Author: Wil

Author, actor, producer. On a good day, I am charming as fuck.

Game on: GenCon info, chapbooks, and dice. Lots and lots of dice.

Posted on By Wil

I leave for GenCon in about 3d12 hours. While I'm not thrilled about getting up at 4am on Thursday, knowing that the reward for dragging myself out of bed at areyoufuckingserious o'clock is three days of gaming and geeking makes it all worthwhile.

I'm blessing dice, taking pictures, and signing books, pictures, bodies and other interesting things for about 3 6 hours each day. I'm trying to set it up so I have a 2 3 hour session in the morning and a 1 3 hour session in the afternoon, but I won't know precise times until I'm on site, and I get a sense of how many people want to get stuff signed and whatever. I'll announce times on Twitter once I'm at the con.

I don't have any books, because I ran out and wasn't able to order new ones in time for GenCon. However, I'm bringing a limited-edition Chapbook in the style of Wil Wheaton's Limited Edition Chapbooks. This one is entirely gaming-related stories, and I'm really, really happy with how it has turned out. Here's the introduction:

Of all the things that make me a geek, nothing brings me more joy, or is more important to me, than gaming. I am the person I am today because of the games I played and the people I played them with as I came of age in the 80s.
This is a small collection of stories about gaming in its various forms, from cards to dice to computers to our beloved tabletop RPGs. Most of these stories were originally published in 2009, when my son Ryan was away at college, and my son Nolan was 17.

Keep playing games. Games are important. Games matter. When you play a game – any game – you’re using your imagination to bring a world to life, and that’s truly special, because while all destruction is essentially the same, when you create something, it’s different every single time. When you create something together, you’re building bonds with your fellow gamers that could last for your entire lives. The Venn Diagram of my best friends, my gaming group, and people from high school I still hang out with is one perfect circle. I suspect that for many gamers of my generation, that’s equally true … and I know that my kids will be saying the same thing in 20 years about people they’ve never met face to face, but interact with almost every day in an online game that will make Call of Duty look then like Pong looks today.

Roll 20s,
Wil Wheaton
August 3, 2010

I'm bringing 200 chapbooks. When I did this at PAX Prime last year, I sold out in about 5 hours, so plan accordingly if you really want one.

Oh, this is really important: I got the Swine Flu at PAX Prime, and it was the worst two weeks of my life. When we went to PAX East, all of us (Jerry, Mike, Kurtz, Straub, Paul and Storm, The Professor and Mary Ann) all agreed that we wouldn't shake hands, give hugs, or engage in human contact with people, to limit the introduction of infection vectors. Most people understood, and we gave each other the old Iron Guard Salute (not the fascist thing, the gaming thing that looks like like "love" in ASL). The result: a few people were cheesed off, but none of us were too upset about that, because none of us got sick. It was the first con I've gone to in my whole life where I didn't get some form of Con Crud, and I'd like to repeat that until we turn out the lights on Planet Earth. So, tl;dr: I'm not going to touch people at the con. I know it seems weird, but I hope you understand why. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm trying not to get sick. (Edited to add: in comments, a non-zero number of readers seem to have a real problem with this, and people on the rest of the Internets are already giving me a hard time about it in very unkind terms. This makes me really sad; I hoped for a little more empathy and understanding. Not that it should matter, but I have Epstein-Barr, so my immune system isn't as robust as a normal person's; it is very easy for me to catch viruses and other nasty things. I'm not going to apologize for not wanting to get sick, especially after two weeks of Swine Flu. If you can't understand that, it's your problem, not mine.)

My panel is called I'm Wil Wheaton, and I'm a Gamer. It is on Friday morning, at 11. If you have one of my T-shirts from Jinx or shirt.woot, and you wear it to the panel, you can be in a group picture either just before or just after the panel.

The rest of the con, I plan to find and play as many games as I can, because holy shit I'm finally coming to GenCon!

Games I want to play while I'm there:

  • Savage Worlds
  • Dragon Age RPG
  • Magic: The Gathering
  • Zombie Dice
  • Cthulhu Dice
  • Button Men
  • Munchkin
  • A Penny For My Thoughts

I have one request, which I hope isn't unreasonable: I'd like to test the theory that you can't have too many dice. If I see you at GenCon, would you give me one gaming die? I'll bring home as many as I get, dump them all on my office floor, and take a picture. I think it could be pretty cool … or very, very sad. Either way, it will be something, you can be sure of that.

It’s like there’s a monkey on my back. A gaming monkey, and he’s rattling dice in my ear.

Posted on By Wil

One more From The Vault, because I'd completely forgotten about it, and it made me laugh out loud when I read it.

While Anne and I drove down the freeway today, Just Like Heaven came on the radio.

