In this episode of Enterprise Sessions from the University of Bristol, Professor Michele Barbour sits down with Dr. Richard Cole, Lecturer in Digital Futures within the Department of Classics and Ancient History, for a fascinating deep dive into the unexpected synergy between ancient narratives and cutting-edge technology.
Discover how Richard’s journey from historical fiction to virtual reality and AI-powered gaming led to the creation of the Bristol Digital Game Lab, a hub for interdisciplinary collaboration between academia and the gaming industry. From algorithmic bias to postnatal depression, learn how game jams and immersive storytelling are being used to tackle complex societal challenges.
🔍 In the episode:
- The intersection of classics and digital innovation
- How games can be tools for humanistic inquiry
- Collaborating with industry to build meaningful experiences
- The future of AI-driven gameplay and museum engagement
- Empowering students through game design and research
🌐 About the Enterprise Sessions
The Enterprise Sessions bring together a diverse mix of company founders and researchers who talk openly about their personal experiences of forming spin-outs and start-ups, raising capital, academic-industry partnerships and the joys of translating research discoveries into real-world impact. The series aims to inform, inspire and challenge myths and stereotypes about research commercialisation and how businesses and universities can work together to tackle society’s biggest challenges.
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🌐 About the Enterprise Sessions
The Enterprise Sessions bring together founders and researchers to share candid insights on spin-outs, start-ups, raising capital, and translating research into real-world impact. Our goal? To inform, inspire, and challenge myths about research commercialisation.
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Connect with our Guests:
Prof. Michele Barbour – LinkedIn
Prof. Richard Cole – LinkedIn
Chapters
- 0:00 – Introductions: Dr Richard Cole and the founding the Bristol Digital Games Lab
- 03:28 – Cross-Faculty Synergy: How Richard discovered interest in games across disciplines
- 05:53 – The Shift: From “What Games Are” to “What Games Can Do”
- 07:35 – How early contacts evolved into ongoing collaborative projects.
- 09:48 – Using Game Jams to tackle algorithmic bias and unpack complex systems
- 12:34 – Making a game to explore postnatal depression in fathers and its potential impact
- 16:04 – How Richard navigates interdisciplinarity within Classics and the wider university
- 21:58 – How Richard expanded his research by collaborating on player studies and integrating humanities insights.
- 23:20 – Industry Partnerships: The range of partners, from indie studios to major franchises like Assassin’s Creed.
- 25:44 – Funding and University Support: How an Enterprise Fellow helped consolidate and scale the Lab’s work.
- 31:36 – Long-Term Vision for the Games Lab and moving to the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus
- 35:29 – Internships, postdoc roles, and the creation of a new narrative games design master’s programme.
- 40:07 – Models of Interdisciplinary Engagement: Examples from Assassin’s Creed, Pentiment, and the VR Oracle illustrating humanities impact.
- 45:04 – The Future: AI, Games & Cultural Experience
- 49:26 – New Project: Bristol Museum AI Quest Experience
- 52:16 – Personal reflection on career uncertainty, discovery, and the empowering advice that shaped Richard’s enterprise path.
Transcript:
00:00:08 Prof Michele Barbour
Welcome to the enterprise sessions from the University of Bristol. My name is Professor Michele Barbour and today I am speaking with Doctor Richard Cole. Richard, you are a lecturer in digital futures, but you sit in the Department of Classics and Ancient History, which is not necessarily a juxtaposition that’s somebody outside of university environment might expect. So tell me a little bit about your role and what the link between digital futures and classics is.
00:00:32 Dr Rich Cole
Of course, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Michele. So my journeys been a sort of long ISH 1 to reach the future side of classics. But the more I think about it is actually a very natural one. I started really by thinking about the power of narrative and stories and the stories we tell about the past, how we frame them, how we think about them, and particularly in the kind of fictional context I’ve always been interested in historical fiction. That was the topic of my PhD.
But that sort of inevitably took me into the world of digital representations of the past. Thinking about the role that games can have in the way we tell stories about the past, but also the way that VR is shaping the new possibilities in terms of reconstructing, approximating, imagining, visualizing different aspects of the past did. And now I’m working with an AI company to build games that help us to translate different ways in which we might imagine historical characters kind of communicating with us in the present, so there has been this kind of trajectory from thinking about stories – kind of modes of communication – and then taking that forward into kind of new media context and then out of that into ways we can extrapolate kind of learnings from that from that sort of humanistic systematic inquiry into kind of what it means to be human and how we tell stories and then sort of casting that actually into the future. So the pass is not sort of unidirectional. We don’t just look back in classics, we’ve always been interested in kind of a bidirectional view. A sort of classics as it was in the past, but also classics as it’s come into the present and sort of the reception of that today. And so I think my mind has always been shifting between the past, the present and the future and the job titles now kind of accurately reflect.
00:02:08 Prof Michele Barbour
Fantastic and fascinating. So you you mentioned games and games as they apply to both futures and and classics. I understand your Co director of the Bristol Digital Games lab. So perhaps you’d like to tell me a little bit about that and how that fits in with the the journey you started to describe.
00:02:26 Dr Rich Cole
Of course. So the game lab was something that I founded with Doctor Xiao Jiang in September 2022 at the University of Bristol that came about because at the time I was working as a post doc on the virtual reality Oracle Project, I really dynamic and interesting project led by Professor Esther Eisenhower here at the University in Classics, when she brought together this incredible multidisciplinary team of ancient historians, computer scientists, neuroscientists and psychologists. And when you’ve worked in a space like that, in that kind of environment, it’s impossible to go back to a a more traditional, indeed, humanities way of working sort of on one’s own writing books. I was just addicted, even to the kind of collaborative interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary way of working.
And that was, to me, the impetus for founding the game lab. Really, it was. I want to have these conversations about the power of games in the present thinking about the past, think about the future with the range of disciplines necessary to make that happen. And Xiao Jiang was a lecturer at the time in the School of Modern Languages, and she was working with games companies to explore localisation, translating games into other. And together we were both working with industry partners on the projects. We were on the for myself on the virtual reality Oracle project. We were working with the Games company to visualize this virtual reality simulation of visiting an agent. Oracle and Jason was working with games companies to localize their games. And so together we sort of in our ways of working had already kind of had this straddling effect built into that sort of way of working, so we were working across academic disciplines, but also outside with industry partners to realise what we were doing to sort of locate our work within an applied context.
