Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 70

so far away from my wasteland

It turns out that my 24 hour trip to New York, followed by a full day of intense creative work, pretty much kicked my ass. I’m so tired, I don’t even have the energy to go to Staples Center to watch my beloved Los Angeles Kings take on our crosstown rivals, the hated Ducks. I thought about maybe homebrewing some wootstout today, but I don’t think I can even do that. It looks like I’ll spend most of today — and maybe all of tomorrow — watching movies and catching up on TV shows, so I can regenerate HP and Mana, but holy mother of balls am I tired.

But it’s a good kind of tired. It’s the kind of tired that seems to start out in my bones. The kind of tired that I feel has been earned, by lots of hard work. Sure, it’s not the kind of hard work that people who actually work for a living would consider work, but since my job basically entails me creating things and then enthusiastically sharing those creations with an audience, the last week has been some of the hardest work I’ve done in a long time.

While I was in New York to promote the awesome videos I made with Newcastle, I did seventeen interviews in about eight hours. Seventeen times, I found new and interesting ways to answer the same fundamental questions, each time making sure that the person I was talking with got 100% of the energy I had to offer, so that each interview felt like it was the only interview I did.

I did that seventeen times, and by the end of the day, I was completely exhausted. In fact, I had a beer at the end of the day (which was funny, because drinking it was technically part of working), and I fell asleep in the car moments after it pulled away from the curb to take me to the airport.

So, about that … the car took me to the wrong airport. In the wrong state. And I found out when I was inside the airport, at the wrong ticket counter, 90 minutes before my flight was scheduled to depart.

I had the most panicked panic I’ve felt related to travel in a very, very long time, as I hoped against hope that the cab I got into at the wrong airport could take me all the way across Brooklyn and Manhattan and get me to the right airport. The entire way, I did math in my head every few minutes to update my anticipated arrival time, and each time it told me that I’d make it or miss it by about five minutes. I didn’t have any checked luggage, and I had my boarding pass already, but it was going to be incredibly close.

When I got to the right airport, I tipped the driver 100%, and ran as fast as I could to security. “I’m going to miss my flight,” I said, “if you delay me at all. Please help me.”

By the grace of the old gods and new, I encountered a string of very helpful and friendly TSA people who all assured me that I’d be fine, since I had nearly 20 minutes before departure (the airline says that if you get to the plane with less than fifteen minutes before the departure time, you’re screwed).

Here’s the thing about me and travel: I’m good at it. I’m efficient. I know how to get my belt off, and I kick of my slip-on Vans quickly and easily. I have the laptop pull and bin deposit down to a fluid move that is like a ballet.

Only this trip, I was wearing Fluevog boots that tied near my ankles, and when I tried to untie them, the laces knotted themselves tightly. This trip, when I tried to take my laptop out of my bag, I nearly dropped it, and then I fell over while I was removing the knot from my shoe. I nearly forgot to take my belt off. It wasn’t a ballet so much as it was the flailing of a crazy person that would have been a perfect visual for Yakkity Sax.

Somehow, I got through security, and when I slammed my feet back into my boots, I knew that I had to run as fast as I could to get to the gate on time. I didn’t even stop to tie them — which was a mistake, it turns out. If you ever have to run in boots, tie them — and I got to my gate with less than five minutes to spare. I was the second to last person to get on the plane, and thanks to the Lords of Light, I had checked in online and they hadn’t given my seat away. I fell into my seat, explained to the bewildered man next to me why I was sweating and gasping and shaking, and when the adrenaline finally wore off, slept for most of the trip.

Yesterday, I slept straight through my alarm and was fifteen minutes late for my meeting at Geek & Sundry, where I worked with a Top Secret Team of Creative People on the Tabletop RPG show.

Hey nerds, I thought you may like to know what I'm working on today. pic.twitter.com/yDJGuHZDpq

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) November 14, 2014

I spent the entire day building the world, figuring out what was important for the players, characters, and audience to know, and eventually ended the day with an outline for the adventure we’re going to run. I’ve never broken a season in a writer’s room before, but I imagine that the experience I had yesterday was similar: exhilarating, inspiring, challenging, incredibly fun, and exhausting.

