50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
These quick casual games are so much fun to play, and they're a great infection vector for getting your friends to try out gaming.
Enjoy!
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One of the best times I had this season on Tabletop was playing Fiasco with John Rogers, Alison Haislip, and Bonnie Burton.
I won't spoil anything, but I will tell you that Will Hindmarch, Jason Morningstar, and I teamed up to write an original playset for the show, and we'll be releasing it when the episode airs.
This is a picture I took of my Fiasco Companion, sitting on our Emissary table from Geek Chic, the day we filmed the Fiasco episode. I was fooling around with this cool little fisheye lens my friend gave me to stick onto my cellphone, and this was one of the few pictures that turned out fairly well.
I like Google Plus. Some of the smartest people I've ever read are on Google Plus, and the Hangout is amazing.
But Google is doing everything it can to force Google Plus on everyone, and it's pissing me off.
Yesterday, I tried to like a video on YouTube. I wasn't signed in to my Google Plus account, and this is what I saw:
Where the thumbs up and thumbs down used to be, there is now a big G+ Like button. When you go anywhere near it, you get a little popup that tells you to "upgrade to Google plus" for some reason that I don't remember, because the instant I saw it, I made a rageface.
Here's what I wrote on Tumblr:
Oh, go fuck yourself, Google. This is just as bad as companies forcing me to “like” something on Facebook before I can view whatever it is they want me to “like.”
Just let me thumbs up something, without forcing me to “upgrade” to G+, you dickheads.
The worst part of this? For a producer like me, I’m going to lose a crapton of potential upvotes for Tabletop, because the core of my audience is tech-savvy and may not want to “upgrade” to yet another fucking social network they don’t want or need.
I am adding now: Those upvotes are incredibly important to us, because we need them to earn another season of our show.
I'm even more grateful now than I was yesterday that we own the IP for Tabletop, because we can produce it ourselves, or crowdfund with Kickstarter, or something like that, if Google keeps doing things like this that will negatively affect how users can interact with us on YouTube.
I was reblogged by Neil Gaiman, who added:
I wish Google would leave the Social Network thing to others. When Google does what it does, and does it well, it changes the world. When it rides bandwagons, it’s irritating.
I’m not on Google Plus, and I suppose that I won’t be liking YouTube videos any longer.
John Green also reblogged me, and he said:
I strongly agree with this. Making it so that only google plus users can decide whether a YouTube video is worth watching benefits no one except for Google Plus: It is bad for viewers, bad for video creators, and bad for YouTube’s ability to curate and tailor videos to potential viewers.
By crippling functionality on sites Google owns (like YouTube) and forcing users to "upgrade" to a service that they may not want or need to get that functionality back, Google is making a huge and annoying mistake. You get people to enthusiastically use services by making them compelling and awesome and easy to use. You don't get people to enthusiastically use your services by forcing them to. In fact, that's probably a great way to ensure that a huge number of people who may have been interested in trying out your service never even look at it.
Last summer, Felicia Day asked me if I wanted to develop a show together for her new premium YouTube channel, Geek and Sundry.
Spoiler alert: I said yes.
She asked me if I wanted to do a show about gaming, maybe a review show or something like that.
"I think it would be more fun do something where we play games," I said. Then, the light bulb went off.
"Oh my god," I said, "What if we did something that was like Celebrity Poker meets Dinner for Five, where we got interesting people we know together for tabletop games?!"
Felicia thought it sounded awesome, I was really excited about the idea, and we got to work. It took a few months to develop, and in December we finally shot our first block of episodes. In February, we got the band back together and shot another block of episodes, and just last week, I finished locking down the final edits for all the shows (that's why I couldn't come to Wondercon on Friday.)
In season one of the show, we play games like Settlers of Catan, The Last Night on Earth, Munchkin, Small World, and Alhambra. Some of the players include Grant Imahara, Sean Plott (better known as Day[9]), Dodger Leigh, Ryan Higa, Beth Riesgraf, Phil Lamarr, Morgan Webb, Garfunkle and Oats, Veronica Belmont, and Colin Ferguson.
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.
I'm pretty sure we succeeded. By the second day of production, our crew was grabbing games out of our games library to play at lunch. All of our interns and production assistants have become complete game fanatics, and whenever I edit a show, all I want to do is go home and play that game until my face falls off.
I hope you'll subscribe to our channel, and please tell your friends about Tabletop.
