50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
I really wanted something like this to be part of Tabletop Day, so I commissioned these awesome print-and-paste-and-cutouts from my friend Lar Desouza (of Least I Could Do and Looking For Group fame, among other things).
These images are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license, so feel free to print them out, share them with people, and most of all … take pictures of them in action and submit to As Seen On Tabletop!
Finally! I can announce that Season Two of Tabletop will premiere on April fourth! I’ve wanted to talk about this for months, but I couldn’t, because of reasons.
But now we can talk about it, so…
We have some amazing guests this season, including Jeri Ryan, Seth Green, Bobak Ferdowsi, Ashley Clements, Patrick Rothfuss, and my son, Ryan Wheaton.
We have some amazing games this season, including Smash Up, Star Trek Catan, Shadows Over Camelot, Lords of Waterdeep, and The Resistance!
Back in January, I wrote a post called Thinking About Tabletop. It turns out that everything I want to say today, I already said then. So, take it away, me from a few months ago:
About a year ago, I finished shooting the first season of my show Tabletop, and had a few weeks off before we began editing the games we played into hopefully entertaining television.
I don’t remember what I did during those weeks — probably slept a whole lot — but when we got into editing, I clearly remember how terrified I was that the show wouldn’t work. The first cut of the first episode was (following my direction) too long, tough to follow, and just not as interesting as I wanted it to be. Luckily, Felicia Day was in the edit bay with me, and she knew exactly how to fix it. She gave notes and advice to the editor (who was amazing), and when we came back two days later to watch the second cut, it was an entirely different show. It was funny, it was entertaining, it captured how much fun it was to play the game. It was what I had always hoped Tabletop would be.
For the next few weeks, we cut the entire season, three episodes at a time, with three amazing and talented editors. By the time we got to the end of everything, we almost knew what we were doing!
As we got closer and closer to the premiere, I kept looking for the familiar nervous anxiety about how people would react, but it wasn’t ever there. I believed in the show in a way I’d never really been able to believe in myself, and I just wanted to share it with the world.
Tabletop’s premiere was a huge success that exceeded my wildest dreams. I think we got close to half a million views almost immediately, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. My friend John Rogers says that you should expect comments to be weighted 3:1 in favor of people hating on a thing, because someone who loves a thing goes “I loved that! I guess I’ll go back to my life now!” instead of going “I loved that! NOW I WILL ENGAGE ALL CAPS TO TELL THE PERSON WHO MADE IT HOW MUCH I LOVED IT.” Even with that adjustment, we were at like 10:1 positives to negatives.
As the season unfolded, I began to hear from game shop owners. When we played a game on Tabletop, it sold out. I heard from designers that when we played their games, they sold thousands and thousands of them. I heard from a distributor that one of the games we played sold out and had to go into a new printing — they thought 30,000 copies of the game would be enough, and they were wrong.
But the most amazing thing, that I didn’t even expect or think about even a little bit, were the personal stories from people who had been inspired to start up their own game nights with their friends and families because of Tabletop. One father told me that his tween kids spent every evening in front of their own computers or televisions, and after dinner he pretty much didn’t see his family until breakfast. But after watching Tabletop together, the kids were inspired to start a family game night. Tabletop, he told me, literally brought his family closer together.
There are dozens of parents of special needs children who have emailed me or talked to me at conventions, thanking me for giving them something that helps their children.
I even heard from a guy who felt like his marriage was drifting apart until he watched Tabletop with his wife and they started playing games together.
My ulterior motive with this show has always been to make more gamers by showing how much fun it is to play games, and I’m pretty confident that I can declare that effort an unqualified success.
Tabletop means more to me than I ever thought it would, and the community that has grown around it makes me incredibly proud, but I didn’t do Tabletop alone. We had an incredible crew who could film people playing games in a visually interesting way. We had an incredible director who kept us together and focused on what was important. We had friends who came to play with me just because I asked, and game publishers who took a chance on our show without knowing exactly what it would end up being. I had an incredible creative partner in Felicia Day. I had a tremendously talented team of producers who pulled together an equally talented team of editors, who are the true unsung heroes of this entire effort.
And then there’s the community, which is as much a part of the success of Tabletop as anything. Whether you’re posting in the Geek and Sundry forums, sharing your stories and pictures on the Seen on Tabletop Tumblr I made, talking about games we played at Board Game Geek, or actually playing games with people who are important to you, you’re part of something wonderful.