And we didn’t realize we were both working in this area, but then we sort of found each other across the faculty, then the Faculty of Arts and decided, well, actually, there was a lot we could do by engaging in conversation. And then when we started doing that with others in our faculty and other faculties, we realized that games are actually a point of contact that we could have with so many different disciplines.
Again, it’s perhaps unsurprising. Games are inherently multidisciplinary features, objects, ideas, and they require huge teams, really, or they require a lot of disciplines, even if that’s located within small teams to come together, to, make them. But we found that actually we could have conversations across the faculties. And so the game lab from its inception was this idea of a a group of people that could come together to share best practice ideas, ways of working and to sort of understand what we could do at that intersection between industry and academia, with games as that kind of shared object of interest. It’s since obviously gone on to do very different things to game lab than kind of what we initially imagined, but that was that was sort of where we started from.
00:05:00 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s a lovely segue into the next question that I must ask it. It feels to me and I don’t want to put words in my mouth, but it feels to me that the game lab was set up off the back of projects that were quite sort of specified and pinned down. I can understand how your colleague in modern languages is interested in translating games to different languages so they could be in different territories. I can understand your perspective. I’ve actually seen the virtual reality Oracle and it was. It’s amazing and I can understand why a game company would want to work with an academic on that – it couldn’t be achieved otherwise.
But it sounds like what you’ve created is much broader and more expansive, perhaps harder to predict, actually, where it was going to go. So I guess my question is, where has it gone? And did it map to your original expectations or has have things surprised you in the demand from the game industry and where they want to sort of lean into university expertise?
00:05:53 Dr Rich Cole
Absolutely. I think if I could summarize it in a sort of brief pity phrase, we were originally interested in what games are, and now we’re very much about what games can be for, and I think that that that’s the sort of transition we’ve gone through. We were interested originally in this sort of idea of the impact of games, the nature of games, sort of picking them apart. I was interested in the kind of languages of games, not in terms of kind of human language, but the sort of the way that games tell their stories. So I was interested in sort of picking that apart with history as my focus and interested in localization, accessibility, those sorts of teams, but straight away we had this sort of sense that by opening up the discussion we could actually be interested in so much more.
We were having conversations with colleagues in law, in computer science and psychology, in bioengineering it suddenly you could have these kinds of really wide conversations. And then when you went and talked to industry, it was very, very quickly became apparent that we needed to understand their challenges, and straight away be able to communicate in their language. So we couldn’t just have a chat, have a call, see what you know, would like to sort of discuss on one day we had to sort of go. OK, this company is making these kinds of things. They’re interested in this and go. We could perhaps talk to them about X. And so we actually became quite strategic quite quickly about what we wanted to achieve through the game lab. So initially just a research group suddenly became kind of within the first year anyway, this sort of, what we’re now understanding of the connective infrastructure we were sort of bridging conversations, different languages, different industries, different sectors to find a point of contact and connection and where we could, where we could achieve something together.
And that again has had a kind of long tail effect I think even over the sort of three years that we’ve been in it sort of been working in this way. And I think one of the best examples is where in our first launch event, we had an industry partner who was there, who was really interested already working with Xiao Jiang to a degree who since has co-founded a games company and a deep tech company combined, who we are now working with on several projects and they as an industry partner have led bids to for collaborative R&D projects at Innovate UK that we’re the research partner on and we’ve since even COVID added together on a creative project and I think that that long tail effect is sort of the result of opening up our doors right from the start, finding a kind of neutral space and owning that space between all of these different areas. We’re working, working out where the interests lay and then kind of pursuing those. And that’s sort of been, I think the, the, the most rewarding aspect of it.
But there have been other kind of discovery moments. I think it has been also a sort of work in practice. It’s not like when we started everything we went right. These are the exact things we’re going to do. We’re gonna follow it exactly like this every year. That’s gonna be our model. And it also wasn’t a kind of traditional university research group where we just go or have some research seminars. We’ll have some visiting speakers. We’ll do this, we’ll do that. Instead, it was like, well, let’s just test the water. If we do this here, what happens if we try this? Maybe that would be an Ave. of work and it’s in doing that that we’ve kind of identified our strengths, I guess almost our USP.
One of those was running game jams, which many different groups do, but we do it in a very different way. We kind of invert it. It’s not about making games, it’s about exploring complex topics through games, and that’s become a really powerful tool that we’ve deployed across different areas of the university and with third parties, with charities, etcetera.
We’re also now making our own games. That was, again, a stretch goal, something that I thought perhaps wouldn’t happen for many years. It’s now happening. I think a lot of the seeds were there from the start, but we’ve definitely gone through a period of transition as we sort of found our feet, I guess.
00:09:24 Prof Michele Barbour
Fantastic and fascinating, and I want to ask you a little bit about the sort of the, the cultural aspects. I mean, university culture. But before I do that, I have to ask, have you got an example or two? You talked about exploring complex themes through games. You also told me, to my great surprise that, you know, writing games. So are there, within the bounds of what you can share, a couple of examples you can give just to sort of add some colour to that.
00:09:48 Dr Rich Cole
Of course. So in terms of the game jams, the first one we ever ran was with Professor Ed King in the School of Modern Languages, who was working on a project around algorithmic bias. And we decided to run a game jam, not to make games necessarily, although that was also, it did happen. We ended up making games in a very, very short period of time, about four hours. I think it was in different teams, but the aim is actually to explore algorithmic bias as an idea, as a concept, as a challenge in society through the process of making games.
And it may seem strange, but it’s actually very logical, because games are systems complex systems that put the human, the player in those systems, and those systems tell stories. They are rules based. They’re limited, but in the process of kind of exploring them, of traversing them you get to understand those systems and you make sense of them. You can sometimes even challenge them. You can become an expert in them. And so we did this with the theme of algorithmic bias to try and kind of immerse ourselves in it. What it is that the the particular challenges it raises different across different sectors. And we had teams make games about algorithmic bias in streaming platforms algorithmic bias in language, algorithmic bias and cultural sensitivities, if we were to meet different species in the future, I mean, there was there were so many ways in which different teams explored that idea. But holistically, I think the the model that that presented to us was that we could use this as a, as a methodology for exploring problems and topics rather than just for the purposes of making games, because games normally a sort of these two day events where game designers come together to rapidly make games, most of the people in that room weren’t game designers, but they left with a kind of understanding of what game design meant, but also a deeper understanding of the topic that they were exploring.
