing over and over and you know they don't get a different result. And again, the BECMI model's there to help with that, but, so they try these other things. They try the one-page role-playing game systems and the one-page adventures and these super simplified games and they're all fine in themselves, but they don't scale and they don't have the longitudinal- they're just fun little one shots and that's fine, and then one of the other approaches is to try the GM-less approach. So this is not uncommon in the LARP [Live Action Role Playing] world. Where you may have multiple GM's and multiple NPC's or no GM's and everybody's either just players or NPC's and they may have referees to arbitrate but there's no GM and you're going through the adventures as a group that way, without a GM. There are diceless RPG's. There's the old Amber Diceless, and then there's the newer reboots versions of those that have come out recent years that we teach at higher levels, and they teach a whole other style of play where there's a point system that you use for declaring actions and you can easily adapt these systems to be GM-less as well because of the way there's a pool of resources to pull from. These are often played at like the level of being Greek gods. You know, the Mount Olympus and such it's- again, it came from the Chronicles of Amber days, where most of the characters are deific, and it requires a very different play style. When everybody has this level of power that's very interesting. It becomes much more socio-political. That's where often the GM can step aside. When you go through like a dungeon crawl and such, you need somebody to do the reveal, the resources, and if it's not a person then you need like a board game or a card game or a computer game or some other object to help with the revealing process. So whether you just randomly pull out dungeon tiles from a bag, then see what the results are, pull out a card randomly, you know, these are all different approaches, and to try to remove the GM let everybody play at the same level, and still have that kind of structure and the instantiation of that setting, right? Because again, you have the potential of what could be, and then you have the as you play it, you're instantiating it into this quote-unquote "reality", this fictional reality that becomes real for the participants. The advantages of the GM-less approach is you do reduce the risk of the mentor tendency. So a couple of the problems we see with the existing role-playing games is with the mentor model- and there's a lot of great things about the mentor model, I've been a mentor many times. I've been mentored. Mentored in photography and automotive and other fields. Mentoring has a wonderful place and unfortunately a lot of it's been lost in our culture, but there's a lot of benefit to it. In the role-playing game world, there's a little bit too much dependency on the mentor model and so it doesn't scale. One GM can only mentor so many people at a time. It creates multiple fallacies about "oh, the mentor always knows- the mentors always right". The infallible GM fallacy. So that unfortunately, players may be getting really wrong information from somebody and it can also lead to lazy mentees and the participants don’t question what the mentor says. They don't do their own research. If the mentor doesn't say well, you should go look this up and teach them how to do these things out themselves. They always just have to ask the mentor. They can get a little bit lazy about it and not doing their own investigation, etcetera, and that can go down again some weird disturbing places when there's too much reliance on that mentor model. Yet, most of the time it does not go that way. But it is prone to a higher risk when you have that single person dependency with all of that authority figure and such. So these other approaches I think are responses to some of these problems, rather than solving the actual problem. Or it may just be experimentation, right? I'm not inside the game designers’ heads. I know that some of the games were designed, they said, explicitly, because they had a bad experience with a GM, because they were so overbearing. Or it was just hard to get the GM to have their schedule free, and so it's a great way that if a person's short, you can still keep the game going, but it isn't- when you take the GM out of the equation completely, it's going to be problematic for the long-term sustainability of a developed world. You could have a randomly developed world, you keep pulling things- chips out of a bag or software to program or whatever, that randomly creates your world so that every experience is different, and I've experimented a lot with computer-generated worldbuilding over the decades and there's a lot of great, interesting stuff going on there, but having somebody with that human guidance as an experienced GM, to help kind of piece it together as a whole, can still create the sandbox experience, but creates some cohesion rather than just pure randomness to it. There's something lost when you take the GM out of the equation. So it becomes in- as far as our definition of a role-playing game, I think there's nine key components and it's getting late now I- please don't put me on the spot to list all nine with what so we listed it on our website, but, one of those key components is that Game Master role for it to actually be a role-playing game. Like the quintessential indie- we look at the RPG model and such. Otherwise it starts to become a hybrid variant. It's still a role-playing game, but it's a hybrid role-playing game rather than the original quintessential experience. That's some of my rambling thoughts on that.
 
