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Video games offer fans the chance to do everything from rampage through time and space to grow crops in the cutest farms imaginable — but according to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, there’s one thing they can do better than anything else: build community.

Talking during his Story Time with Phil Spencer panel at PAX West 2024, Spencer revealed that the first Destiny “was the first game where I actually met people first in-game, who I then met in the real world, and [they became] some of my best friends even to this day… People I’ve been playing games with for 10 years — Destiny with — and now we play other things as well. But, you know, that was something that was really eye-opening to me.”

He went on, “The thing I love — and this sits at, like, the core now for me and my love of video games — is these are people I met who I would never have run into in the streets of Seattle in my hometown here. I would not have met them in my work, or my circle that I normally see. I met these people because we needed to finish the nightfall on a Tuesday before the Tuesday reset, so we jumped in and it was like, ‘come on, let’s go run it together and see the world’ — or, at least, try to get the drop… try — and then it turned into more than that.

“We would start playing together and, as most times happens when you have the headset on, at first you’re talking about strategy and the game and what you need to go do, but after maybe the 30th or 40th nightfall or strike, or raid, the conversation goes in other places, and you start talking about life. And you start talking about, ‘What are you doing in your world? What’s happening?’ And, for me, it connected me with people that I think, in the real world, I would have never met. I think what a special thing that video games can do [is] building connection with people not based on where you live or where you went to school or where you work, or even what you believe and what you look like, but rather this shared love of this art form of video games.”

This core aspect of what video games have come to mean for Spencer was just one part of his hour-long look back at how own personal gaming history — one that touches on his origins as an arcade game aficionado, all the way through his start at Xbox. You can watch the full panel here.

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