Category: Games

blog Photo Credit Tony Case on Flickr

Life Reboot: Status Report

Posted on By Wil

It’s been just over a month since I wrote about rebooting my life, and I thought it would be a good time to check in, see how I’m doing, and give myself some grades. If you were inspired to reboot your life, maybe this is a good time for you to check in, too.

So the only way this works is when we’re honest with ourselves. We have to honestly assess how we’re doing, take credit and feel good about the stuff that we’re crushing, and work harder on the stuff where we aren’t. I think we also have to be gentle and kind with ourselves. Regardless of how you end up grading your efforts, if you can honestly say that you are doing your best — and you accept that your best can vary from day to day — you get points for that.

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that time i hosted blizzcon

Posted on By Wil

I’m sitting in Phoenix, hoping that I get on a flight that leaves in an hour, because the flight that should have put me home twenty-five minutes ago was cancelled after many delays. I’m on standby, and I’m cautiously optimistic. One way or another I’ll get home tonight, but I hope it’s earlier than later, because spending five hours in an airport isn’t my idea of a good time. Also, Fallout 4 is waiting for me.

Anyway, now’s a good time to catch up on some stuff.

First: Blizzcon. I was terrified. I thought I was prepared, but I just couldn’t shake the voices in my head that insisted the people who were going to hate me no matter what were right about how much I suck at everything. The stage was bigger than I expected (even though I expected it to be big), and the audience was enormous. At over 12,000 people, it was tremendously difficult to keep them all engaged at once, and even when I had around 7,000 people responding to what I was doing, I couldn’t think, “Wow, 7000 people are enjoying this!” all I could think was “You suck, Wheaton. Half the audience hates you.”  For the first part of my hosting, my IFB was turned up way too loud in my ear, and I could hear myself cranked up to 11 in just my right ear. It was very distracting, and it really threw me off. I couldn’t take the IFB out, either, in case the director needed to say anything to me. Which he didn’t. Yay.

I thought I was … okay … but the feedback I got from everyone there, tons of people online, and everyone at Blizzard was very positive. In fact, other than the people who were always going to hate me, and the people who are determined to be angry about all sorts of things, everyone seems to feel that I did a good job.

If I were grading myself, I’d give myself a solid B. I made some embarrassing mistakes, like saying it was 2016 several times (I blame my brain for being excited that the next day was my 16th wedding anniversary) and for saying “Etcetera” when I was supposed to say “E T C” during the talent contest. In my (weak) defense, I didn’t (and still don’t) know who ETC was, which I guess will confirm that guy who was all “WIL WHEATON IS NOT QUALIFIED TO HOST BLIZZCON” so congratulations to him. Maybe they’ll find that guy and hire him for net time. To further defend myself, I read what was on my card, which said “Etc.” and not “E.T.C.” which probably would have saved me some embarrassment and some hardcore WoW players consternation.

The stuff I wrote, though? It seemed to work out mostly well. I asked Ryan to help me write some journal entries from the point of view of a character we called Boogers the Boggit, and while I felt like it died in most of the room, a ton of people have told me they thought it was clever and funny. I’ll repost it here in the next few days and you can decide for yourself if I’m the worst thing, ever.

Blizzcon itself, though, was incredible! The enthusiasm and passion and excitement was infectious, and I honestly feel sad for anyone who loves the Blizzard games who can’t embrace that sense of community because they need to be mad about stuff. The gatekeepers are really missing out on something wonderful.

After Blizzcon, a bunch of us went over to Trader Sam’s at the Disneyland Hotel, and we had all the flaming drinks until it closed. I may have been partially responsible for giving Randi Harper one of her first hangover, but I’d never admit to that. The next day, Anne and I celebrated our anniversary with some of our friends at Disneyland and California Adventure. It was incredibly fun, and Chris Hardwick and I posted a bunch of dumb pictures of us being silly while we were there. They’re on our Instagrams if you want to see them.

Monday, I flew out to Atlanta to work on Powers. I can’t say anything about it, but maybe I can after the episode airs. I guess that I can say that my day started at 430am, which was 130am as far as my body was concerned, but I was wrapped by 1pm, which is good because I was approaching an exhaustion I haven’t felt since we wrapped on Eureka and I went straight form an 18 hour day on the set to Dragon*Con without going to sleep.

I wasn’t prepared for how excited the cast of Powers was to meet me and to welcome me to the set, but I’m looking forward to going back next week to work with them again … right after I do another Big Bang Theory! Tomorrow, I start a few days on an episode that also features Bob Newhart.

Holy shit, I can’t believe that I get to meet Bob Newhart! I’m going to do my best not to go all When I Met Henry Rollins on him, but I will say that there’s a non-zero chance that, in the future, I’ll be doing a bit in my stand-up set that’s Bob Newhart’s agent taking a call from him about meeting a nerd who was embarrassingly excited to be there and made it really weird.