Melody [08:27] 

Wow, this is great stuff. Thank you so much. Would you please talk to us about rule sets from your experience, possibly including safety tool sets, diversity, unspoken rules, stuff like that?
 
 Hawke [08:41] 

Right. Well, so one of the things we like to do, if possible, is have participants go through and fill out a-
 
Melody [08:48]

If I may jump in real quick, apologies for interrupting, but, would you be so kind as to clarify what “participants” means please?
 
Hawke [08:57] 

Yeah, the participants. Yeah, role-playing game therapy participants, the players, the clients. It depends on the setting. So, a player is a participant and whatever the goal is, whether it's a therapeutic goal, recreational goal, entertainment goal, educational goal, it's the generic term I use for a role-playing game participant. They're the player, right, and they're participating in the activity. If it's an educational setting, I'd be more likely say student. If it's a therapeutic setting, I'm more likely say client or patient or something like that, and participant just kind of covers all of it. So there's some of the things we like to do no matter what the setting, whether it's recreational, entertainment, educational or therapeutic, and then other things that are very specifically- we would want to do differently in the therapeutic setting. So across all of the settings we like to have, if possible, with any role-playing game participant, fill out an assessment of their genre interests, game system types, the settings they like, etc. because that helps us get to- so like the media they consume, etc. helps us get to what intrinsically motivates them.
 
Melody [10:02] 

That kind of sounds like interest inventory in education.
 
Hawke [10:06] 

