Unwind. Relax. Chill. How may times do you say or hear these words and think how important it is that you make time to do these things? How often do you think to yourself that you need to spend more time with your friends, with your family? We all think it, but maybe we aren't always very good at doing it!
On 7th June Gill and I were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to pitch our business, Strong Point, at the North East Startup Awards, and we spent a long time working out what we wanted to say in our pitch. I mean a REALLY long time! We each had ideas about what we wanted to say about our game and our business, and to be quite honest we're still not sure we got it quite right. But 2 minutes isn't a lot of time to say everything you want to say and show how passionate you are about what you do. In the end we felt that sharing something of our ethos, something about why we think our business is important was how we should approach it.
Here we are on the way to the awards at Sage Gateshead. I don't know if it shows but at this point we were a strange mix of excited and nervous. Probably more nervous. No, definitely more nervous! We were about to try to convince a room full of people that our game was worthy of winning a business award. Up against some amazing businesses doing some amazing things could our game compete? Or even, should our game compete?
Which brings me back to our ethos. We came up with the idea for creating a game in the summer of 2020. The world had been in lockdown, we'd been unable to see friends, family, anyone for weeks on end, but in the late summer the introduction of 'bubbles' meant that we could meet in small groups. The chance to be with people we loved, friends and family we had missed, was such a relief and a release. People were connecting and reconnecting with each other.
It was an important moment in the development of our core values, because we knew that being together, having fun, laughing, socialising and playing games was what made us happy. And we knew those same things were making millions of people around the country happy.
Playing games is a really significant part of how we connect with our friends and family and we want others to share the joy that comes from playing games with the people you care about. I'm not an academic or a psychologist, but I know positive social interaction is good for your mental health, it's food for your soul. Games provide a perfect opportunity for people to come together and have that meaningful, positive, and fun social interaction that we need.
This is why we created Strong Point, and if we hadn't believed that other people would enjoy the game we still would have made our own simple version of it to play with our friends and family! But we do believe other people would love our game and we are thrilled that we have shared it with the world.
Last weekend we took Strong Point to the UK Games Expo at the NEC in Birmingham and there we met other people passionate about games like us. We spoke to developers, retailers, distributors and manufacturers, all with the same view as us: games are fun and they are an important part of our social fabric.
The picture above is a snapshot of the Expo: nearly 25,000 people in one place over the course of 3 days all sharing a passion for playing games, creating games and sharing their games with others. The day we spent at the Expo affirmed our belief that games are important to a LOT of people and that the vision we have for Strong Point to be in homes around the country, around the world, isn't a pipe dream. And as we said in our awards pitch, it certainly isn't a trivial pursuit...
Thanks for taking the time to read my rambling thoughts, if you've read this far, what's wrong with you, haven't you got anything better to do? Such as go and play a game, for instance? Or maybe you need a new game to play, in which case go here:
www.strongpointgame.co.uk/shop or here:
Or here:
Thanks, again,
Si.
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