And since then we’ve worked with like Natural England to explore protected site strategies with game jams. We worked with academic colleagues running projects on post conflict societies, and we’re going to be running one over the summer with Gene Golding Institute to explore museums of languages. I mean the topics are now really varied and wide-ranging, and I think that shows the strength of what the game lab can be as this sort of methodology driven group that can provide a service, yes, but also a means to have a conversation around different topics, sort of bringing people together around games cause because games are so ubiquitous now in society and many people will have a way in it sort of levels the playing field, but also allows people to have a very clear creative directive to explore the topic in in question. So that’s something that we’ve really embraced and are looking forward to pursuing.
In terms of game making, we have found that the game dams have have logically also led into that area. I mean, yes, we make games quickly and they’re very basic prototypes there. Sometimes paper prototypes, they can be concept, art, narrative, whatever it might be that we can make in a short space of time. But it’s also a very strong method for exploring what a game could be around a topic that we’re really interested in. And my Co director of the game lab, Doctor Michael Samuel in film and TV, has run a project this year that I’ve been Co investigator on around building a game to explore post Natal depression specifically for fathers. And so we actually ran a game jam at the start of that to explore, well what could a game do to help us explore this topic? Could it act as a catalyst for conversation? We know you know, for instance, that fathers don’t tend to explore resources when they would like to. In this context, and if they do explore and they want them to be digital, so we knew that a game could have a very strong impact in this space. But we also didn’t really know what that game could look like. Should it be narrative driven, should it be a kind of space you walk through, should it evoke questions? Should it have interviews from people who’ve experienced post Natal depression? There were so many questions that were raised by the process of performing the game jam, and we also got to play a lot of games that explore complex topics like depression and they’re incredibly affecting. They’re really interesting. We all do it very different.
So the game jam was again a foundational kind of practice that helped us move forward with that, and then we worked with a digital artist to create a playable experience in Unreal Engine and that’s the sort of prototype that we’re now going to be taking forward for further development with the third sector, with charities, with people, with lived experience to sort of see what it can do in that space. It’s already shown that it can act as that catalyst of conversation. So we’re sort of now thinking, well, what, what can it do next.
00:13:53 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s incredible and it’s you said at the outset you start to think about what games can be and do. And I just think it’s extraordinary even just this short conversation really opened my eyes. These topics would not have occurred to me as being in the domain of games.
Just going back briefly to the algorithmic bias work, which if I’m fascinating. Is the sort of aim of that to then create a game or games that help other people beyond the game jam to understand and think about algorithmic base have to have conversations. Or is it rather to almost having gained that understanding to then do something outside of the world of games that that helps to combat or prevent bias in in the wider world, what’s the output I suppose?
00:14:40 Dr Rich Cole
It’s a really good question, I think for that particular project it was definitely the former because Ed is making a game that was always the part of this project to make a game that would help to translate the research and transmit it widely, and I think games can really do that. But again, it was sort of what could that game look like. And I think the game really helped the academic team to make sense of that.
And I think that that’s what we’re now trying to sort of position the games them as it’s not just this explorative session that helps those that come to understand the theme, but it can also help whoever is trying to make sense of their research in terms of the game to realize what that could be. And that’s what we’ve done with other academic projects and looking to do more in the future. But the second point you mentioned is also.
00:15:20 Dr Rich Cole
Relevant and I think this is what we’ve realized when working with the third sector with charities that actually the ideas that emerge from the game down can help inform policy. In the case of Natural England, we were working on a wider project, a bigger project around kind of public engagement with protected sites and the game jam was just one method amongst many being explored as a means to help younger people particularly engage with these challenging strategies around how we manage access to sites, in this case we we did a sort of four hour walk around leigh woods just the other side of the Avon Gorge to explore that particular site. And I think that’s where again I see the value of this is not just a sort of momentary value or a legacy of people who go to these events, but it can help inform policy as well.
00:16:04 Prof Michele Barbour
Wonderful. I’m struggling to find another adjective. This is a fiercely interdisciplinary undertaking, I mean this is it’s very clear the way you’re speaking, how this could never be achieved without bringing people from really quite radically different disciplines across the university and indeed outside of the academic environments.
That’s not always the culture in a modern university and at risk of offending some people. I would say the culture in sort of the arts and humanities tends, in my personal experience, to be less attuned to that interdisciplinary working, although of course it is present. So how has that been for you, someone from our Department of Classics and Ancient History, how was that received by your peers? Is it with, I don’t know. Excitement, intrigue, suspicion. What is that? Cultural sort of environment like for you in your home department? And have you seen any changes? I suppose through the through four years you’ve been doing this?
00:17:04 Dr Rich Cole
In many ways, I’m quite lucky because classics is inherently interdisciplinary and is in in many ways kind of one of the oldest interdisciplinary sort of disciplines, and that one can engage with, and I’ve always been struck by the fact that, you know, I have colleagues in my department working on everything from languages to ancient science to history to myth to storytelling. Even in the case of Bristol, I think we’re very lucky. We have colleagues working on cybersecurity on yeah, on virtual reality and I think that is an incredibly dynamic space to work. Indeed, I think I have actually been so lucky with the mentors that I’ve had who have trailblazed in this space, who’ve really been the ones to pioneer new approaches and perhaps have had to face a lot more of those challenges from peers, particularly over the last couple of decades where those sorts of approaches perhaps weren’t considered to be traditional classics in any sense of the word.
00:17:58 Dr Rich Cole
I’ve been lucky to be following in their footsteps and so for me it’s actually been a much easier journey in the sense that I think it’s that the path has been laid and that’s not to say that I have not encountered challenges myself, but I think, yeah, I couldn’t have done it without them. I think I’m doing it at a particular moment in time where I’m fortunate that the university is embracing more interesting ways of working. There are support structures in place for that, and there is more of a culture for it.
00:18:24 Dr Rich Cole
That being said, I spend most of my time feeling like I’m a cheat classicist like I am, an expert generalist more and more, and less someone who has sort of A1 particular deep expertise in one area. I’m starting to think of that as my superpower, as my strength, rather than as a weakness. Again, I think that’s contingent on the success that we’ve had, but it’s also shown to me the importance of that kind of way of working, because without without that sort of fierce interdisciplinarity, the game lab couldn’t exist. So that’s what I’m trying to learn is, is that it’s really important to acknowledge the training where I’ve come from and sort of how that shaped me. But it’s also acknowledging that to make that happen, I do need to step continuously outside my comfort zone and I think that is actually the one of the hardest things to do.
00:19:14 Prof Michele Barbour
And yet you sound so comfortable out of that comfort zone. And I guess that’s something that’s just learned and experience over time. And. And you reward yourself with the satisfaction you drive.
