Last fall, we packed up my girlfriend’s car and drove to two-story farmhouse in Athens, New York for a staff retreat. I had never done one of these before, but we felt like it was a good time to regroup and reflect on what we had done….and where we wanted to be.

One thing we did was work on a mission statement. You may normally think of those as the kind of thing a high-minded non-profit might ink, but they’re very valuable for businesses as well. As an editorial outlet, we have the benefit of recreating ourselves with every new piece that gets published, but we wanted to stake out exactly how everything we did fit into a larger schema. If you’ve never done this before, check out Google’s mission statement. It’s pretty telling: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google does hundreds of things, but all of them ostensibly, circle back to this core mission about making information useful.

So here’s our mission statement:

Kill Screen’s mission to show the world why games matter.

Pretty rad, right? Mission tells what we’re going to do but a vision statement tells you where we’d like to be. Think of it as a Top Ten list for the dreamy future. In any case, here’s our “vision”

1. Play does not mean a waste of time.

2. Videogames are maturing as a medium.

3. Everyone games, but not everyone is a “gamer”.  

4. Games need an advocate.  

5. Games are connected to every other creative field…

6. But games have a lot to learn from other creative fields.

7. All games are social.  

8. Games are serious business.

9. Games (and gamers) are more diverse than you think.

10. Games are at a crossroads right now.

If you get a chance, read our more fleshed out explanations here.