There’s that word again: exhausting.

Exhausted.

Spent.

Drained.

Did you know that intense use of your brain for things burns a ton of calories? I didn’t, either, until recently. There’s no entry for “concentrated on storytelling and worldbuilding and character development for eight hours” in MyFitnessPal, but if there was, I would have checked it off, yesterday.

So here I am, so tired I could probably just go back to bed, but feeling compelled to write and share my experiences with the world, because that’s what writers do, and I’m spending the next six months being a capital-W Writer.

But more on that another time, because now I need to rest.

Tabletop Season Three Premieres with Tokaido!

It’s finally here! Our third season of Tabletop officially kicks off today, with Tokaido.

I love this game so much, and I hope we captured the beauty, balance, and wonderful mix of strategy and guile that goes into each turn.

I played with my pal Chris Kluwe, J. August Richards (who some of you may remember from The Wil Wheaton Project), and Jason Wishnov, who wrote, produced, directed, and coded a wonderful game I worked on earlier this year, called There Came An Echo.

I have said this quite a bit in the last several months, and I’ll continue saying it for the next several months: thank you, so much, to all of our backers, for helping us make this show that we love. I couldn’t have done this without you, and I sincerely believe that you’ll be happy that you did, as the season unfolds.

(NB: Apparently, we made a minor rules mistake at one point in the game, which I won’t discuss specifically because spoilers, but I don’t think it would have affected the outcome.)

I feel strange, but also good!

I obviously had to order one of these the day they went on sale, because of reasons.

I helped make a thing that’s funny

Newcastle teamed up with Caledonian Brewery in Scotland to make a Scotch Ale, and they hired me to tell you about it. We made a pair of really funny videos together, and this is one of them. I’m super proud of this, because I helped write it, and got to improvise a lot of the silly bits. I hope you enjoy it.

What’s that? You want to see the other one? The one that features my long lost twin, Bil Wheaton? Okay, I’ve got you covered.

Regarding Anonymous Gaming Trolls, Tabletop, and More

So it turns out that this week is full of stuff that I would like to share with you, Internet.

First, I wrote a column for The Washington Post about how anonymous trolls are poisoning the video game community, and what we can do about it.

Anonymity, in some cases a key civil liberty, also enables society’s worst actors. The loudest, most obnoxious, most toxic voices are able to drown out the rest of us—a spectacle that has nearly pushed me to quit the video-game world entirely in recent months. I don’t need to hear about the sexual conquest of my mother from a random 12-year-old on Xbox Live ever again.

But here’s the thing: that random 12-year-old I seem to encounter so often? He probably isn’t 12. According to the ERSB, the average age of a video gamer is 34. That 34-year-old is certainly old enough to know better, but he probably came of age in an era when trolling was not just acceptable but encouraged by a generation of players who rarely, if ever, had to see the actual people they were playing with. No wonder he feels enabled by digital anonymity. It means he never has to face the consequences of his actions, or acknowledge that there is a human being on the other side of the screen.

It’s time to break this cycle—and to teach gamers that they can compete without being competitive, that they can win and lose without spewing racist, misogynist, homophobic bile at their fellow gamers. But doing so requires casting off the cloak of anonymity.

Early feedback via Twitter is split between a majority, who are tired of being harassed while gaming, and a minority who seem to believe I am advocating for an end to online privacy (which I clearly am not). I’m interested to know your thoughts on this column, so please read it, and comment here, if you don’t mind. If you’d like to read more about it, I highly recommend this article, which quotes my friend, Stepto, at length.

I’m hosting DC ALL ACCESS this week. Here’s the trailer, which makes me laugh:

Tabletop Season Three premieres in just two days!! We put together a special trailer for this season that asks the question that’s on everyone’s mind…

I signed agreements to do two more audiobooks. I can’t reveal their titles, yet, but I will as soon as I get permission.