And speaking of wonderful things, we’re working really hard to make International Tabletop Day the best celebration possible of the tabletop gaming culture we love. At the moment, there are 2,250 events in 55 countries, and more people are joining and adding their own every day. I want to point out that a few hundred events would be considered an epic success by any measurement, and a thousand events was something we never dreamed would happen — in a year or two, sure, but right away? No way. The point is, you, the Tabletop audience, my fellow gamers, my fellow geekdads and gamerdads and geekmoms and gamermoms … your enthusiasm and joy of gaming has built a truly global community. We are all part of something amazing, now, and I hope you feel as good about it as I do.
I really excited for you to see Season Two, and I hope we live up to your expectations.
Trust me when I say that this wouldn’t have happened without you … so thank you for watching, and until next time, play more games.
I know this is not an original idea, but I don’t care, because I am easily amused and it was lots of fun to take these pictures while we were at Walt Disney World.
This is … uh … a thing that happened.
This last weekend at MegaCon in Orlando, I met contestant Keri again, and she reminded me that we did this in 1989 when I was at the Disney Studios in Orlando. I asked her if she had a copy of it, and her husband told me they had it on VHS, but she was embarrassed by it and didn’t want anyone else to see it. He and I communicated in the secret language of husbands, and he risked sleeping on the couch to share it with us. I’m really glad he did, because unlike pretty much everything I’ve seen from this part of my life, I’m not mortified by it*. I think it’s pretty cute, and it’s obvious that we’re all having a whole lot of unselfconscious fun.
BUT! There is a cautionary tale, here: Kids, this is what we looked like when we were teenagers in the late 80s. I keep seeing that some fools are trying to make these fashion trends come back for you damn kids today. LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES. DO NOT REPEAT THEM. WE WORE NEON SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.
*except when I’m hollering at 16 year-old me to give the fucking obvious answer you moron!
I started this post yesterday, and couldn’t finish it until today. So turn yesterday into the day before yesterday and tomorrow into today and then ask yourself why you even bothered because it really isn’t all that important.
I woke up this morning because my dog was fussing to go outside.
“I didn’t know this was a pet-friendly hotel,” I thought as my brain got off the train from Dreamland. “I have to move to part of the hotel that doesn’t have pets in it today.”
Then I opened my eyes, and experienced the glorious moment when, after being away from home for a week, I realized that I was back in my own house, in my own bed. I got up, let her out, and made myself a cup of coffee … then I enjoyed that glorious moment when, after drinking hotel “coffee” for a week, I get to make it myself, just the way I like it.
The flight home last night was pretty rough until we got over Texas. It was so turbulent over the Gulf of Mexico the flight attendants didn’t even get out of their seats for close to an hour after take off. A few years ago, I would have been an absolute mess during the whole thing, but I’ve been flying so much, I just ride it out and try not to spill my water all over myself. I’m about halfway through book three of A Song of Ice And Fire, and I want to finish it before the new season premieres, so while my body was bouncing around on an airplane, my mind was in Westeros. It was pretty great.
So I promised I’d share a couple of memorable moments from MegaCon. Before I get to the pictures I took yesterday, I’ll do that now.
Appearing as a guest at a big convention like this is a lot of fun, but it’s also exhausting. People always ask me if my arm or hand or wrist is tired near the end of a long day of signing, and I always tell them the truth: my body never gets tired; it’s my brain that is exhausted. Signing is so much more than, well, signing. It’s listening and engaging and sharing moments and meeting hundreds of people in a relatively short amount of time, doing my best to not rush people while understanding that the person in front of me and the person still waiting behind them may have been in that line for over an hour. It’s drawing out shy kids who are excited to meet me, but don’t know what to say. It’s handling people who can be a little strange — if harmless — who may not know when it’s really time for them to move on. It’s telling someone that I’m sorry, but I can’t sign that thing, or I can’t pose for that picture, or I’m really not going to go have beers with you because I don’t know you at all even though you think you know me.
I suppose I could make it less mentally taxing if I just sat there and didn’t make an effort to engage people or treat them like human beings (and there are some folks who do exactly that), but that’s not how I roll, and I will stop attending conventions before I become That Guy. That Guy has no perspective, no humility, no gratitude, and while I’ve met him a few times (there are a few people who act like fans at conventions are simply meatbags attached to wallets) I won’t ever be him.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Because I was a fan at conventions long before I was a special guest, I know what it’s like to be on that side of the table, and it’s important to me to treat people the way I want to be treated. It’s also wonderful, because I get to meet remarkable and inspiring people, and share in the mutual joy we have for Doctor Who, Tabletop gaming, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Star Trek, beer, hockey, and silly Internet memes.
