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.)
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.
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!
Last night, we wrapped production on the third season of Tabletop. It was bittersweet for me, as always, because I’m so wiped out and teetering on exhaustion, the idea of sleeping until I don’t need to sleep is very appealing … but I’m also sad, because I love the crew so much, and they are such a joy to work with. We truly have become a family over the last three seasons, and it’s going to take me a few days not only to decompress from the intense production schedule, but to get used to not seeing all these people who I genuinely like for 12 hours a day.
I’m incredibly proud of the work we did this season, and I am super excited to get to work on editing and the other post-production tasks, starting on Friday.
For those of you wondering, here is the complete list of games and players from this season, in the order they were played (not the order they will be released):
Tokaido – Jason Wishnov, J. August Richards, Chris Kluwe
Concept – Joseph Scrimshaw, Rett and Link
Roll For It and Sushi Go! – Jason Ritter, Jennifer Hale, John Ross Bowie
Forbidden Desert – Felicia Day, Alan Tudyk, Jon Heder
Love Letter and Coup – The Fine Brothers and Felicia Day
Hare & Tortoise and Council of Verona – Jessica Merizan, David Kwong, Alison Haislip
Sheriff of Nottingham – Meredith Salenger, Ashley Clements, Derek Mio
Stone Age – Nika Harper, Jesse Cox, Jordan Maron
Geek Out – Anne Wheaton, Bonnie Burton, Clare Kramer
Five Tribes: Jenna Busch, Richard Garriot, Satine Phoenix
Mice & Mystics, Chapter One – Anne Wheaton, Ryan Wheaton, Nolan Kopp
Dread – Molly Lewis, Ivan Van Norman, Laura Bailey
Catan Junior – Emily Anderson, Brett, Baligrad, Adam Chernick
Libertalia – Karen Gillan, Seth Green, Clare Grant
Kingdom Builder – Yuri Lowenthal, Tara Platt, Paul Scheer
Dead of Winter – Dodger Leigh, Grant Imahara, Ashley Johnson
Legendary – Allie Brosh, Mark Fischbach, Brea Grant
Tabletop After Dark: Cards Against Humanity – Aisha Tyler, Ali Spagnola, Laina Morris
Our backers also get a special mini-episode that includes a whole bunch of behind the scenes stuff with our crew. I’m keeping that stuff secret unless backers want to talk about it and share it. Also, we have an episode order as well as a season premiere date, but we haven’t announce that stuff, yet.
This is my intro for Dead of Winter. I thought it may spark an interesting discussion about what I call Peak Zombie:
I think I was a freshman or sophomore in high school the first time I saw Dawn of the Dead. It hit me the way certain things can only hit a child’s fragile, eggshell mind: it was gory, and disturbing, and pretty scary. It also made me wonder what I would do if I found myself in the zombie apocalypse. Would it really be living if I spent the rest of my life trapped inside a mall? At what point does surviving cease to be living? Why am I asking myself incredibly complex and difficult philosophical questions, instead of playing The Legend of Zelda?
Dawn of the Dead piqued my interest in George A. Romero’s version of the zombie apocalypse, and I devoured — sorry — Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, and even Return of the Living Dead. For many years, I was a zombie fiend. In fact, every Halloween from 16 to 30, I was some version of a zombie. I wrote stories about zombies, I read stories about zombies, and if there was something with a zombie in it, it was on my wish list.
But sometime in the last few years, we hit Peak Zombie, and the truth is: I’m kind of over it. The Living Dead are rarely a metaphor for consumerism, conformity, militarization, and complacency. In much of popular culture, zombies are little more than cannon fodder and background noise in corporate entertainment that’s rushed to cash in on the public’s insatiable — some may say zombie-like — hunger for stories that pit a scrappy band of human survivors against a relentless, endless, faceless mob of interchangeable, shambling bad guys.
But every now and then, something breaks through the fortified wall of hardened, Hipster cynicism I’ve built around my survival compound, and reminds me that we keep returning to stories where zombies are threatening our very existence because even if the undead aren’t explicitly standing in for some profound and specific commentary on our modern world, they can, in fact, stand in for time, age, hunger, despair, and every existential threat we worry about when the night is darkest, and we can’t find the light.
Today on Tabletop, Dodger Leigh, Grant Imahara, and Ashley Johnson are here to explore a game that puts us right in the middle of the depths of our fears, during the worst of the zombie apocalypse. As if staying alive and pushing back the undead wasn’t hard enough, one of us may very well be working against the rest of us, to ensure that none of us make it through the DEAD OF WINTER.