Next Monday, I’m performing in a live show here in Los Angeles, with Hal Lublin, and John Ross Bowie. It’s Hot Comedy Dreamtime, written by my friend Joseph Scrimshaw.

Oh! Also next week, I’m filling in for Larry King, and interviewing Chris Hardwick for Larry King Now.

In a couple hours, I’ll sit on a seat which will magically hoist itself into in the sky, and I’ll end my day in New York City. I don’t think I can talk about why I’m going, yet, but I’ll be there for just under 24 hours, for something really awesome that I can’t wait to share with the world.

PLAY MORE GAMES!

I have additional thoughts, based on your comments, which I wrote while in a seat in the sky. They are behind the jump.

I really want to be listening to Serial, but I wanted to take a moment and talk about my column in the Post today. Before I get into it, this is important: I fully stand by everything I wrote. I’m writing this simply because I have the opportunity to take up a little more column space, here on my blog, to dig a little deeper into what we published this morning. Most of this is in response to what I’m 75% certain is just the deliberately provocative distortion and obtuseness of trolls, but if there are 25% of people who genuinely misunderstood me, this is for them.

It feels like a lot of people — unsurprisingly people who associate themselves with #GobbleGrabber — are either misunderstanding, or deliberately distorting the thesis of my piece. I could continue to just block and ignore these people, but I hope that there are some well-intentioned people among their number who are being mislead by the loudest among them, who I may be capable of reaching.

First, something I had not considered when I worked out, researched, and wrote my column: the very real possibility that some people who are survivors of various forms of abuse, or people who have dealt with stalkers may feel even more exposed while gaming online if they were forced to play games under their actual identities. I acknowledge that this oversight springs directly from the reality that I am extraordinarily privileged, and live my life on Scalzi’s lowest difficulty setting, with the celebrity cheat enabled. The fact that this is a very real fear for a lot of players (mostly women), supports my main points that the worst among us are making things terrible for the rest of us. But I will also point out that I do not believe anyone should be forced to decloak. In fact, one of the headlines suggested for my story was about “banning” anonymity in online games, and I asked that it not be used, because I don’t believe in banning anonymity online. The suggestion that ending blanket anonymity in gaming somehow ends anonymity everywhere is such a lazy argument, it isn’t even worth refuting. As I said, anonymity is extremely important for a lot of people, and I can simultaneously oppose SOPA and Total Information Awareness, and understand that some people need anonymity to be protected from abusers, while I hate that some other people take advantage of anonymity to be shitlords on the Internet. See, when you’re a grown up, that’s not difficult to understand. I believe in holding people accountable for their actions online (and offline), so maybe to that end, a player can be anonymous, but if he’s a shitlord on a consistent basis, maybe his console is banned, his IP is banned, his account is banned, or something that he can’t throw away as easily as an e-mail address ties him to his words and actions, so he will think twice about how he behaves while gaming. And, listen, people, this isn’t about forcing some sort of Orwellian surveillance onto political dissidents living under totalitarian regimes. This is about people being bullies while playing video games. This is about people driving developers from their homes, out of fears for their own safety, because someone doesn’t like a video game.

The same people who claim that #GilbertGrape is about stopping misogyny, bullying, and bigotry are also out in force, asserting that I said and believe things that I didn’t write, and claiming that I somehow support bullying, doxxing, and misogyny, because of reasons. It’s frustrating to put a lot of time and effort into making a clear point that I hope spurs discussion, only to have a small but loud hive of annoying insects buzz around, seeing how loud they can get it inside their echo chamber. A typical line of argument goes something like: But if you ban anonymity in gaming, it will make things even more terrible for women! This argument fails to consider or address the root cause of women being treated poorly in online gaming (men harassing women, threatening women, and generally making it miserable for women to play games unless those women adopt a masculine identity). Yes, if nothing were to change, and we were to continue along the arc we, as a gaming community, are on, it absolutely would make things worse for women. But when gaming online is safe for everyone, because people are held to account for their actions, everyone should be able to play as themselves, without fear of systemic and sustained harassment. These people who make this argument seem to ignore the fact that bad behavior should be addressed, and instead make the case that women should just continue to hide their identities, rather than holding accountable the men who harass them. I understand the benefits of positive anonymity, and I support positive anonymity.