Yeah and so we have a couple of different assessments and one of them is Genre Interest Assessment Tool, GIAT. Another one is Game System Assessment Tool, GSAT. We've got a few of them. So they go through this assessment and that helps us turn- because not everybody, in fact, believe it or not, a minority of people actually like sword and sorcery fantasy type genre for example. That's a minority of the population and whether it's superheroes, supernatural, etc. there's a lot of people that are actually turned off by those types of genres, and so if we can find out if somebody's never role played before, what kind of media they consume, we can kind of pick the right kind of game and setting and system that's going to be the most, again, intrinsically motivating for them. So let's say they love modern-day police procedural detective type mysteries, right? They don't like period pieces, they don't like sci-fi, they don't like fantasy. They really like a lot of the procedural programming. Whether it's medical procedural, legal procedural, or a gumshoe-type detective mystery. That's really useful to know, because instead of making them go through a D&D sword and sorcery fantasy thing, which they might be put off by, or if that's the only thing we have set up because of a particular group, we can modify the adventure to include those elements of a mystery as opposed to like a dungeon crawl or some such. Where you’re more likely for them to be intrinsically motivated, they're going to have a better time, and that's going to mean that the educational or therapeutical goal is going to be more likely to succeed because that intrinsic motivation. So we like to get that out of the way. We also like to get their consent and so there's a great tool from Monte Cook, which is a consent tool, it uses a- basically a stoplight -  green, yellow, red stoplight - where they go through and they’re asked a few questions. It's basically checking for triggers and topics that are- they're comfortable with and it kind of: “Well, I kind of can push this, but don't push it too far…" and verboten topics, and so it's a one-page assessment, it's publicly, freely available and it's a really handy tool and we've really liked it. We had our own version before, but we like the current one that's publicly available, so we use it quite a bit for all of the different settings. So again, if time is available to do that, then that's handed to the GM and lets the GM know how to customize the adventure to work around- so you get all of these from all the players and now you have an idea of kind of the areas you need to watch out for. Other things that can be added, of course, people use things like the “X” Card or the “No Thank You, Evil” Card etc. My only concern about those is if they're public in front of other people, we find them to be less effective than the more private communication of what makes them uncomfortable. So, being able to pass a post-it note, or if it's online, a private chat, saying, "Hey, this is getting a little too edgy for me,” you know. With the little kids’ games - a “No Thank You, Evil” maybe when they come across a ghost, maybe they're a little too scared of ghosts. So, instead of it being a ghost, it's a cotton candy quote-unquote “monster,” right? Something less upsetting for the kid. So having that consent also is important if you want to do heavier topics. So let's say you're working with adults and you're trying to work through some more mature material or you're working with teenagers. Bubble Gumshoe is a game that actually- it's a great game, but it's deceptively simple. It actually requires a lot of time to prep, and it's actually geared to target more of the real-world challenges that teenagers and tweens have. So from like sixth to twelfth grade in their lives. If the adventure topics include things like being at a party and dealing with somebody trying to get too physical with somebody else at the party, date rape, all these other topics that teenagers have to deal with are actually topics available as quote-unquote “adventures to address”. The simpler, lighter ones are some- "Michael's bike has been stolen. Find out who did it". Then you get into these heavy topics. Well, you need to know what you're working with, and you don't want to jump into that in a public setting. That's more of you're working with specific clients in a controlled setting and you know that there are issues you need to address or you're trying to delve into them. You want to have that consent and understanding of where the boundaries are. That also makes it easier to be more inclusive rather than exclusive. So one of my little pet peeves is that there is a recent tendency towards- you've seen a few YouTube videos going around, a few tweets, quite a few tweets going around, encouraging people to match play styles with play styles rather than diversity of play styles. So for example, put all the murderer hobos together, or put all of the rules lawyers together. This is something I learned back in the eighties through my own experiments, that initially you might have a higher participant satisfaction score, they may have more fun at first because they're playing with like-minded people, but over time that becomes boring and less rewarding and they're not able to put their finger on it. They're not usually aware why it's starting to leave them flat, so usually they'll go like, "Oh well, I just didn't get the right character. I need to make a new character and play a different adventure this way and then we'll be more fun." And it'll be fun at first because of the newness and then it kind of fizzles out and you'll see this happen time and time again with when they are all of like mind rather than diversified play styles, and this approach that right now has become very popular… You see it again, being tweeted everywhere, is what I call "Balkanization" of the role-playing game environment, and I know that that's a little bit of a controversial term and I chose that intentionally to bring that up, because it is a serious issue. If you start separating everybody's play styles, that's no different than separating everybody by other diversity. So we've run groups with high-risk and incarcerated