"This was my first CD," I said.

"I know," she said. "You tell me that every time we hear a song from it."

"And one day, you'll hear it, and I won't be here for some reason or another, and you'll wish I was here to tell you."

While we both pondered the macabre nature of that particular thought,
I realized that not only was this album forever linked to my first CD
player, but it also gave me hypernostalgic memories of gaming with my
group of friends in high school.

"I don't know what it is," I said, "but lately, I've wanted to get
together with geeks and do a weekend of serious nonstop gaming."

She glanced over at me. "Oh?"

"Yeah. But this is more than the usual 'I want to play Car Wars'
thing. This is a serious –" I searched for the exact word to describe
the overwhelming longing, approaching psychophysical need to play, and settled on, "Jones. Like an addict, you know?"

I wiggled around in my seat, and faced her, "It's like there's — hey, aren't we taking the 110?"

"Whoops." She said, as she quickly changed lanes.

"It's like there's a monkey on my back. A gaming monkey, and he's rattling dice in my ear."

"Like he's shaking them in a Yahtzee cup?" She said.

"Gamers don't use Yahtzee cups," I said, as patiently as I could.
"It's more like he's holding a bag of dice in his hand." I held my hand
up, and felt the invisible bag in my palm. "And he's rattling the dice
around."

"Is it your bag of dice?" she said.

"Yeah! It's totally my bag of dice!" I paused for a moment, and
added, "but he's not opening it. Because if he opens it, and touches my
dice, I will fucking kill that monkey."

This is totally going into the gaming chapbook for GenCon.

From the Vault: there is more than one thing that makes us who we are

Posted on By Wil

I'm bringing a limited-edition chapbook of gaming stories to GenCon, so Andrew and I have been digging through old entries and columns to put it together. This weekend he found and sent me the following old post, with the note: "Nothing to do with gaming, but it's REALLY short and I think we could both use the reminder from time to time"

He's right. I think we can all use the reminder from time to time.

(Imagine the sound of The Vault opening)

It drove me crazy, during the marketing and promotion of Just A Geek,
that I couldn't convince the publicity department to stop it with the
"It's a Star Trek Bio! Sci-Fi! Sci-Fi!" message and tell readers what I
wanted them to get out of the book.

The thing is, a lot of readers who expected that sort of book were
pissed because it wasn't what they got, (a few of them were pleasantly
surprised, but the ones who wanted a gossipy Star Trek tell-all let me know what
an asshole I was for misleading them and wasting their time) but readers who were at least marginally
familiar with my blog, who were looking for something different, grokked
a different fundamental story in the text. A few days ago, WWdN reader
Stephanie wrote me the following, which I reprint with her permision:

What
I took from your book is that you shouldn't let one thing you do in
your life define you – because we do several different things in our
lives and there is more than one thing that makes us who we are.

That's
a really big part of my story. I'm really glad you grokked it,
Stephanie, and I hope it inspired you and others to follow your dreams,
whatever they may be.

(Imagine the sound of The Vault closing)

singing fun fun fun

Posted on By Wil

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from John Scalzi, reminding me that my Unicorn Pegasus Kitten fanfic is due on Saturday … I'm going to skip the part about how I began to hyperventilate at the thought of actually turning something in to John that people are going to read and OH MY GOD THEY'RE ALL GOING TO LAUGH AT ME AND —

Um. Let's just say that I've been working on it nonstop, so I don't blow the deadline, and I have what Anne calls "Writer brain."

(Witness: "You have writer brain." "Why do you say that?" "Because you just put the cereal in the refrigerator and the almond milk in the pantry." "Oh.")

Anyway, earlier this morning, I was typing as fast as my fingers could keep up with my brain, when my computer did this thing where the screen fritzes once, twice, then looks like something out of Videodrome, then locks up. (This has happened infrequently for a few months, and because I missed my Applecare renewal by one day, I don't have it so … I'm stuck with this until I can afford a replacement. #firstworldproblem.)

Luckily, I'd just saved, so I didn't lose any work. I stood up, sighed, and reset the machine. While it rebooted, I walked across my office and looked out the window just as a hummingbird flew around the side of my house and began taking nectar from of the flowers in the lavender bush beneath my office window.

The window was open, so I could hear the beat of its wings and its tiny voice when it chirped. It darted around the bush, and the sun turned the green feathers on its back almost iridescent. I think I caught a flash of bright red on its breast while BNL's Brian Wilson played on my Sonos.

It was an incredibly peaceful moment, and it calmed my frenzied mind. Though I hadn't planned to take a break from my work, I was glad I did. If I'd been working, I wouldn't have seen or heard it, and I was grateful to be in exactly the right place and time to have that moment.