I do believe in holding people accountable for their behavior, online and offline. I do believe that the vast majority — a silent majority, but a majority still — of gamers are awesome people who play hard, but aren’t dicks about it. I do believe that a very small minority of loud and persistent shitlords are having a very loud and very public temper tantrum, because they feel threatened by something that, frankly, isn’t objectively threatening. (Sidebar: the existence of a casual game like Flying Unicorn Happy Song or whatever doesn’t negate or dilute whatever First Person Testosterone-a-rama you currently love to play. The existence of a discussion about how women are portrayed in gaming, and whether that affects how welcomed women feel in the gaming community, isn’t an attack on you, Mister #NotAllMen. In fact, it isn’t and never was about you. And I won’t even dig into the insanity of expecting a review to be “objective”, when reviews are, by their nature, subjective.)

The point I was making, which I know the vast majority of people understood and comprehended, is that I want games to be accessible to everyone, and as long as a small but loud minority of people can act like shitlords with impunity, large swaths of gaming will be accessible only to the most vile and wretched group of trolls. The more people game, the more games we’ll have available to us to play. The wider the demographic of gamers, the more diverse styles of games we’ll get to play. The sooner we who are the majority of decent people stand up and demand that people who are terrible in gaming be held accountable for their actions — actions which would, in many cases, be criminal if perpetrated in-person — the sooner we can all hold our heads up high and say, You’re damn right, I’m a gamer, and I’m damn proud of it. Want to play a game?

welcome to my life, tattoo

No, not this tattoo.

I’ve wanted tattoos for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until this year that I finally felt like I could make good decisions about what I’d permanently put on my body.

At first, I thought maybe I was too old, but when I asked my friends who have lots of tattoos what they thought, they all said that waiting until I was in my 40s was a great idea, because it means I won’t ever have to reckon with an unfortunate decision made during Spring Break in my 20s. That reassurance, coupled with me dedication to not-fuck-giving about what random people think, was all it took for me to go ahead and get some artwork to live on my body.

First, I got Anne’s heartbeat tattooed on my left forearm. She wrote a lovely story about it on her blog, which I encourage you to read (in fact, even though I’m a little biased, I think everything she writes on her blog is pretty great, and worth your time.)

I wanted her heartbeat because I wanted to carry part of her with me wherever I went. I wanted her heartbeat on my left arm because I’m left handed, and I felt that it symbolized her guiding me. I wanted it on the inside of my arm, because I wanted to be able to look at it whenever I thought about her, and I wanted to be able to lay her heartbeat against mine whenever I missed her.

It was quick and easy and before my artist was even finished with it, I was making plans for another. They say you’ll either have a single tattoo, or a whole bunch of them, and I see myself landing squarely in the latter category.

A few months later, I went back to see Kim, my artist, and started work on a fairly large octopus piece on my right forearm. There are a lot of reasons that I wanted an octopus, but they’re personal and I’m keeping them to myself. I will allow this: the octopus is amazing, and the more I learn about it, the more I love it.

It took three sessions, for a total of about six hours, to finish her (I don’t know why, but I know that the octopus I have on my arm is female) and when she was finally finished, I felt like she needed a name.

“What are you going to name her?” Kim asked me as she put a bandage on my arm.

Maybe it was the endorphins talking, because I’m a pretty sciencey, skeptical, get-your-woo-bs-out-my-face-because-SCIENCE! guy, but I said, “I’m not sure, but she’ll tell me when she’s ready.”