Right when you’re collaborating and still thinking inside the university. Then I wanna take our conversation out. But when you’re collaborating with people across so many different disciplines, do you find language barriers? Not literally, but figuratively. If you’re working with people in computer science and and mathematics and cyber and so on. Have you had to adjust the way you communicate and have they or actually is that a myth? Is that actually not the case that there are different languages across different disciplines in that way?
00:19:50 Dr Rich Cole
Brilliant question. I think I have encountered some quite poignant moments where there are significant language barriers. And the best example I can think of that is when I was working on the virtual reality Oracle project and we were putting together a workshop led by the the Research Associates on the project, I pitched the idea that we put together a workshop and then out of that we put papers into the workshop. At that point, the other research associates in the range of disciplines and computer science, psychology looked at me and sort of just didn’t really understand what I was talking. And at that point, I realized that just paper and conference proceedings and publications that come out of these things are just so radically different across disciplines, in computer science and premier venue is a conference that publishes proceedings. If you do that in the art and humanities, that’s a sort of faux par or it’s not the thing that’s done. And it was those sorts of moments where I realized they’re truly is a kind of learned difference between disciplines around kind of, you know, significance of outputs, venues where you go the things that you sort of put your focus and effort behind in order to be recognised and promoted whatever it might be.
00:20:56 Dr Rich Cole
But I think that was actually quite easy to get over because it sort of as soon as you realize that you stopped seeing what you’ve internalized as being true, or the only way of doing things. And you quite quickly sort of learned to break down the assumptions that you’ve or at least not to, to rely wholly on them. I continuously find myself challenging those assumptions, but I quite enjoy that. I think it’s again as something that that inspires and provokes the way that I work rather than sort of being a bit, you know, a significant hurdle.
Other than that, though, I think the thing that I’ve learned the most over the last couple of years is how much I can gain from engaging conversation with other disciplines. And I think that this is – it was sparked in particular when I started to look at the role of the player in games, so my research, even during the PhD I was always interested in the kind of impact. Like what does it mean to engage in reading a piece of historical fiction, watching a historical film, playing a historical video game. But I can only ever see arise so far with the kind of toolkit that I had within the humanities, and so I was always trying to sort of think beyond that. What other kind of tools can I use?
00:21:58 Dr Rich Cole
And then I started to get interested in running player studies. But that sort of then sort of catapults you into talking to psychologists, to computer scientists, and then you realize, oh, they’ve been doing this for a very long time, but often with different questions. And so therefore I was like, OK, I can really learn from them. And I really enjoyed learning in the process of doing with them. So it wasn’t just. I’ll go read this stuff and then try it myself. It’s like, OK, I will work with the computer scientist to Co run a study and understand what we can get out of that. That has been the kind of model I’ve now sort of followed. I also think that I’ve contributed to them and provided something. I mean, again, you’d have to ask them if that is indeed true. But I think that that’s there is something that the humanities brings that that takes one away. Indeed, in this particular case from sort of player studies that are very quantitative and sort of numbers based or even when they’re qualitative or sort of generalized to a certain degree, but won’t really think about sort of questions around or what our players taking away from these things other than sort of engagement and immersion and these sort of buzz words that are around in, in psychological literature and computer science literature. Yeah, I’m really interested in, well, how are people thinking about history? And I can only really ask that question because that’s my interest. So I think that’s, that’s where the alignment is happening.
00:23:06 Prof Michele Barbour
This is clearly such fertile grounds that you found here for so many interesting research questions and projects, and I imagine your postgraduates must love this. There must be so many, so many interesting things to pursue.
Let’s look a little bit outside the university then you’ve mentioned several Times Now. You have industry partners involved in, in the game lab and in your broader research. You mentioned that somebody you knew had founded a a company to, to work in this area are those your primary collaborators? Are they sort of SME’s, small medium enterprises startups or do you also work with larger companies like what what’s that portfolio looked like?
00:23:42 Dr Rich Cole
The way that the games industry works is that you have everything from one person working in their bedroom all the way up to enormous multi studio conglomerates. You know, spread across the entire globe, delivering enormously costly games. And so we were always interested in in sort of tapping into all of that. We have found that the partners that we’re working on active grants with tend to be the SME’s tend to be the growth companies, the ones that have a real interest in R&D and the capacity to do it, but are also willing and kind of really want to leverage the expertise that the university has on offer in that kind of growth trajectory that they have.
That’s not to say that we haven’t worked with the mid-range gaming companies and indeed what they call the AAA gaming companies – we have, we’ve been able to bring speakers, historians working on the Assassin’s Creed franchise to Bristol. We’ve had talked to the CEO endemic that built Plague Inc, the game that’s played by millions of people on their phones and became incredibly prescient during the pandemic we’ve engaged in conversation with these people because of the insights that they have, and we have found ways of developing relationships there, because that’s the other thing is trust. You really have to build trust. And that’s quite hard to do with massive companies unless you have a really good way in through individuals that are making the culture there. And so I have found ways in to certain companies through kind of really good contacts that we’ve been nurturing over several years now and you know, down the line that is likely to lead to further projects. But in terms of the active ones right now, that has been, thanks to kind of the independent scene within Bristol, the indie gaming scene that is a really active, vibrant dynamic seeing that’s not dominated by large players. And so I think again, when we set up the lab as this kind of quite agile entity, we were, we were sort of almost modelling the nature of the independent gaming scene with again kind of small agile teams. And so we’ve been able to sort of connect in link in with those those teams and so, yeah. A couple of our main partners are in that kind of space.
00:25:35 Prof Michele Barbour
Your passion and enthusiasm commits. What you’re doing is really, really clearly evidence, but you’ve mentioned already and I can’t imagine how it be possible without quite a lot of support. And I do mean financial support because as researchers, we rely often on on grants and on funding and actually funding, at least from my experience, for these radically and disciplinary, very emerging areas can be hard to come by, but also other kinds of supports. You know that all the support that one needs to ideate initiate, run and close a project effectively so, what support have you lent on? Is there any support you found hard to find? Is there support you’ve discovered and now you want everybody to know about it because it was hard to find and then it turned out to be great. Like, what about that support network?
00:26:20 Dr Rich Cole
What we’ve done would only have been possible thanks to the incredible support from a whole wide range of teams, from faculty research team in in old Arts, now arts store and social sciences, and the commercialization team, the translation Team, International research and indeed kind of just the finance teams within the university who have worked with me tirelessly on every bid. None of this would be possible without them.
