By now you've probably seen the announcement regarding player presentations scheduled for Fanfest. If not, be sure to check them out. This is a great line-up and I highly recommend making time during the event to check out as many of my fellow presenters as possible. I know I always try to make as many as I can.
It has been a decade since I last took the stage at Fanfest and I've generally tried my best to avoid it in the years since then. Not that I have anything against it, far from it. But that first Fanfest was insanely stressful and action-packed, with meetings, tours, dinners, and special lunches - plus the presentation and a roundtable afterwards. Not to mention being on the live-stream, being interviewed sitting next to CCP Guard and generally feeling like a fish out of water the entire time. It was my first time in Iceland and my first time meeting other players in person, not to mention all the Devs and people at CCP. I can't even watch that original presentation now and I barely remember even doing it.
Since then I've tried to keep things as normal as possible during Fanfest and I've enjoyed myself much more since then. A big part of that is obviously getting over the initial barrier of meeting people and being thrown into the deep end. This upcoming Fanfest will be our seventh and our eighth visit to Iceland in the last ten years. My wife and I are old pros at this now.
All of which means I am really looking forward to it. So much has changed in the last ten years and the environment is so different now. And while challenges remain, all in all the things I talked about in the first presentation have come to fruition. We have a very vibrant and engaged creative community and CCP has become much more open to collaboration and licensing in the last decade. All of which I was advocating for back in those early days. And a great example of that collaboration is the work I've done with Titan Forge and CCP on the development of the board game. The type of project that would have gotten me a letter from CCP's legal department a decade ago. Times change.
And a big part of my presentation will be a celebration of how they have changed as I pretty much intend to show you a lot of beautiful images and artwork for a half-hour. I don't even have many words in my presentation, it is almost entirely images. So if you are interested in hearing the behind-the-scenes stories, tales, and concepts from the project - then be sure to pack into my presentation. Because that is what it will all be about.
It is hard to believe this will be my 17th year of playing Eve Online and a full decade since my very first Fanfest.
Time stops for none of us.