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!