00:26:43 Dr Rich Cole
But what was quite interesting is the only reason I was able to tap into quite a lot of that is because I actually spent a stint working as a PA to the Dean of the old Faculty of Arts. And so I had a professional services role alongside a research role, and that opened my eyes to the university as a business, as an institution, as a complex series of teams working towards a shared goal.
00:27:03 Dr Rich Cole
I think as an early career academic coming into an institution that’s quite impenetrable often and that’s no fault of universities necessarily, it’s because they’re just big, complex beasts that are hard to sort of navigate in a in a in that agile way. I mean, I think it takes both the willingness of the person to do that, and then time, institutional memory, and the winner is to have kind of those conversations regularly. I was sort of doing that on my job that I used to have and then I continued doing that on my lectureship and beyond. And I think that that’s that put me in a very strong position to understand who was doing what where and how I could leverage that.
00:27:40 Dr Rich Cole
But in terms of kind of the particular pots, what I think has again been quite inspiring is unlike more traditional arts and humanities research where there is kind of one obvious Council you apply to, perhaps you might do interdisciplinary research and cross one or two councils for us, we could tap into almost anything because games can be applied and worked on in almost any different which way. And so we’ve had funding from almost every internal pot you could imagine within the institution in different ways, which has meant we could do a lot, but we’ve also been able to tap into innovate UK funding into areas that are typically reserved for SME’s and things, because of that way of working with industry that we’ve established, but also because that’s how games are made and that’s how SME’s are looking to sort of support their work. So I think we’re in a fortunate position in that way that we can tap into resources that kind of other disciplines would struggle to access.
00:28:28 Prof Michele Barbour
Yes. Fascinating. Perhaps actually being that sort of, I don’t say chameleon, but your work has so many different applications. And finding the application that matches with the funding opportunity, actually it’s easier than it would be for some because there’s so many different ways you could look at what you’re doing and then utilize it in a constructive way.
00:28:48 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s wonderful to hear of your story to date, and one of the things I’d like to explore a little bit is you have been selected in a very competitive process as one of our university enterprise fellows for next academic year for 2426. So what do you hope that will do for you? It sounds like you’re making fantastic progress. So why is the Enterprise Fellowship a a value add? And what do you hope to achieve through it?
00:29:09 Dr Rich Cole
Of course. So the way in which I’ve been conceiving of the fellowship is just the perfect opportunity right now in this moment in time to bring together the different areas of work that lab has been engaging in, synthesizing that into, I mean, a service offering, yes, but into a a way in which we can support a whole range of different projects and ways of working, and then to be able to sort of test that with the key stakeholders.
We’ve actually been doing some of that leg work already. So we know there is interest. We know there is demand, we’re working kind of four key areas which we’ve already sort of touched on sort of game jams, consulting with academic, consulting with gaming companies, running player studies, and also doing our own kind of production. It’s about finding a way to celebrate what we’ve done in that space to turn that into case studies that they demonstrate to others what can be achieved in that space. Because at the moment it’s still largely sort of word of mouth or it’s people are coming to us now. But it’s also, I want to be able to take that idea out to sort of big international gaming conferences to sort of test these assumptions with completely different audiences. I want to find ways to embed that way of working sustainably so that we can kind of support the lab as this revenue generating kind of research project that we can then create roles within the team to expand our team and sort of find our feet in that in that sort of way. I mentioned there’s this sort of long tail effect that we’ve already found. And what I’m seeing the now is basically sustaining that, bedding that in in a way that enables us to continue the work we’re doing to pursue our vision and our goals to remain academically rooted, critical of what games can and could be in society to realize our ambitions in that space and to do it in partnership in a way that enables us to not rely wholly on grant funding or on an individual project here and there. Because, like you said, individual products can have great significance in their own terms. But what I see the lab is doing is having sort of impact over time in lots of different areas. But to sustain that requires us to be very clear about what it is we’re offering and to be able to sort of tell that story both within the university and outside of it. And I think it’s, it’s that piece that the fellowship is really going to help solve.
00:31:21 Prof Michele Barbour
So I suppose that then makes me want to think slightly further ahead as well, and the long tail that you talk about is true of so many disciplinary research undertakings and is something that our structures don’t always support and facilitate. We tend to think in in chunks of time, of 10 years and so on.
00:31:38 Prof Michele Barbour
So what’s your longer term hope for the digital game lab? What do you want it to become in in your, in your mind’s eye? What do you see? And then maybe we’ll come on to what barriers do you anticipate? But let’s start with a positive. What do you hope that that can be? I was gonna say in steady state, but maybe there isn’t a steady state. Maybe this will continue to evolve.
00:31:59 Dr Rich Cole
I think that point about evolution is crucial because we’re only here thanks to, as I sort of said earlier, throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks and and understanding that I know at the festival of enterprise this summer there was a discussion about enterprise not just being finding one challenge and selling that but about being aware of the range of challenges and how one could solve different things, but being able to adapt in that space, and that’s sort of what I see the lab really doing. It’s not like we solve 1 particular challenge in the gaming industry or solve 1 particular change for academics. It is that kind of breadth of what we offer and what we are doing that I think is our strength. And so I’m keen to continue to be open to developing and evolving that.
I would say though, that we have a couple of stretch goals that we really would like to reach and one is to continue to develop our own games that we believe will have merit, and I think there’s a variety of ways in which we’re going to go about doing that. One is to sort of build out the student body so that students can feed into that sort of development and gain industry expertise and experience, etcetera. The other is bridging those partnerships that we’ve created so that we can continue to send academics off to other companies to develop their ideas, but also bring industry expertise into our sphere so that we can continue to build out our games. That’s definitely one part of the picture. The other is sort of formalizing what we offer into this kind of holistic package so that we can take an idea from inception through to delivery for other projects for our own projects. It’s not just one thing here or one thing there. It’s that sort of that overall picture that we want to sort of keep in mind.
00:33:25 Dr Rich Cole
And I think the other big thing is the game. I was physically moving to the Bristol Digital Futures Institute. And so it’s going to become part of that ecosystem as well as staying kind of within the arts and humanities because that is its core strength. So it’s sort of finding out long term, what does that mean when we’re Co located in the enterprise campus where we can kind of open our doors, maintain and kind of even expand upon what we’ve done already. Often sort of. You know, as individuals using existing spaces, but we’ve never really had that kind of wholly dedicated space. And I think what we can do with that is also really exciting.