This weekend, I met dozens of people who told me that they were scientists, engineers, doctors, or programmers because they were inspired by Wesley Crusher. I met tons of women and a few men who told me that I was their first teenage crush. I met a lot of people, men and women, my age and younger, who thanked me for speaking out about depression and anxiety. I held a young woman’s hands while she cried because her anxiety was so intense and scary, and I promised her that she would be okay. I was moved by her bravery, and inspired by her courage. I met some families who were all geeking out about different things at the convention, from Star Trek to My Little Pony to LEGO to Star Wars, and happily sharing in each other’s joy. I was honored to be part of all of these experiences, and grateful to have them.
But there is one meeting that stands out, that moved me so much, I’ve been struggling to find the right words to recount it. On Saturday, a young woman walked up to my table with her husband and her two children. She handed me a typed letter and told me that she knew she wouldn’t be able to get through what she wanted to say to me, and would I please read it.
I unfolded it, and read her story. When she was a young girl, she had a serious complication due to her Lupus, and her doctors told her that she would never walk again. She had a photo of me, though, that she took with her to physical therapy every day, and the therapists would hold it up for her and encourage her to walk toward it — toward me — while she recovered. She made a promise to herself, she said, that she would walk again some day, and if I was ever in her town, she would walk up to meet me. At the end of her letter, she thanked me for being there, so she could *walk* to meet me.
I looked up at her through tears, and she looked back at me through her own. I stood up, walked around my table, and put about fifteen feet between us. I held my arms open, and asked her to walk over to me. She began to cry, and slowly, confidently closed the distance between us. I embraced her, and we stood there for a minute, surrounded by thousands of people who had no idea what was going on, and cried together.
“I’m so proud of you,” I said, quietly, “and I am so honored.”
We wiped the tears away, and I sat back down to sign a photo for her. I looked at her young children. “Your mom is remarkable,” I said, “and I know you don’t get it, because she’s, like your mom? But you have to trust me: she is.”
The kids nodded, and I could tell that they were a little freaked out by the emotion of the thing, even if they didn’t understand it. They looked at their father, who said, “Mommy’s okay. Mommy’s okay.” That made me tear up again. Mommy was okay, and she is a remarkable woman who defied the odds and her doctors, and *walked* up to meet me. I’m still overwhelmed when I think about what that means, and how I was part of it.
Okay. While I compose myself, here are some pictures from the final day of MegaCon 2013:
I was pretty geeked out by this awesome AWESOME-O cosplay.
I’ve forgotten this young woman’s name, but she drew an incredible Wilthulu for me.
Another remarkable artist who’s name has gone out of my head (my brain rotates those logs pretty quickly). She drew this fantastic picture of the TNG cast with Q, and gave me a copy of it. I really, really love it when people get excited and make things, and I love that Star Trek is something that inspires that so frequently.
Chris Hamer drew this commission for a couple, who asked me to sign it for them.
How incredibly cute is this Borderlands 2 Cosplay?! I just love the little muscles his mom drew on his shirt.
Fix-It Felix and Vanellope Von Schweetz cosplay! How adorable are they together?
Last one: it’s me and my space mom, Gates McFadden!
Gates has a wonderful theatre here in Los Angeles (Atwater Village, to be precise). Her theatre’s tumblr is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen: Gates has a Doctor Crusher action figure that she takes all over the place and puts into darkly comic situations which are photographed and captioned. The individual images are hilarious, but when they are taken as a whole, they tell a story that … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you.
Seriously, check it out, and tell your friends.
MegaCon was really great. I had a good time on my panel Saturday morning, where I told some jokes and did a Q&A with about 3500 or so people in the room. The TNG panel Saturday night suffered from appallingly bad moderation (Patrick was interrupted during a wonderful story about working on the show when the moderator decided to make it all about him with an inappropriate unprofessional, and disrespectful Harlem Shake bit) but I think the group of us overcame it as best as we could.
I’m really glad I went to the convention. I got to visit with my TNG family again, knowing that the entire group of us probably won’t be in the same place like this for at least a year, and I got to share in some of the most wonderful and inspiring moments I’ve experienced in years. If you were there, thanks for making it a great weekend for me.