What I learned at the Xbox 360 Marketing Summit yesterday:

1. The coolest kids refer to PowerPoint presentations as "decks," and
2. standard-issue uniform for marketing guys in the videogame industry is striped cotton shirts, preferably with short sleeeves. In a room full of about 100 people, only about 12 men were not wearing shirts of this kind.

They held the Summit at the oh-so-hip Clift Hotel which doesn't even have a sign out front. You just have to know where it is, like a speakeasy. When I first got there I didn't recognize anyone, and as I am utterly terrified of walking into rooms full of strangers (not the best quality in a PR person, by the way) I hung out in the lobby and sat in the chair covered in pelts waiting for someone I knew to get there. The Pelt Chair is near the Big Chair, which is pictured on the hotel's website. Nobody sat in the Big Chair.

The Microsoft people are actually much nicer than one might expect. (Sony people, with a few notable exceptions, always give off an aura of cranky arrogance. Nintendo people are also usually nice. Maybe it has something to do with Seattle.) The morning session was interesting, but the hotel catering took away the coffee and water as soon as breakfast was done so by 10.30 we were all dying. I left after lunch, as did about 50 other people. For dinner they had this insane plan to load us all onto buses and drive up to Rutherford Hill winery near Napa. People who went didn't even make it back to the Clift until 11 pm, and then many still had to get home from there. With all the great restaurants in SF, that is just nutty. Certainly not worth the t-shirt and bag they gave out.