00:33:54 Prof Michele Barbour
I mean, tell me a bit more what do you want to do with that and you and your campus is extremely exciting and we could talk about that all day, I know, but what of the new campus plans really excites you. Where do you think that your area of research and entrepreneurship particularly benefits?
00:34:10 Dr Rich Cole
Well, I think it comes back to that point about taking an idea through to, sort of creation and completion and then sort of assessment because that’s exactly what the DFI facilities and the my world paired facilities are set up to do. But I think you need entities like the game lab to create the opportunities where those ideas will come in through and to be developed. I mean there are definitely other ways, but I think the game is 1 core way in which we can really utilize make the most of those kinds of facilities.
00:34:37
The other thing is working with industry partners. There’s something about temporal quarter enterprise campus. It’s hard to put one’s finger on it. I think unless you’re actually there. But what I found when I’m there is that it doesn’t feel like a university space, but nor does it feel like you’re sitting in an industry’s company’s office. It’s somehow in between the two. And that’s the space I’m already working in.
00:34:59 Dr Rich Cole
So it’s in a kind of conceptual way. So it sort of it makes real the way in which I have been working. And so that’s why I’m really excited to be there. It’s why it feels like a natural home for me. But then there are other kind of practicalities. I think once we have a dedicated space, we can run play nights, we can bring students together down there. We can bring staff together, we can run training initiatives. That’s another kind of future goal to train people in how to use game engines for their own research. There’s lots of opportunities, I think that open up once we have a dedicated space such as the facilities down there.
00:35:29 Prof Michele Barbour
Couple of times you’ve mentioned students and when a lot of people think about universities, that’s first thing they do think about. So what role do students have in this now? What roles would you like them to have in the future and what kind of students are we talking about research students, PGT students, undergraduate students, what’s the now and what’s the possibility for students?
00:35:49 Dr Rich Cole
Of course, this has definitely been on the cards from the start, so we actually had paid internships for postgraduate students within the lab, from its beginning. And we continued to do that, they provide invaluable support, but more recently, what we’ve found is we’ve been able to by bringing in research grants, you create postdoctoral research associate roles, research assistant roles for existing postgraduates for those who just graduated as their kind of first training opportunity. Again trying to model what really worked for me, I went. I went from a PhD into a kind of very digital space for the postdoc and that supercharged what I’m now doing, so I’m trying to basically model what worked for me for others and to provide those opportunities and next steps or steps on that ladder.
We are also in the process of writing a master’s degree in games design with a narrative focus, and this would be the first of its kind in the country if that is, if we manage to make that happen, then I think we’ll end up with a an incredible talent pool that we could not just train in terms of providing the skill set for the next generation of designers in this space, but also create opportunities through the lab for them to get involved in active game projects. That’s again that I think that masters like that would only be possible thanks to the work we’ve already got going through the lab. I mean it, it sort of underpins the narrative of why that that program could work.
00:37:13 Dr Rich Cole
We also have seemingly attracted now I think in the range of 10 PhD applications. And this sort of came out the blue, really. I mean, it was something that surprised me. How quickly people identified the lab identified the expertise of the academics within it, not just myself, who could support their projects. And so we are building again a kind of critical capacity there that will enable us to do so much more. We’re going to hopefully run our own podcast. We’re going to hopefully continue to develop our particular areas of the lab. That would be much harder for us to do, for the directors, at least to do on their own because of the other responsibilities that we have. So it’s identifying the strengths of those that talent pool coming through and sort of seeing how we can usefully support and deploy that to sort of, you know, continue the vision of the lab because that seems to be why people want to work here. It’s because there is an entity like that in existence.
00:37:54 Prof Michele Barbour
Rare and precious entity. The new Masters program sounds fascinating, kind of readily understand why there’s demand for that and also how, how rare and unusual it is. It’s really interesting. You’ve had a sudden glut of PhD applications. That’s not standard necessarily in our environment. Where are they coming from? these computer scientists and mathematicians seeing the intrigue of narrative and narratology in their work or these classicists seeing a really exciting learning and career opportunity in in tech?
00:38:26 Dr Rich Cole
Is actually all of that. We have had computer science several students apply with kind of computer science as their background, but they’re interested in how can we have AI characters in video games telling stories about the past, for instance. So they have that kind of technical expertise, but they’re interested more broadly than in just that area. Or they’re in how that area can be applied in, in other context. And for that, you need those kind of really strong interdisciplinary teams.
00:38:47 Dr Rich Cole
We’ve also had a lot of class assists or people with a kind of historical general historical background interested in the role of historical games today in studio with that, and also we’re having people interested in sort of, yeah, adaptation and people looking at kind of film and TV and games. And so that’s helping to bridge those areas. So what I found is in bringing together the team for the lab when a student project comes in, it’s now quite easy to just activate that existing network and say, OK, well, there’s this project that’s come in, who could we potentially get supervise it? There are then institutional challenges. Where does that student sit? Who is their primary supervisor? What is the nature of that team? But again, without the kind of infrastructure of the lab, those sorts of questions would be infinitely harder to answer.
00:39:26 Dr Rich Cole
So I think that’s been one of the most rewarding and perhaps unintended consequences because when we started the lab, I was only on my postdoc myself. So it wasn’t. I hadn’t supervised a load of PhD students myself at that point, but it’s become rapidly kind of one of the defining features I think.
00:39:40 Prof Michele Barbour
Excellent. Richard, you said that through the digital game lab, you’re keen to explore it, keep an open mind as to all the different ways you could engage with industry with other disciplines we did with. Are there particular models that you have found that are emerging as particularly well suited to support this kind of interdisciplinary research? Other areas maybe we could put extra support to allow other people with your kind of mindset to really thrive the way you’re doing.
00:40:07 Dr Rich Cole
Absolutely. So I think I’ve been interested in this question for a while now and I’ve been looking at how other game centers, game labs, other sort of groups, even individuals, have been engaging in this kind of work across the UK and beyond because it’s starting to happen more. It’s still not that common, but it’s definitely making significant inroads where it does happen and they’ve been interesting models from kind of individual academics with deep levels of expertise consulting on a particular team,
For instance, we had Anderson from Edinburgh come and talk to us recently about the work she did consulting for Assassin’s Creed Mirage. She’s an Islamic art historian and you delivered a an incredible kind of history enhancing experience within that game thanks to her input. So that was one particular model. And I think there’s elements of what we’re doing that sort of overlaps with that other labs have kind of, you know, deployed their student body to, to work on creative project.