populations where we've gotten rival gangs to sit down at the same table and game together. You know, Blacks, Hispanics and White Supremacists all at the same table, gaming through the same adventure together without incident. That's one of the amazing things about the tabletop role-playing game experiences that allows setting aside all of those real-world issues for the sake of the game. It's quite amazing. I've seen people who were decades long- hated each other, fought each other in high school, they're now in their forties and fifties, can't stand each other every time they come each other's orbits, but in the game, their characters are the most effective duo and their characters are best of friends, and these people are dramatically different play styles, dramatically different demographics, educations, politics, religion, philosophies, ethics, all dramatically different and yet they're all able to be at the table together. And I'm really seeing an alarming increase of the "Balkanization" of gaming in the last ten years or so. It's been slowly creeping up and really gaining momentum last five or ten years. And one of them I ran into and I saw was at PAX East a few years ago, is that they say, based on what somebody wears, their hat or their shirt, they should be automatically excluded from a game table without discussion, and so we have as one of our policies that… - right? You've been through that with the training, right? With that- it's always needs to- we don't have a zero-tolerance policy. We have everything needs to be judged in context. It is harder to evaluate things in context. It takes more work than to just have a zero-tolerance policy, but the example I've given is the "Got Root?" T-shirt. So in the nineties, because I have a systems administration background, computer background, and in the nineties there was a shirt and hat going around that was very popular, making fun of the old "Got Milk?" commercials that they said "Got root?" with a question mark, and that's a reference in computer tech to systems administrator, right? The person with all the root permissions, in the UNIX world it’s called “Root”. Windows world, “Administrator”. And that was very popular in the nineties, and so I had a few of these shirts and hats and such floating around, and I was at a convention at one point some years later and somebody stopped who was from Australia and was really upset. He was greatly insulted by my T-shirt. I was like: "What? What? Whoa!" and he was confrontational, and luckily he was confrontational. Luckily, he said something and stuck around so we could have a conversation rather than just like reporting me or something because he was offended. And so he's like, "You've got a lot of nerve wearing that around here!" And I'm like, "What are you talking about?!" And, luckily, we had a conversation. I explained, "Oh, it's a tech joke. Here's what it means…" and he's like, "Oh! Out in Australia, that terminology is used either for the sexual act or the male genitalia." And those shirts, turns out, later on started to become popular in Australia. The exact same shirt, completely different cultural context, completely different meaning. These zero-tolerance policies, would have had me excluded from that convention if he'd gone and reported me. The good thing was, we had a conversation that it was in context and all was well. And we had a good laugh over it and everything was fine after that. So it's really, really important for- if you really do care about diversity and inclusiveness, that you go through the extra effort of figuring out context. Now, if you see somebody wearing something offensive and you have the conversation and it's clear it's intended to be offensive, then you have the right to decide at your table: "That's not the kind of player we wanted our table." You know, if you're just doing it recreationally. If it's therapeutic, well you may or may not have that option. You know, some of the groups I work with do all kinds of offensive things. That's why they're there, and so we have to work with them to get through that. But again, the game helps provide a safer environment where we can work through those challenges, and we can create in-game parallels that get them having the metacognition that they may not have been having, so that you can have a conversation before and after each game session, and this is where the more therapeutic side comes in, helping them process what happened in the game and put in new context so that they can generalize into their daily lives. That's a key part of the therapeutic process, is taking what they learn in the game and explicitly bringing it to their attention. That mindfulness of like, "Oh, when your character did this in this context in the game, you saw this result. What were your thoughts about that?" "Oh well, this and this and this. Maybe next time, you know, I shouldn't automatically be so insulting, etcetera, etcetera". It's like, "Okay, have there been times in your life, in real life that you can think of where you might have done something similar or seen something similar for somebody else, etcetera? What would you do differently now that you've had that experience in the game that you could do differently?" and then as we check in each week, like, "Hey did anything come up last week that kind of reminded you of the game?" Etcetera, etcetera, and that's kind of that pre- and post-game processing discussion that really helps. So I kind of jumped from the inclusiveness to that therapeutic pre- and post-processing, but again, having these conversations, these contextual conversations are such a key important part, and when we just exclude based on someone's appearance, whatever it is, we do a lot of harm, and unfortunately I've been seeing an awful lot of that lately. So it's just something that I'd like to raise the warning flag about that for people that might have been doing that. Be careful about that. Yes, there's immediate rewards for kind of having everybody that thinks the same way as you, but that "Balkanization" is harmful and history shows that when you avoid the melting pot approach and go more for the "Balkanized" approach, only bad things happen in the long run.
 
