Europe, Day 8: Closure in Copenhagen

My mind’s reflection centers are rapidly closing down – the event is over. From its start in Dublin, Ireland, and now closing the last two days in Helsinki, Finland and Copenhagen, Denmark, the XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 has been an unprecedented success.

There are blogs and forum postings detailing community reactions in almost every venue. We are headed to Tivoli Gardens to celebrate this evening, and tomorrow morning at 10 AM I board a plane for London, and then for home.

It's not unlike me to get reflective at times like this.

Helsinki, Yesterday

We are standing on the steps of the cathedral. Helsinki is under a gray sky, a grainy colloid of old mixed with new. Gravel sprinkled everywhere melts the recent snowfall.

I am awake. After Dreamhack, it has been almost impossible to regain any strength to pull through, but I finally have what I need – fresh air, and the proximity of a culture that’s more than just the here, the now, the digital.

It was years ago, early on in my career in Microsoft that I began to realize that I could live only short sketches of life surrounded by the sterile triumvirate of glass, black, and chrome designs that signal the apogee of the modern age. For the first time in what felt like years, I stepped out among the trees and saw them not as resources, but as symbioses, variables in an equation owned not by us, but by the larger structure.

I realize the same feeling is upon me – and satisfied – on the steps of the Helsinki Cathedral. We are games, games are us, but it is more than we’re concerned with at the moment.

We work long hours. We suffer intolerable crunches. We are prone to shortsightedness. Too often, we make ourselves – or others – victims of our inability to see integration in everything we do; how what we create today may affect so many tomorrow.

The cathedral’s insides are handsome, sparse, functional. They bring with them not the unstructured sketches of early worship, or the gilded, dyed tones of later hierarchical religions, but a sense of form and scale. An engineer’s cathedral, perhaps.

Mathematics, logic – these things intersect the planes of belief and culture – perhaps no more visibly so than in games. As we look forward to a day of free expression in interactive form, for all, not just through the filters of top-down production, it is on my mind to understand that games have a point.

It’s not that they didn’t before. It’s just that more people are listening.

Helsinki-Vantaa Airport

The snow is blowing sideways. Deicing vehicles are spraying down the waiting aircraft, including our Avro jet to Copenhagen.

I remember the social atmosphere at the University of Helsinki. The scholastic home, of course, of Linus Torvalds – the driving force behind Linux. We, as Microsoft, were an orthogonal concept – the very definition of an enemy force, well behind their lines.

The students were open-minded. They did not jeer, they did not shout us down, they did not reject us. There have been so many ideas I have seen – and some that I have worked on – that have short-sighted goals in mind: goals of domination, offense, position-jockeying, gamesmanship. These, I feel, would have been called out and rejected, and rightly so. But I feel that what I am doing now represents a belief in something that transcends these short-sighted tactics and focuses on serving a new and emerging need that people genuinely want – if only in small baby steps.

XNA Game Studio was not for everyone. It was clear enough through this tour that not everyone wants to be a game developer, and in the group of those that do, not everyone wants to use XNA Game Studio. This is good, this is normal, this is healthy. This does not scream the needle’s far-right peg of quackery, nor does it seem a deflated and uninteresting concept when played in front of the European stage.

I can say then, that XNA is building and moving a resource that will become part of the larger ecosystem of games, and of the larger world we live, work, and play in. It is growing its own legs now, and the community is allowing it the space to continue to thrive.

For that, for the reception I have received in every country, in every venue, and for what that courtesy indicates – an acceptance of a product that is on the way toward passing the global metric for what we believe to be genuinely good for our future – I thank you; it reinforces that this product is worth working on, worth tweaking, worth restructuring as we learn more about the world around us, both digital and corporeal.

As one of the many messengers to bring the news and teach the platform: Ireland, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Denmark – thank you for everything.

Now let’s get to work and build some games!