Keisha Howard of Sugar Gamers and Chethan Ramachandran of Skillprint.
Keisha Howard of Sugar Gamers and Chethan Ramachandran of Skillprint at GamesBeat event in 2020.
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The DeanBeat: Can you trust someone that you’ve never met in person?

Here’s one of the things that surprised me about the GamesBeat Summit 2020 online-only event that we held last week: Our audience loved messaging each other on Slack, the group chat system that we used to enable our 600 attendees and speakers to communicate with each other.

In some ways, the text chat of Slack seemed antiquated. You type messages to groups of people or engage in 1-on-1 chats. But in the absence of face-to-face meetings and group Zoom calls, this was the next best thing. In fact, our 600 people messaged each other more than 12,000 times by the end of the conference. And only 20% of those messages took place in public chat rooms.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.