Melody [20:58] 

We appreciate your sharing your experience and your thoughts on this matter. Would you please talk to us about “Flow”? It isn't just something Game Masters use, is it?
 
Hawke [21:08] 

Flow State. So one of the key people bringing up the concept of flow is the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The spelling is really funky. It looks like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi but it's pronounced "Me-hai Chick-sent-me-hai". It's quite challenging. It's much easier to look up “flow state Hungarian psychologist” than to try to know how to spell the name, but he proposed different phases of engagement, and immersion in activities, and in the sports world, it's often called being 'in the zone'. I do have a video out there on YouTube, I don't know if you've already seen it, talking about- kind of summarizing Flow State that brings in Kobe Bryant and other basketball players and such, and as well as clips from gaming, illustrating these different levels of engagement, immersion, and flow state, and the key principle of Flow State is that you found a balance between, challenging the person so much that it requires all of their focus and engagement to succeed at the task. It's just a hair beyond what they think they can do, but they have enough confidence, they're not overwhelmed with anxiety that they know they've got to be completely focused on the activity. They've got to bring their A-game. They have to put all their effort into it if they're going to succeed at this activity, and it's an incredible level of immersion and focus and one of the ways we determine if players are in a high level of immersion that could be potential flow state experiences, for example, when we have a game running and a Community Center, I watch for body language and eye contact and things like that, and then response to external stimuli. Because one of the theories is that you will just start to exclude any external stimuli. You'll become less self-conscious about your own appearance etcetera. You're just so engaged in the task, you're not worrying about all these other things. So I will start walking by a table, and if somebody who looks up at me and such, that means they're not as immersed. If I walk by and they don't respond to the stimuli, that means they're more immersed. I'll come in through a door, and if they respond to that, they're less immersed, if they don't, they're more immersed. The ultimate test I like to do, to see if a particular group of people, in gaming or any other activity, is fully immersed and potentially in flow state, is I'll take a big, heavy, thick book and throw it down on the ground- Just 'BOOM!' and a lot of people jump, right, from the startle response. People who've pretty much gotten to flow state experience, they won't even respond to that. They are so focused, they have tuned out anything extraneous to the activity that they're doing that they don't even have a startle response to that sudden noise. It's one of the ways we do our observed immersion scale test and then it predicts when they do their participation feedback score saying: "How much fun did you have?" "How immersed were you?" "Do you think you had a flow state experience?" etcetera, etcetera, "So on a scale of 1 to 10 and 10 being the ultimate experience, where would you put it?" We’re able to increasingly, more accurately, predict what they're going to fill out on their participant immersion scores both individually and as groups. We can differentiate between individual experiences observed and group experiences, and that's one of the challenges with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's tools, is they're mostly subjective self-reports, and they have their value, but they are problematic because they're subjective self-reports. And I've tried for years to figure out how we could get a correlation between that to make something more objective, because that makes it easier for Game Masters and therapists and educators to gauge while it's happening, how effective the modality is being at the desired goal. If it's recreationally, are they having a good time? If it's educationally, are they paying attention and soaking up the material so they're more likely to do well on the test? If it's therapeutic, are they really engaging in the experience and having more of an empathic experience so that they're more likely to be able to extrapolate that in their own lives through that depth of immersion? So flow state is a key tenant in recreation therapy. It's one of our main goals is to try to find ways to optimize the immersive experience for maximum potential flow state experiences. Because the research shows people in flow state, it is their ideal learning state and when you get people in flow state, they are really soaking up information like a sponge. They will retain it, they will have context, they will be able to go apply it. It's the best place to put them for- whether it's educational learning or therapeutic learning and skill development, etc.  

Melody [25:41]

All right, what do you think about the profession of being a Game Master, including recreational therapy, but, what about less licensed fields as well?
 
Hawke [25:51] 