00:40:56 Dr Rich Cole
Other ones have kind of brought in significant kind of EU funding to deliver solutions to really big challenges like climate change, something that the Manchester Game Centre is sort of really working on. So there’s some really interesting models out there, but all of them seem to emerge organically, really as a result of the kind of people that are there working, their background, their experiences. I think what makes Bristol really interesting is again going back to that point about the kind of independent scene and the SMEs that we can work with, because it’s not just one off, we’re not just working with one games company because of one level of expertise, we’re sort of, we’re almost tracking the journey of other companies and I think that that’s what we’re looking to do more of in the future. So some of our big partners in that space, now the company a Bristol based company, Meaning Machine, they’re an AI company, but also a games company, interestingly, led by a technical expert and an arts and Humanities games designer who has a background in history, and that kind of pairing actually literally models the kind of bids that we’ve got putting together where I’m the research lead, working with computer scientists and so we’ve been able to kind of track I think what works for them and provide a similar level of kind of expertise. But from that sort of academic side of things.
00:42:08 Dr Rich Cole
And then there’s other SME’s such as time machine designs led by Richard blows, he’s developed this kind of venture gaming studio that’s developing digital heritage content. And it’s through collaborations with him that we’ve worked out kind of where we could inform the kind of work that he’s doing. And but he’s also now my PhD student, so he sort of brought him into the university ecosystem because he really wanted to pursue that interest. And so we’re finding ways of kind of aligning there that’s different again, from working solely with a sort of an SME kind of quite separately from the university. So I think it’s that sort of way of working that we’re really interested in exploring further and and and seeing what can come out of those kinds of collaborations.
00:42:37 Prof Michele Barbour
Wonderful. It’s such an exciting area. Did you shared a couple already? But I can’t resist the temptation to ask you if there’s one further example you’d like to give of where a humanities or arts perspective, whether that’s narrative, whether that’s cultural insights, has influenced the design of a game or the impacts of a game or other sort of digital project. I know you’ve given us some already, but have to open the door to one more.
00:43:03 Dr Rich Cole
of course. Well, I can answer that at A at a typical academic fashion, the sense that I think the argument is a fundamental to good games generally, but of course I I can definitely go into details. I think it does depend on whether we’re looking at kind of commercial driven games or academic driven games, but I think we see it in both. So just a couple of examples from kind of my own area that within the commercial sector, we are seeing some really interesting deep level of engagement with Human culture, civilizations, ideas in the sort of creation of contemporary digital experiences. There’s games such as Pensament that deals exceptionally well with and the complexities of kind of medieval Europe and then transitions during that stage in a sort of fictionalized setting, but it really captured people’s imagination and the developers have gone into extensive detail about how passionate and interested they were in the history. And they’ve even given their whole sources and references. Again, it’s not a piece of history. It is a piece of historical fiction, comes back to my PhD and how interested I was in that sort of tension but it demonstrates sort of what can be done. The art of the possible.
00:43:57 Dr Rich Cole
Similarly, the team behind Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, released in 2018, sent their whole development team out to study Ancient Greece in Greece. And you can really feel that when you play the game, there is so much there. I mean, classicist, I’m kind of well placed to note notice, notice that and spot that.
00:44:15 Dr Rich Cole
But again, the game is not just a cut and paste of previous Assassin’s Creed games. It is something that somehow more tailored to the particulars of that period. Thanks to the kind of work that the developers went to, and indeed, the in-house historians that they worked with. That’s not to say there aren’t particular ways we could study that and what they’ve done and what they’ve achieved, but I think it is an interesting example within the academic sector.
I do think that something like the virtual reality Oracle is a is a kind of pinnacle example of what can be done there because it’s all about trying to understand how humans have dealt with risk, which is was Esther’s kind of main area of research in the context of thinking about consulting an Oracle, so risk has always been there in human society. So how are the different societies dealt with that and understood that? And you know, designing the Oracle and imagining the experience of going through that was a way of sort of teasing that out. So again, not something that could have been built without asking that question. And this is sort of connected now to my emerging research interests in this area, which is sort of games as humanistic inquiry kind of as inquiry machines, they almost mechanized the process by which we ask questions about humans and culture and how we work and what it means to be human. And I think that’s, that’s where I see their potential.
00:45:23 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s infectious, it’s in. It’s inspiring. Let’s look ahead now as we sort of reach the end of our time together, we’ve skirted around the edge of AI a little bit. We haven’t gone into it in detail and I think that’s for good reason. But if we look forward now and not just in your own work, but the broader integration between humanities and computer science and games. And wider culture, I suppose, contemporary culture, where do you see the most exciting opportunities? I realize I’m asking you to have a crystal ball, but you know you’re a classicist, you can do that. Is it in AI? Is it an immersive experiences? Is it in the ethical deployment of tag? But I don’t want to lead you. Where do you see an exciting opportunity?
00:46:03 Dr Rich Cole
So I’m very fortunate to have worked in several of these areas and actually. Be working in particularly the AI space. Right now the AI and gaming space and so in a way, it’s not so much forward thinking. It is kind of present but leading towards the future that I think is really exciting and I can break that down a little bit.
00:46:24 Dr Rich Cole
So last year we put in a bid meeting machine. Our industry partner put in a bid to innovate UK to work on a collaborative R&D project where we were the research arm to study the ways in which players respond to the games that they’re making using generative AI. And this is not a kind of AI slot. This is not using AI to create the game rather it’s using AI as the engine to power the potential for emergent experiences within a game and just sort of again fine tune that a little bit. One of the games that we studied that meaning machine have made called dead meat is a murder mystery game you’re tasked to investigate a murder mystery by interrogating a suspect. But because that suspect is powered by generative AI, they can respond in any way, and you can write anything. And so that’s the kind of game that’s never really existed. It goes back to kind of text adventures it, you know, there’s lots of murder mystery kind of type games, but it takes all of that and does it in a new way. And it also means that studying player experience is already difficult, cause everyone has a slightly different experience, by and large, most games are the same set of rules. Here you can throw anything at it.
And we saw that we studied 70 people playing that game in person, we had them all thinking aloud while they were playing. And you know, I saw every which way you could imagine. Players approach that players were role-playing things they were trying to break the system. They were. They thought the game world was sort of almost infinite. There’s so many different ways in which players explored that. And so we’re in the middle of writing up a study to try and make sense of all that.
