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Wil Wheaton's New Show: Tabletop
xwwt writes "Wil Wheaton is working with Felicia Day on a new show called Tabletop, which will air on the YouTube Channel Geek and Sundry. The show will be about board games and gaming in general. This is how he describes it: 'My ulterior motive with Tabletop is to show by example how much fun it is to play boardgames. I want to show that Gamers aren't all a bunch of weirdoes who can't make eye contact when they talk to you, and that getting together for a game night is just as social and awesome as getting together to watch Sportsball, or to play poker, or for a LAN party, or whatever non-gamers do with their friends. I want to inspire people to try hobby games, and I want to remove the stigma associated with gaming and gamers.' The first show airs April 2nd."
If you're hosting it, Wil, that's already one goal shot straight to hell.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Getting to hang out with Felicia Day...
I'm a gamer, and there is flat-out no way this stigma will be removed in my lifetime. When you get right down to it, we're playing pretend. Unless it's couched in layers of indirection, that's just not going to be socially acceptable until the average person has a lot more leisure time.
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I just hosted a board game night for a a bunch of 20-30 somethings - it was a huge hit! I started each game off with giving players more than the standard loot, to get it going faster, and had an end after 1.5hrs so that they could all get 3 different games in in one night. We played, Masterpiece, Movie Maker, King Oil (all with 4 people) and then had a couple 2 person games for people who showed up late: Xomax and Polarity. We're looking forward to doing it again.
You are my nemesis.
Right, because the best way to break into the mainstream is to fire up a show on a YouTube Channel entitled 'Geek and Sundry'.
I don't think enough people realize how awesome sport bikes can be. I'm going to start a column in a sports bike magazine in the hope that it will help a new audience catch the fever.
Please, no replies about how Geek and Sundry was created by the producers of The Guild. The Guild is not mainstream.
A gamer also isn't necessarily someone who plays video games. I'm not personally much for video games these days, but I love a good game of Settlers of Cattan or Apples to Apples. I'm interested to see Wheaton's take on that forgotten group of "gamers" who preceded video gamers.
What? He's doing gay pr0n for the love of it?
Wait. I think I may have missed a context switch somewhere in there...
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
On a date, I broke out the Space Hulk ... but bear with me - it's instant romance - with some good mood lighting, a candleabra dripping with wax, a few good bottles of red wine (in metal goblets of course), some good gregorian chants on the stereo. . (The candlelight is important, as it means that she can't see the terrible paint job I did on the little figurines. I'm told chicks dig artists.)
The Big Bang Theory has already been doing this, albeit with a bit of tongue in cheek. Considering that Wheaton has actually been a recurring guest on that show, guess where he got the idea?
Will Wil (no pun intended) be reviewing 'Mystic Warlords of Ka'a", and describing how he beat Sheldon?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The problem with trying to make watching other people play board games is the excitement is all in their heads. Their imagination is what's making it such an exciting evening, as well as their in-crowd banter which is all about their own personal jokes. Hard to convey that to a watching non-participating audience.
Physical sports are exciting for a lot of people because there's a lot of fast visual action, people rushing around and crashing into each other, scoring goals, carrying out very visual actions. But games based on mind play? well... they are all in the mind. I don't see how games like chess, or bridge, or the like can be exciting spectator sports, unless you're really into that game yourself so a fan already? Occasionally I've seen poker on tv - incredibly boring for me because I don't understand the game, don't want to learn about it, and don't find the people particularly entertaining. I think tv board game coverage might be the same: fine if you're already a fan of scrabble, or monopoly, or dungeons and dragons... but otherwise? nothing to see, none of the visual pyrotechnics of car racing, top league basketball/football/downhill skiing (etc).
For video gamers it happened. When I started gaming, about 27 years ago, it was something only geeks did. Me and my friends were weird for wanting to play videogames. We were the outcast nerds. Now? Fucking everyone plays videogames. Frat bros love them some Call of Duty, the Sims is popular across all demographics but particularly with women, World of Warcraft had over 12 million active subscribers at one time.
Videogames are mainstream and it is just an assumption that most people under about 25 play them, and the age is growing all the time.
Could very well happen for table top games too. When you get down to it, they are just more complex and involved board games.
Hey, if he's got the cash, why not retire? I would. Like a shot. Oh sure, do some guest starring roles here and there, perhaps do a Star Trek convention (as long as Grandma isn't dying). But if I've got a nice cottage on a private lake, with high speed internet, and a float plane, why not?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Why didn't he just ask her out?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Where was this show when I opened my game shop in my small home town.
We got railed against by all the "good Christian people" who murmured nothing but evil rumors about us, and did their best to cause us any trouble they could. We had a church on one side of us, and a bar on the other side close, and BOTH tried causing us trouble. The bar complained if anyone stood outside our building, and the church was mental, crazy and looking for a way to burn us at the stake.
We had a cop come into the shop looking for a missing child because he heard that we played D&D there and that involved sacrificing of children to the devil.
We didn't sacrifice kids, though we threatened to if they misbehaved. It was a running joke in the shop.