I wrote about this recently extensively. I recently blogged about this and did an essay about it just a month or two ago, I think. And my main premise is: we are starting to crawl out of our infancy into kind of our tweens, not quite juvenile level of development as a profession, right? It's just starting to become- the writing side of it, the writing and publishing side, that's well established, that's been around for decades. The rest of it as an extended, extended profession of service offerings and realizing the full potential of this veteran is, you know, I think we're out of the infancy now and we're somewhere in that tweens to adolescent stage. There- there's an awful lot of experimentation and trying on different hats and different roles, ironically and appropriately, as we try to figure out what really makes it work as a profession. I've been fortunate enough; I've been a paid professional Game Master since 1983. People, for whatever reason, as young as thirteen years old, people were happy to pay me to run them through game sessions. It's been my hobby quite well, and that's, you know, very wonderfully vindicating, especially when there was the peak of the anti-gaming movement, but as it evolves, whether you're doing it for recreation, for entertainment- so let me make sure I've made this distinction because I don't know if did on this. We classify four different areas of the profession. There's the recreational, which is kind of the default way of playing. The goal is to entertain yourself and the participants. You're not trying to entertain an audience outside of the gaming group. There's the entertainment level, which is you're doing it for fun, maybe, but you're entertaining an audience. There's other people watching you and that's who you're actually trying to entertain. It's a different style of play and a different way of doing things. And then there's the educational area and then we get into the healthcare and therapeutic areas. So those are the kind of the main areas we focus on. The application of those can be all kinds of scenarios. So you can do educational or therapeutic or recreational or entertainment application for executive retreats, or you know, parties and there's so many different ways to apply any of those four approaches, but that's kind of the main distinctions we found over the decades, and the approaches for the layperson to do this professionally need to just draw from other well-established professions that have had success. So they need to understand about liability insurance and law and business and profit margins and customer satisfaction and feedback and employees and all these business things that have nothing to do with gaming itself. If you want role-playing gaming to succeed for you as a profession, and if you want it to evolve as a profession, codes of conduct, safety standards, all- there's so many things you have to put in, when you do any kind of activity that people are going to start paying you for, and it's only in recent years- I can't do- we still get lambasted by people who think we're evil or have sold out. Just like a musician who decides to go from an indie, you know, playing in coffee shops to actually getting an album and making money, maybe making money, right? If they signed with a big album, that might be a problem, but trying to make a living at it professionally there will always be fans who lambast the artist for selling out, and we've seen a lot of that as we've got into the professional Game Mastering, no matter what the purpose, whether it was recreation, entertainment, education, or therapy. A lot of people push back hard as "Get your business- get your professionalism out of my hobby," right? Just like “get your peanut butter out of my chocolate”. This is it with music, right? “Get the commercial stuff out of my hobby music,” and we argue that it's not mutually exclusive. You can have hobby gaming just fine, it doesn't get threatened by having professional standards and professional Game Mastering and working towards certifications and diplomas and standards of a profession. Until we've got common language and common standards, and it's okay if they're competing languages and standards, that's part of the process, as you slowly work through any profession, that takes a long time to evolve, you have to get this professional language and professional standards and all these in place for it to progress, and you have to share these things with each other as a community. If everybody's off in their own silos, as unfortunately they are doing right now, we saw a lot of growth up until about 2014, 2016 - probably about 2016, all of a sudden people started to smell money and kind of broken off into a lot of small silos. And unfortunately what I'm hearing, because people come to me to consult all the time, is they're all doing the same thing over and over, and the profession’s not advancing because they're not sharing with each other. So they keep making the same mistakes. They're not sharing templates with each other. They're not sharing methodologies. They're not sharing experiences. So the profession doesn't move forward very rapidly when they do that. Up till about 2016 there was a pretty good growth of sharing and advancement, and since people have kind of gone off and like, "Oh this is my secret sauce, my secret sauce." I've watched it kind of reverse quite a bit and I see a lot more factions and reversal of the advancement / repression. That being said, thanks to the internet, it is getting out there. We, of course, share everything as openly as humanly possible, and legally possible, and we do see advancement, but it is still, as I said, very much in this juvenile stage, with a lot of resistance to taking on all the responsibilities required to be an actual professional. But it's getting there. The only really negative thing is I do see a few real power grabs. There's some people doing- filing patents and things like that in the hopes of shutting others down, and that's unfortunate when you see that happening and hopefully they'll be enough pushback from the community- you know it's fine to patent your own individual idea, but when they're trying to patent the entire concept of role-playing gaming- very broad and overreaching, you know. I worry about what happened with Amazon one-click. That really- when I was doing the whole dot com thing, you had to literally add an extra click to all our shopping carts when the Supreme Court ruled in Amazon's favor for that, and so we always have to keep our eyes open because there are people who want to control all of it and that doesn't advance the profession. That slows down the advancement. We need to get back to the collaborative approach that we were doing up until about 2016. Everybody sharing ideas, experimenting, sharing our trials and tribulations and travails and triumphs and slowly aggregate that pool. There’ll have to be some associations created. There’ll probably be competing associations for a while, you know, as businesses rally across different philosophies. Then eventually over the decades, it'll probably standardize on one or two or three. As long as it doesn't stagnate and that's happening, that's a good sign of growth of a profession. As you see that in every other profession, where you have the spin up, they get larger, they start to cluster, some acquisitions, then you have some professional memberships. You start to get some associations, you start to get things into the schools, start to get some formalized education and standards. You have competing standards. Slowly those standards start to eat to get a little bit of a Darwinian process, and eventually we get to something where we've got an actual established profession that's moving forward and finally has reached adulthood. I'd say we still have at least another decade or two for it to get to that stage beyond adulthood.
 
Melody [33:33] 

Very interesting. Wow. I have no doubt that several of our listeners may want to listen to this podcast episode a couple of times just to process all the good information in it. Well, let's end this podcast episode here. To our listeners, please see the podcast description for details on how you can connect with Hawke Robinson. In the next podcast episode, we will be talking with Hawke about the Game Master training program, milestones, and performance analysis. Follow us to receive notifications when new podcasts are released. For more podcasts and information, check out our website: https://www.gamemastercertification.org/. If you liked what you've heard in this episode, please share it. Thank you for listening.