But in doing that work and you know this is huge credit to meaning machine for their innovation here, they’re not just creating a new genre which they’ve coined the term first person talker, which challenges our idea of what a first person shooter might be. It’s instead of the whole purpose is, is conversation. They’re realizing in the process of creating these games that there are significant design limitations and technical limitations to actually make good games. This is not something you just pull off the shelf. You can’t just throw chat, chat. You can hear the game and or get chat. You making games that that’s just not ever going to really happen. There are some models trying to now sort of world AI models trying to build games, but all they can do is simulate small clips of other games. They’re interesting research sort of examples. They’re not going to replace these huge teams that are required to build the best games.
00:48:38 Dr Rich Cole
So what machine are really interested in, is trying to work out how you can innovate and tell new stories. Design new genres even of games using this system, so it’s not to replace people. In fact, it’s sort of foreground is the need for creative and technical solutions that are human driven, human led to, to make something really interesting for the players. And we found that with dead meat players loved the game. But it is also quite hard to win and it’s quite hard to know your sort of purpose in that game sometimes because of this kind of infinite variability and ability.
So mean machine. We’ve been developing further systems to kind of fine tune that and to sort of direct the player within that. And so we were successful this year in bidding for another project and this sort of connects even back to my digital classics interests primarily where we’re working with Bristol Museum and Art Gallery as a partner to build a quest experience of their Egyptian gallery in the game context, so you’ll be going into the gallery. You’ll have the game on your phone. You’ll be able to engage in the kind of conversational style gaming experience that media machine have created, but there’ll also be a quest system there that will send you around the experience in a new way. And we’re really curious now, not just about the player experience, but can this reshape how we go about exploring cultural heritage? Can it reshape how we explore existing galleries that were tech leading in their day the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery opened the Egyptian Gallery when some touch screens were all the rage, they’re now seeming to be quite dated, but equally that space is really conducive to kind of being taken on a journey, but there really isn’t that much of an obvious narrative in the space. So we’re really curious about, well, if you deploy this on a phone in that space, does that deepen the experience? Does it help you to investigate and understand what you’re seeing through storytelling and that storytelling being kind of it both highly curated, we’re you know, literally writing the narrative as we speak with meaning machine, but also can that emergent aspect help? Can it turn the visitor into a researcher in that space? That’s the sort of question we’re trying to answer.
00:50:38 Dr Rich Cole
So that’s why I think there is huge potential and we’re really just scratching the surface here. I mean this is a prototype, we’ll have this summer. I imagine we can then take that and really try and sort of stress test that in lots of different areas. And like I said, I think we’re really just scratching the surface of the technology of what that can do within games. So that that to me is a hugely exciting potential, immersive experiences are a whole another bucket, I do think that that is also really exciting. So I’m interested to see how these things can potentially sort of overlap in time.
00:51:06 Prof Michele Barbour
I love all of the examples you’ve given I can see how doing something like that in a museum set could not only enrich the experience of people who already visit museums, but engage with a whole different set of groups of people who might not usually or might get dragged around it by well. Meaning I don’t know, teachers, parents, friends, whatever it might be and engage them just so much more than they’ve ever been before. First person shooters. I will have to say I have to other members of my family. But if you need volunteers, I absolutely love murder mystery and the idea of it being emergent like that I just played all day long. So yeah. Yeah, that’s sign me up. Sign me up.
00:51:40 Prof Michele Barbour
My final question, Richard, you’ve touched a lot of times, but your personal journey, so you, like many academics, started with a degree. You were intrigued. You wanted to go deeper, so you did a PhD when you looked. I’m not gonna ask you how many years that was ago, but at that point if that person could look through time, ask an Oracle and see where you are now how would you feel about that? Is it what you expected? Is it what you hope for? What? It’s surprise you would it please you. Would it be? Yeah, that was exactly the plan all along. When I’ve executed it. How would you at sort of, I don’t know, mid PhD stage feel about where you are now and where you’re going.
00:52:16 Dr Rich Cole
What a brilliant question to end on. I think I would be deeply proud of where I’ve got to now from where I was, and there’s a reason for that. I thought I would leave academia at the end of my PhD. There were no clear jobs, especially in in classics nation history. When you studied something like historical fiction and you don’t have all the languages to hand in all of the ability to kind of do the sort of base level teaching in that area. It was actually very difficult to find a home, so I definitely considered leaving. I was very sad to do so because of the strength of Community collaboration, that sort of the chance to really just spend time investigating ideas was exactly what inspired me to do a PhD and what I loved on the PhD. But what was interesting is during the PhD I did do a couple of jobs working for research institutes, doing outreach projects. And it was that that actually energized me as much, if not more than just the sitting down and doing the research and writing it up. In fact, some of those elements of the academic job were the things I found the hardest.
00:53:16 Dr Rich Cole
So then when the postdoc opportunity came along to work in a multidisciplinary team, I took it. But again, I also thought at the end of that, if that doesn’t work out, that will be the point at which I leave. There was a constant sense that at each stage I sort of was trying the next step, seeing how it would go was coming to terms of the fact that it might be the end of the journey, but also I would try my hardest during that. Over how many years I had to make something work.
00:53:39 Dr Rich Cole
One of the best pieces of advice I ever had was from a professor who said if you’re doing a research career, you’re effectively self-employed. You find the opportunities yourself and you make them work. And strangely enough, that was the most empowering piece of information. I heard not. It doesn’t take away from the real challenge of precarity and all those sorts of things, you know, journey of which I’ve quite literally only just stepped off into, into permanency. But it helped me to feel I was in control of the journey that I was on. And so that’s where I do feel. I would be deeply proud of if I could have looked forward in the in the, in the past and sort of thought that was the. That was where I was going I’d be incredibly happy. It’s taken a lot of engineered serendipity. It’s taken a lot of luck. It’s taken a lot of hard work, a lot of extra hours, but it’s been the kind of journey I wanted. I don’t think I could imagine quite how successful it could have been because in the way I’ve discovered a lot of skills along the way that they didn’t know I had. And I think that that’s also been probably one of the most rewarding aspects, trying new skills, new jobs, working in new ways and being like, OK, that’s, that’s where my strength lies. I didn’t know that at the end of the PhD at all really. So yeah.
00:54:46 Prof Michele Barbour
Courage and engineered serendipity. I like that. It’s not just serendipity you made that serendipity work. Doctor Richard Cole. I cannot thank you enough. I’ve really, really enjoyed our discussion. It’s been fascinating and enlightening and very, very warm. So thank you very much indeed.
00:55:02 Dr Rich Cole
Thank you, Michele. It’s been a real pleasure.
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