Did you know that you can listen to many of your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?

Like Desert Island Discs, where you can hear castaways like Cher, Gareth Southgate and Nick Cave,

and enjoy longer versions of the music they've picked. Good things come to those who don't wait.

Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds.

This Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland.

Hello and thank you very much for choosing to listen to this. I'll warn you, this edition is not the kind of subject matter we usually cover

because today we're going to be looking at the concept of bringing the outdoors, indoors, through virtual gaming.

Now I am not a gamer, so when I met up with Dr Timothy Peacog,

co-founder and co-director of the Games and Gaming Lab

at the University of Glasgow, the poor man really had no idea just how much explaining he was going to have to do.

This is the Advanced Research Centre at the University of Glasgow and it's been purpose designed to

bring together people from across the

range of different disciplines, from arts, social sciences, science and engineering, medical,

veterinary and life sciences, to solve or to tackle major global challenges. And even the space

outside the building is designed to be a public forum or an opportunity for people to, from the local community, as well as from the university, to connect and to hold different events, as was seen in the, first in the Arcadia Festival launching the building last autumn?

Most of what we do on the programme out of doors is, as the title suggests, outside.

We're going to go inside because some of the stuff you're doing is trying to address some of these issues, but in a virtual sense.

How big a role did the events of COVID-19 actually play in that,

and actually driving in that direction?

I would say that they played a very significant role, partly as we were no longer able to conduct meetings in person, but also that we increasingly found that people were engaging through gaming with

one another online, whether that was playing board games over Zoom or doing family quizzes every

week through to...

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