Okay, they’re about to start calling the standby passengers for my flight. Cross your fingers for me.

blog Eliot got comfortable on my desk this morning.

if the zombies were real, they would have gotten me today.

Posted on By Wil

Eliot is not a zombie, though she bites and claws like one if you touch her belly.

Yesterday, I finished writing all the stuff I plan to do at Blizzcon, with the help of my son, Ryan, who is both a fantastic writer and a very experienced Diablo and Warcraft player. I have decided that, since Diablo is my favorite of all the Blizzard games, and since it’s the only one I’m even marginally competent at playing, that’s where I’ll focus my stories and jokes and anecdotes. I’m still nervous as fuck about it, though.

All this week, my brain has been a real asshole. I’m having nightmares every night, from stress dreams to straight up terrors, and last night my idiot brain woke me up every five minutes so I wouldn’t oversleep and miss some very early radio interviews I needed to do today, because I’m on The Big Bang Theory tonight.

So, of course, after ensuring that I didn’t get any rest (though it says 8 hours on my sleep thing, I really feel like I slept for maybe 45 minutes) my brain decided that the best time to fall into a deep sleep was when the alarm went off. So of course I slept through it, and missed my first interview, which was a call into the Bob and Tom show. We tried our best to reschedule it for a little later in the morning, but due to something with football on their end and a very full schedule on my end, we weren’t able to make our ends meet. I’m disappointed, but there’s nothing I can do about it, now.

I did get to talk to a number of fun and friendly hosts across the country, including the hometown crew at KROQ, which was pretty great. I don’t listen to much radio these days, but I grew up on KROQ, and part of me always gets excited like a teenager when I get to do something with them.

After my interviews, I ate some breakfast and got ready to go do my training run. I’ve been staying on track with my Zombies 5K training, and I love it SO MUCH. I look forward to every run, even when it’s hard. Today, I began week 5 … and pulled the everlovingfuck out of my right calf muscle just as I was starting my first 10 minute free form run. I did everything I could to gently stretch it out, massage it, beg and plead and bargain with it to relax and let me run some more, but nothing worked. I limped back home for a little over a mile.

I’m sort of annoyed, but mostly disappointed, because I feel really good and happy when I’m running, and because I had a lot of gas left in the tank. I was pretty sure I’d be able to run the entire time today, and maybe exceed the 29 minutes of running I did a few days ago, too.

So I finished today with about 19 minutes of running and 40-something of walking, and I’m probably not going to be able to get back on the — horse? street? shoes? Whatever we call it when we go back out to run again — until Sunday at the earliest, and I leave Monday to go work on Powers. I hope I’ll be able to keep training while I’m on location, because the running part of my life reboot is my favorite.

Speaking of that, I’ve heard from thousands of people from all over the world about that post. I guess it’s been really helpful and meaningful to more people than I ever imagined, and the thing I wrote about artists getting paid for their work blew up, too. It feels good to say something helpful and positive when people are listening.

Checking in on the seven things I pointed out, I’ve been able to keep on track with all of them, except for watching more movies. I just haven’t had time, because all the Blizzcon preparation has consumed my life. When I’m not writing, I’m worrying, and when I’m not worrying, I’m worrying. So that’s fun.

I had a really exciting and awesome moment a few days ago, when I realized my life reboot had moved me from a size large to a size medium, and I had to get rid of more than half of my T-shirts. I also discovered that some clothes I bought months ago, anticipating losing a little bit of the flab around my belly, started to fit this weekend. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, but it’s still kind of a big deal. I don’t have the best self esteem on the planet, and something like putting on a shirt that I like, and fitting into it because I did the work to fit into it gives me +1 to awesome, even if it’s only temporary.

When I was supposed to be working on my Blizzcon thing, my brain threw a bunch of stuff at me that’s relevant to another story I’ve been working on. I allowed myself to write it down, even though it was technically Resistance (per the War of Art), because it’s still something I’m creating, and that I’m excited about. It’s a cool story, and I’m looking forward to putting it at the top of my queue after the weekend is over, and I’m done preparing my character for Powers.

If you’re on Project Reboot with me, I hope you’re enjoying it, and finding successes. Don’t give up if the successes you want aren’t the ones you’re having. Success of any kind is still success, and everything worth doing is hard.

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Halloweeney Tabletoppey Gamey Stuffey

Posted on By Wil

So I was thinking about putting together a list of horror-themed games that you can play, and while I was doing that, I realized that we have played two of my favorites on Tabletop: Betrayal at House on the Hill and Dread.

