Category: blog

critical failure

Posted on By Wil

For months, whenever I visit gaming sites I care about, someone is laying into me about Tabletop. Things like, “He doesn’t care about the fans” and “He took everyone’s money and didn’t spend it on the show” and “Nobody who is a real gamer takes this show seriously” or “I hate Tabletop because [thing someone decided I did, whether I actually did it or not.]”

I’m pretty good at not having a fuck to give about things, especially from power gamers who aren’t in my target audience, and who will probably never be happy with what I do. For the first two seasons of Tabletop, “Thank you for your comment. Please direct any further comments to that brick wall, and remember that we made this for free,” was my standard response. The people who loved what we did vastly outnumbered the people who complained about the show and about me and about all the delightful things people complain about. And that’s fine. Not everyone likes everything. My goal was to make more gamers in the world, and we’ve certainly succeeded in that. If we never make any more Tabletop, I’ll always feel very good about that.

There’s this thing that we talk about in production, in acting classes, and on the set. It’s this idea that if you feel good about something you made or worked on, and someone shits on it, who cares? You’re happy with it, you made the thing you wanted to make, and they made comments. You can stand by your choices. But there’s another side of it, and it’s why so many of my fellow creative people are as selective as they can be about the projects they do: when you do something that you don’t feel good about, whatever the reason was that you did it, and someone shits on it, it strikes a nerve. When you should have known better, and you didn’t trust your instincts, it strikes a nerve. When you count on someone to do the thing they were supposed to do, and they didn’t, it strikes a nerve.

So when I am accused, over and over and over again of not caring about Tabletop, not caring enough to get the rules right, not caring about the audience, or feeling complacent because of reasons — it strikes a nerve, because I work incredibly hard to be good to our audience. It strikes a nerve because I care a lot, especially this season, because for over twenty thousand people, it wasn’t free, and the only brick wall I care about has all their names on it. Written by hand, by amazing production assistants.

Yesterday, after being beaten up on r/boardgames yet again, I wanted to address that, and explain how things happened this season that are not up to my standards. It wasn’t my intention to do any of the things I’ve been accused of doing, but enough people I trust and respect have all said the same thing to me, so I clearly didn’t communicate my feelings clearly.  I counted on someone who had never let me down, and they profoundly let me down, when it mattered the most. I feel that the backers of the show deserve to know what happened, why it happened, and how it made me feel. What I wanted to say was: this is what happened. This is why that happened. This is how it made me feel. I am angry, and embarrassed, and I kind of don’t even want to do another season of the show.

I didn’t do that well. I stand by telling the truth about what happened, but I wish I’d done it in a better way. I hope you’ll continue to enjoy Tabletop, because a lot of people worked very hard to make it the best show we could make it. In a lot of ways, I believe we have succeeded. In some other ways, we’ve clearly fallen short. I want you to know that I care. I cared during production, and I care now. I realize that this will continue to not be good enough for some people, unnecessary for others, and is unlikely to do anything other than prolong the Internet hatefest I’m presently receiving. But this is one of those things that I need to write for me.

I accept responsibility for my tone, and my words. I don’t apologize for being angry, embarrassed, and disappointed.

I feel like I managed to alienate myself from a community that I love and care about, and I may never be let back in. That hurts a lot, but if it’s a self-inflicted wound, I have nobody to blame but myself. I can’t even blame the dice.

#SaveTheBeer!

Posted on By Wil

For weeks, I’ve been a wreck. The stress dreams were relentless, my appetite was unpredictable, and I got massively sick for the first time in years.

My depression and anxiety have been as bad as they’ve been in months, and it’s been a challenge to get to the end of every day.

This is pretty normal for me when I care deeply about something, and I know that all of this has been anticipation about the release of Titansgrave, which is something I’ve been actively working on for about a year, and something I’ve wanted to produce since Tabletop first began.

I feel a responsibility to the cast and crew, to the editors, to the director, to our partners at Green Ronin, and to the thousands of backers who made it possible for us to create the show.

I’ve been making creative decisions every day, watching edits and rewatching edits and giving notes on edits and watching the edits with those notes applies so much, I started to lose perspective on the story. When I’m spending all of my energy focusing on what I can cut and what I need to change, that’s all I can see, and it’s easy for me to forget that there’s all this stuff there that’s genuinely cool.

My deepest fear has been that we wouldn’t be able to share with the audience how we felt while we played, that we couldn’t be able to communicate the fun, the tension, the camaraderie, the anticipation and excitement. I was worried that everything I thought was awesome, because I was there, wouldn’t translate.

By the way, I felt exactly this way before Tabletop was released, so this is nothing new for me.

As I told Ivan yesterday on Twitch: all I could hear was Carrie’s mom in my head, hysterically screaming that they were all going to laugh at me.

Well, it’s about 24 hours later, and contrary to everything I’ve been taught, I’ve been reading the comments. It looks like the hard work of our team from the first few ideas I wrote down in a notebook to the first few steps our party took together to the final edit I signed off on last week was worth it.

So far, everyone seems to love the characters, the players, and the story as much as I do … and that makes me so incredibly excited because I know what the future holds for all of us, and now I wish it was next week as much as you do.

Thanks for watching, everyone, and thank you for your feedback. A very, very special thank you to our backers, and to everyone involved in the creation and production.

Oh, and whoever decided that #SaveTheBeer was going to be a thing? You get +3 to awesome today.

 

i’d love to change the world but i don’t know what to do

Posted on By Wil

…so i leave it up to you…

I’ve been talking with some friends about the increasing belligerence, toxicity, and general shittiness of the Internet lately. It seems like it’s just exploded in a logarithmic curve in the last week or so, and websites I generally enjoy browsing, like Reddit and Fark, and social networks I’ve always liked, like Tumblr and Twitter, seem to be overrun with real dickwagons.

“It’s like somone pushed a button, and unleashed a horde of … angry … children …” I said, the reality dawning on my as the words came out of my mouth.

“Oh god. It’s summer vacation and the children are online, unsupervised, all day.”

I’m going to sound like an old man now, but fuck it: I’m genuinely concerned by the lack of basic empathy and kindness I’m seeing online from the damn kids today. Maybe they’re not like that face to face, and maybe they don’t think that being online is “real”, but the cruelty and bigotry and misogyny that I see blithely spouted all over the place online worries me. Are we letting an entire generation grow up believing that behaving like the whole world is [whatever]chan? Is that healthy? The Internet has always had awful people on it, but the farther away I get from my 20s, the worse and worse it seems.

Maybe it’s because I’m a parent, and I know how hard I worked to help my own children develop empathy and kindness, so I have an observational and confirmation bias … but I’m genuinely starting to feel, for the first time in my entire life, like I don’t want to interact with people online. I don’t mean that in a flouncy, goodbye cruel world I’m leaving this forum forEVAR way, either. I mean it in a “man, what happened to this neighborhood? It used to be so great,” kind of way.

I’m looking at websites and networks and communities that I’ve been part of for close to a decade or more, and I hardly recognize them. Is that because I was just less touchy about people being shits back then? Or is it a real and meaningful change in the culture? For the sake of the damn kids today, I really hope that this is just me feeling touchy and overly-sensitive. Because I’m trying really hard to make the world a better place for this generation, and if the behavior I see online from them is indicative of their norm, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.