A few weeks went by, and I tried out different names for her, but nothing felt right. Maybe naming her was a silly thing to do, like when I named my neato robot vacuum “Dobby”, and then felt terrible when I kicked it in the dark, and it shook side to side like I’d hurt it (it was making sure that he — it. It. Not he, it — was still connected to its charging station).

But one day, I think during Comicon, I was walking with my friend, Joseph Scrimshaw, and he asked me if she had a name.

“Not yet,” I told him, “but I decided that she’ll tell me what it is, when she’s ready to name herself.”

I had no endorphin excuse, this time, but after several weeks, giving her a name had become A Thing.

The words came out of my mouth, and a name popped into my head. It was not a name I ever would have chosen, but it was there, all the same.

“She kind of looks like she should be called ‘Gloria’,” he said.

Gloria was the name that had popped into my head, two seconds earlier.

“Okay, this is weird, but not only is that a name I’d never choose on my own, but it’s the name that popped into my head just before you said it. So I guess her name is Gloria.”

I don’t know what it means, I don’t know why I chose it, I realize that we could have heard or seen or otherwise subconsciously had something happen around us that made that name land on us at the same time, but whatever the rational explanation, the idea that this ink on my arm, which is in the shape of an octopus, assigned a name to itself — to herself — is cool to me, so I accept it.

Today, I went in to see Kim, to get Gloria some touch ups. When I was done, she looked like this:

Eventually, I’m going to get my right arm sleeved. I talked with Kim about some of my ideas today, and we’ll probably get to work on them next month.

Skeletor’s best insults

I don’t miss working for a corporate nightmare, but I really miss Skeletor reading angry tweets.

If you love Skeletor’s angry face of anger as much as I do, you’ll probably enjoy this compilation of him insulting everyone he can in Eternia.

(via io9)

do you game more in person, or online?

I’m writing a column for the Washington Post, and I could use your feedback, if you have a moment.

I would like to know (unscientifically, of course), if you play games more online, more in person, or about the same.

If you have a moment, please answer this survey thingy I set up:

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

I’m closing comments here, so I only have to look in one place for the data, since my deadline is tomorrow. Thank you for your help!

panorama ephemera mashupa

I made a thing, which I believe is best experienced as ambient background noise, projected onto a bare brick wall. This is not something that you sit down and watch, the way you’d watch a movie or a TV show.

This work was created by combining audio and visual works obtained from the Internet Archive, at archive.org. The visuals are from Panorama Ephemera, which was found in the Prelinger Archives. The audio was remixed and processed in Audacity, and comes from several different sources, also originally found at the Internet Archive.

Everything used to make this video is in the public domain, or is licensed for remix and reuse.

This video is released under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share alike license.

Halloween stuff and Tabletop stuff

Happy Thursday!

To begin: I did a Not The Flog that was released this morning. In it, I talk about the season three premiere date for Tabletop, offend nearly everyone for one reason or another, and bounce around on my couch while I wear a fancy Captain Kirk tunic.

Oh, I also talk about some dumb Halloween stuff that is occasionally amusing to me.

NEXT.

I co-hosted DC All Access today, with my friend Tiffany. I think it will be released in the SOOOOOOON.

ALSO.

I listened to a fucking amazing NPR show this morning, from Snap Judgment, called SPOOKED V. It’s a collection of fantastically creepy and scary stories, just in time for Halloween. I highly recommend it.

FINALLY.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on archive.org recently, and have been doing my best not to completely fall down the rabbit hole of amazing films and weird bullshit they have there, but this time of year, I just love checking out some of their old and creepy silent films. I mentioned on Not The Flog that you can see The Golem there, but you can also watch a gorgeous transfer of Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror, a silent Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde short, and the unforgettable 1960s B-Film classic, Carnival of Souls.

I’ve been having such a good time downloading and remixing things from the Internet Archive, I almost feel like I could just write about it and publish the stuff I make for the next several weeks, but I have other duties to which I must attend. So until next time, have a happy Halloween, and PLAY MORE GAMES!