The adrenaline and excitement from an incredible day at PAX East is finally wearing off, and I'm on my way to sleepy time, where I am a viking.
Before I go to bed, though, I wanted to share a little bit from my keynote today. This is excerpted from my speech:
Gaming is the foundation of the best friendships I’ve ever had, and it’s the mortar that has held my group of friends together for almost 25 years.
We are all here today because we love playing games. Some of the happiest days of our lives would not exist without games and gaming. Games are important. Games matter. PAX is where we come together to celebrate that, and today, I’m going to talk about the power games have to inspire as well as entertain us.
When you play a game – any game – you’re using your imagination to bring a world to life, and that’s truly special, because while all destruction is essentially the same, when you create something, it’s different every single time. When you create something together, you’re building bonds with your fellow gamers that could last for your entire lives. The Venn Diagram of my best friends, my gaming group, and people from high school I still hang out with is one perfect circle. I suspect that for many gamers of my generation, that’s equally true … and I know that my kids will be saying the same thing in 20 years about people they’ve never met face to face, but interact with almost every day in an online game that will make Call of Duty look then like Pong looks today.
Andrew said that he was watching Twitter while I was giving the keynote, and the word he saw most frequently was "inspiring." He said the second most frequent word was "funny," so I'd say that, even though I initially thought I dragged a bit in the middle, everyone in the main theater (~4000!) got out of it what I hoped they would.
I'm having an amazing time here. Thank you to everyone at PAX East for being so awesome and kind to me. I can't wait to play games tomorrow!
I loved your speech. It really set the tone for my entire weekend, especially since this was my first PAX ever. I did have a blast.
I took your advice and went down to the arcade area. Wow. It made me long for this sort of things to come back again, it was so much fun to hang out in a room full of people gaming and laughing and watching over each others shoulders as they tried to zap the last Space Invader or just get a high score in pinball. I can’t think of a physical space like this that exists anymore ANYWHERE.
Anyway, thanks for signing my books for me and stopping to pose for a picture. You were right, it was awesome.
Sam (@orangerful)
Being someone that makes video games for a living, it’s far too easy to get too close to them and only ever see the negative side of the job.
Thanks for reminding me ‘Why We Do This’, because in the midst of a crunch like the one I’m in right now it’s far too easy to forget it.
(and though I worked on Fable 2, the thing with the dog was totally not my fault.)
I played part of your speech for a younger friend of mine today. Aside from me talking about Wil Wheaton, he’s never seen you before and doesn’t know you, but he is so into games, movies, writing stories, and using his imagination. Within 30 seconds you totally had him captivated. It was amazing to see how he lit up to everything you were saying. Pure joy.
I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today without gaming, it’s been a part of my life since I was old enough to hold a controller! 30% of the people I work with at our Game Dev studio are people I played CS or WOW with at my local net cafe 4-6years ago and 75% of my msn list are comprised of my gamer mates. Quite a unique and powerful connection only facilitated further by the evolution of Social Gaming as we know it today, being integrated into our everyday communications ie: Facebook and myspace etc.
My first time here, so far so good!
Cheers
Long time fan, first time commenter.
A friend linked me to your PAX keynote speech, and I watched it this evening while preparing dinner and helping my son with his homework (a parent’s job is never done) and alternately laughed and bawled my way through it. Truly inspiring encapsulation of the gamer experience and “why it is we do what we do.” I’m a traditional tabletop gamer and my son apparently intends to be buried with a WiiMote in one hand and an XBoX controller in the other, but the reasons we love our games are much the same. Thanks for showing me some of the common ground between the two. Brilliant speech!
Amber
I just ran across this Oklahoma Gamers site, in case you are interested.
http://www.okgamers.com
Awesome keynote with a fabulous message.
Thanks so much for your wonderful speech. 🙂
Here’s another someone whose closest circle of friends originated from gaming. When I moved to Cambridge (England, not MA) in ’96, where I didn’t know anybody, it took me a few weeks to find the local gaming shop and from there a local weekly gaming club that met at a pub.
I, as a foreigner, had no problems being accepted as the only thing that mattered was that I liked games. When a local White Wolf Vampire LRP group (sorry, I know you don’t like LARP) started, a few people from that club went along to that and there we met new people we liked and who liked us and the rest, as they say, is history. I ended up running the Cambridge Vampire game (part of the Camarilla fanclub) for three years. Due to burnout and other reasons, many of us aren’t members of the LRP club anymore but we became close friends, some of whom even got married.
We still game (mostly tabletop RPGs with the occasional board game evening) but also do other things together.
If I hadn’t been a gamer when I moved, I doubt I would have met so many awesome people because most people at work were or are not on my wavelength and there weren’t any other group activities I was interested in.
We were at PAX East, and by far, your keynote address was THE BEST part of the weekend. Thank you for saying “yes” and sharing your stories of being a gamer.
It’s inspired me to play D&D online. =)
Anne