I was one of those kids who grew up playing these kinds of games with my friends. I thought I was rather lucky. The crowd was very bright, a collection of some of the best minds in our school. We became a pretty tight nit social group and had a blast over the years growing up together.
It was the best social mix of people as well, we had jocks and geeks, welfare kids and rich kids, troublemakers and saints all working together and having a BLAST.
I can remember my dickheaded Dad finding my D&D books, and flipping out over the artwork. He accused me of being into Satanism and banned any of the books or anything related to it from the house and forbid me from ever having anything to do with it. Of course I just ignored him and kept playing, I just covered my tracks and didn't leave anything around for him to find.
But years later, he opened a used book shop and got some D&D books in some boxes of books he purchased. He got to thumbing through them and became interested. After he gave it a look over, he did a 180 degree turn, thought it was something cool and NOT a demonic thing. He then started selling them new and was well on his way to being a game shop when he was burglarized for all of the D&D stuff and he didn't have insurance. (small shop, very poor...) Karma got him as well, because some snotty cunt I went to school with wrote a nasty article on his devil worshiping D&D store in the local paper. I got the immense pleasure of asking him, "how does it feel?"
That's ok, he got even, I didn't get into Magic the Gather like he advise back when they weren't known by anyone and just starting. I missed vast pile of cash missing out on cards that became incredibly high priced. I didn't get in on it until Legends, but I still paid the bills with it and enough to take my card business into a full blown game shop. I just wish I had done it in a big college town where I would have more of a population and customer roll over as the students move along.
As was, I saturated the market in a 75 mile radius, and my other shop, a gift shop was failing, and I had a spouse who had no discipline in spending. Couple that with a couple of damning business mistakes, some wrong investments, a town full of religious zealots hounding you, cops harassing your customers, it all adds up to a nervous breakdown, financial ruin, and at last divorce.
You know what made it worth while? I started a gaming club, and the shop was open until ungodly hours on the weekend. I installed huge gaming tables, that we built ourselves. They weren't Vegas quality, but they were nice, clean and looked great and were HUGE and they were full of gamers. The D&D groups got so huge, I had to split them up. I wrote original content for it all and wrote material for the Dungeon Masters. We coordinated it all as one world and the groups would meet for some vast epic event. You have to break it down into smaller groups. I dungeon mastered groups of 20 plus, while they claimed to have loved it, the mechanics of it don't work out so well.
Two examples; With dungeon design, you have a lot of 10ft wide coridors to explore. When you have 20 people, you pray everyone doesn't fire at once at something ahead. I let them figure this out the hard way of course. But as a DM,
Take the Red Pill.
What are you high? It's a multi-billion dollar industry. Note my thing about WoW having had 12 million active subscribers. That means they had 12 million people who had all paid to play the game in the last month (some monthly subscriptions, some pay per hour). Every month 12 million people were willing to pay to be able to play. They've lots players to other MMOs now, but the still have about 9-10 million players.
Some other game sales out there:
Call of Duty: Black Ops, over 25 million copies sold, over $1 billion in revenues.
The Sims: Over 35 million copies sold between three versions and who knows how many millions sold on expansions (each game has literally like 50 expansions).
Angry Birds: At least $12 million sales, 500 million downloads.
Or how about platforms? The grand daddy of them all would be the Playstation 2: Over 154 million sold. Doesn't really do anything other than play games either (it is a pretty lousy DVD player) so about the only reason to own one is to play video games. That is the single most sold platform but the others still sell plenty: 65 million 360s, 62 million PS3s, 95 million Wiis.
So yes, many of my friends play video games. However it is getting hard to find a group of people where nobody does. They are very much mainstream.
So sorry if you want to think that video games are just something the strange people do (which is funny from someone who posts on Slashdot) it's just not the case. They are big business now, an extremely popular form of entertainment.
For anyone interested in this I recommend taking a look at Shut Up & Sit Down (http://www.shutupshow.com/). It's a pretty funny show where they review a couple of board games with a specific theme ever episode. Well worth watching and they tend to be pretty funny as well.
The premise of this show is slightly flawed. Tabletop & Boardgames have been very popular among the average person for generations. My family has played many a game of Scrabble, Monopoly & Game of Life.
You can't compare D&D to Sports. You have to compare it to, say, cycling or cricket. There are mainstream boardgames that have no stigma associated with it, just as there are mainstream sports (Soccer or Baseball, Basketball, American Football). But if I was to bring up the subject of the Ireland vs. Oman match that took place this weekend (which we won) in the canteen at work, then I'll probably meet blank stares. The Ireland vs England Rugby match though...
So, if he's going to try to attempt to remove the stigma of a niche hobby, by having it aired on a Geek youtube channel hosted by 2 well known geeks, then I wonder at the success.
I will watch it, because I'm a geek, but I wonder if it will resemble This at all...
The German company Elastolin once produced an assortment of wonderful vacuformed plastic castles, scaled for use with figures from 25mm to larger. Elastolin castles were based on German castles. A hobby shop in New Jersey, used to supply these and as i understood it, they were especially desirable. Especially fascinated with the Elastolin Castle used with rules "for the Siege of Bodenburg," I would like to see these products reformed and re-released.