Hi everyone, Alex Ryan from the San Francisco High Road office here at the X’10 Canada Holiday Preview event being held at one of Toronto’s premiere venues, The Fifth. Having spent years attending gaming events in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, I was certainly looking forward to how the home office and our Canadian counterparts “put on the ritz” with their gaming events and have spent the day checking it out.

First of all, let me say that The Fifth is an amazing venue to hold an event. Located in Toronto’s entertainment district, The Fifth is separated into two different floors, the first floor and the fifth (duh!), with X’10 covering every inch of these floors with gaming goodness. With X’10 beginning at 10am and going all the way to 10pm, media were treated, not only to the delicious  paninis and open bar, but eight screen local multiplayer action with Halo Reach. Rock Band 3 represented big time with their keyboards and Pro Mode in effect making the gaming press step it up a notch to rock, and turntablists mixing it up on DJ Hero 2 (Lady GaGa FTW!). Sega, Activision, EA, Bethesda Software and UbiSoft were all in the house with everything from Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Dead Space 2 (my personal fave!) to the retro awesome that is Sonic 4. On top of that, the Lionhead developer for Fable came here from the UK to get in on the action. And let’s not forget Kinect…

The Fifth’s fifth floor was all about Kinect. In what is usually the venue’s nighttime restaurant area, Kinect stations were aplenty giving not just the core gaming media a turn at the new a peripheral, but local and casual media along with Mommy Bloggers coming through to try their hand at the new controller-less Microsoft innovation. Dance Central anyone? Yes, please! Check out So You Think You Can Dance Canada’s Blake McGrath busting a move.

So needless to say, it was wall to wall to wall games here at X’10 Canada and I can certainly say that my Canadian counterparts have done me proud with the venue, the amount of gaming companies coming together with their holiday lineups, and the multiple types of media brought together in one place. With the all day event across two floors and everyone having time to relax, play and just enjoy gaming as it should be enjoyed, I’ll definitely be here for X’11 Canada!

I just read through a great article that appears in the current issue of New York Magazine (http://nymag.com/news/features/27341), which contends that emergence of social media is creating the most significant generation gap since rock and roll music burst onto the scene.

It is a worthwhile read for people on the north side of the generation gap (let’s say aged 30+) who are looking for a better understanding of how the south side of the generation gap defines personal information and privacy. Let’s face(book) it, part of the attraction for marketers to the web is just how personal the information online has become. And part of the mystery for people in understanding social media + youth is “Why would anyone put it all out there like that?” Young people on the other hand, are responding by getting more and more active. For them, public life is fun, it’s creative and it’s where their friends are.

In the online world, everyone has an audience where they can belong and connect with friends. The desire to belong and connect with others makes social media sound exactly like every other revolution embraced by young people in every generation. Yet, at the same, it is like nothing else that has come before. (Via Clive Thompson http://www.collisiondetection.net/)