I also realized that I’d made an episode of Not The Flog that was about Halloween-themed games. So instead of sitting down and writing up something long and exhaustive and interesting that would seriously cut into my Blizzcon preparation time which is really actually preparing and not just playing lots of Diablo III and Warcraft and Hearthstone I swear.

So, presented here for your amusement and education are a series of videos with a gaming and Halloween theme.

Hey, since I have your attention: what’s a horror-themed game that you like to play around Halloween? Maybe we’ll end up with a neat list, after all.

Videos after the jump!

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Games I wanted to play Diablo III. Eliot had other plans.

stay awhile and listen

Posted on By Wil

I’m hosting Blizzcon next month, so a big part of my preparation — my job, which is still kind of hard to believe — is to play as much Blizzard games as I can. There’s no way I’m going to be as knowledgeable as the people who live and breathe these games, but I need to know my way around them, because it would be irresponsible not to.

For some games, this is really easy. I’ve been playing Diablo since day one, and I used to play StarCraft back in its first release, so playing those games is like visiting with an old friend, if that old friend hasn’t gotten all saggy and old and weak and unable to hold his liquor after midnight like, um, someone who is most certainly not me. That’s for damn sure. Not me. I’m doing great thanks.

If you follow me on Twitter, which I’ve explicitly told you not to do, you know that I’ve recently restarted Diablo III, and I’m going all the way through the story again. I’m playing a wizard (a class I’ve never played before. I sort of fell in love with the monk and never played any others) and I’ve been saying up way too late every night, while I try different spell combos and figure out what gear I like the best. Can I just mention how happy I am that I can transmogrify items now? Because I am the kind of player who would really fall in love with the way a hat looks, and never want to put on something better because it didn’t fit my style.

I can feel some of you rolling your eyes at how I’m a filthy “casual”, but you’ll get over it. The idea of loot runs and rushing bosses to level a character as fast as possible has never appealed to me, but playing through the story, experiencing areas and NPCs that I’d forgotten about or never came across before, and remembering the countless all-nighters I pulled in my twenties has been really fun and rewarding.

Anyway, I’ve put something like 50 hours into D3 in the recent past, and it would be very easy to hook myself up to some sort of iron lung-style device that keeps me alive, fed, and moderately hygienic for the next couple of weeks. It really is that much fun for me, and I’m only level 36 right now. I got a ring last night that spawns these little chubby troll things that blow up for no reason, and don’t seem to be useful in combat at all, but hold crap are they hilarious.

I’m doing my best to have a good work/life balance, though. I’m making time to walk my dogs every day, writing a little bit every day, eating right, and even seeing my wife once or even twice a day. Today, I even went outside while the sun was still up, so there’s that.

I’m also learning games that are new to me, like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm. I love Heroes of the Storm, and I made it through the training missions pretty easily, but when I try to play with actual humans, I am hilariously bad at it. I mean, I’m better at rolling d20s than I am at not dying in Heroes of the Storm. Ted Cruz is better at not being an asshole than I am at being useful to my team in Heroes of the Storm. True Detective Season 2 was more satisfying than — okay, you get the point.

But here’s the thing: every time I’ve played, I’ve told my team that I’m learning, and I stink, and I’m sorry but I’ll do my best. And every time I’ve played, my team has been friendly and patient and encouraging. Even when I’m stinking it up like the San Jose Sharks in the playoffs, the people I’ve played with haven’t been shitty to me. I asked my son, Ryan, who knows his way around these games much better than I do if that was normal, and he told me that, in his experience, people who play Blizzard games tend to be pretty decent to each other.

“They’ve built in all these controls to weed out the assholes,” he told me. “So the people who are playing are people who want to be playing, and it isn’t like League of Legends, where someone feeds the other team specifically to be a dick and ruin it for everyone.”

So if you’ve recently played Heroes of the Storm with a player who was so incompetent you thought that maybe a kitten had hopped onto a keyboard and was rolling around on it, and you were kind and patient with that person, there was a good chance it was me. And even if it wasn’t, give yourself a gold star for being awesome to someone who is struggling in a game. The only way we get more people to play games, and the only way we keep nice people in games, is when we help new players get comfortable.

Today, I’ve been playing a whole lot of Hearthstone, which is sort of like if you put Magic: The Gathering and Ascension into a blender, poured in five gallons of World of Warcraft, and put it on high speed for an hour. It’s silly as hell (in a good way) and easy to figure out, but difficult to master. My experience with deck builders and dueling games gives me an advantage to not sucking that isn’t present in Heroes of the Storm, and I’m probably going to be ready to attempt an actual, human opponent by the end of the weekend.

I have installed WoW, but I’m intimidated by and terrified of it. That’ll probably get played next week, sometime.