WWdN: In Exile

one of my favorite moments from PAX East

This is what happens when Paul and Storm and I Get Excited And Make Things:

I forget precisely how this whole thing came together, but I remember Paul showing me the video, which prompted some sort of "this is the most amazing thing I've seen since the last time I said that" response from me. He and Storm and I ended up talking about how we wanted to do something like this for w00tstock, then realizing that, duh, PAX was just around the corner.

Storm wrote up the choreography, Paul did the graphics and bought the suits (for a total of $18), and I picked up the wigs. We rehearsed the whole thing about four times in the hour before we went out on stage, and I was really worried that I would screw it up, because I am not so much with the "staying on time when you're dancing" thing.

I love that you can hear the people around the cameraman in this video sort of go through stages from WTF to OMG to LOL. When we finished it, I got the sense that half the audience got the reference, half didn't, but they were all entertained by it.

I don't know if we'll ever do this again, because a huge part of it being amusing is not knowing that it's coming, but it was insanely fun, and I'm glad we took the risk. I don't know how we'll top this at Prime, so I guess I'll be down in the lab working on something.

in which the case for buying an iPad is almost made

When Apple announced the iPad, I was so unimpressed and bored with it, I couldn't even muster a "meh." It seemed to solve a problem that didn't exist, and while I kept waiting for Apple to make the case for it, I don't think they ever did.

I mean, if I'm going to spend five hundred fucking dollars on a device, the company had better make a very compelling case for why I need it. They should also not tie it into the worst mobile service provider in the history of known space, but I didn't even get that far on the decision tree, on account of it costing five hundred fucking dollars and just being a big iPod Touch.

I'm not knocking anyone who thinks it's awesome and shiny and a must-have precious, I'm just saying that at the moment, the iPad (oh, what a truly unfortunate name) isn't for me.

However, I saw an article this morning that made the first move toward a compelling case for the iPad: boardgames. I'm not talking about checkers and chess or even Monopoly ... I'm talking Ogre, Car Wars, Settlers, Battlelore, Talisman, Arkham Horror, Dungeon ... I think you get my drift.

It would be incredible to play boardgames that look like boardgames on a tablet device. You know that awesome Carcassonne game on Xbox Live? Like that. Imagine how awesome it would be to play Car Wars on a tablet: it would look just like the Deluxe Edition, with counters and a map grid and everything, but all the math and DCs would be done by the computer - unless you really wanted to overlay a turn key, I guess. You'd never have to worry about the dog crashing into the table and knocking your vehicles around, you could play against an AI, and you could flip over to another window to go shopping at Uncle Albert's, all the way back (or, uh, forward) to the fantastic 2037 catalog.

If I could take books, and movies, and boardgames I love with me when I went on trips (even if it was just a commuter train trip for an hour) then I would have to make a substantially more difficult saving throw versus WANT. Right now, I just have to roll a positive number, with a +20 bonus and no chance of critical failure.

in which wil feels homesick

One of the themes of my PAX keynote was Welcome Home, which everyone who had been to a PAX before could understand. For the first timers, though, I wanted to help them understand exactly why it is we say that, so I said:

All of the things that make us weird and strange in the real world? Those things that people tease us for loving, those things that we seem to care about more than everyone else at work or school? Those things make us who we are, and when we’re at PAX, we don’t have to hide them or explain them or justify them to anyone; instead, we celebrate and share them.

We have come here this weekend, and we will go to PAX Prime in Seattle in August, and we will be back here in a year, and back there next year, and the year after, and the year after that, because just playing games isn’t nearly as fun as playing them – together – surrounded by thousands of people who love them as much as you do. The next 72 hours are going to go by faster than you realize, so make sure you stop and look around a few times every day and appreciate this time. It will be over before you know it. 

I'm glad I took my own advice, because the weekend flew by and was over before I knew it. I'm truly grateful that I carved out some time for myself, and spent nearly all of it playing in the classic arcade and classic console rooms. I even played 4-player Warlords on Atari for the first time ever (2-player being the best we could do in the 80s, since nobody I knew had 4 paddle controllers - well, two controllers, since ... aw, forget it. If you know what I mean, I don't have to explain it to you and if you don't, it's not that important.) and made it farther in Dragon's Lair than I think I ever did when I was a kid.

I was completely exhausted by the end of the day on Sunday - but not sick! HA! HA! I WIN AT NOT GETTING SICK AT PAX! - and as I sat on my bed in the hotel, zoning out at something stupid on television while my HP and Manna bars slowly climbed out of the red, I began to feel a familiar sense of ennui. I feel this way every time a PAX is over: a sense of sadness and loss that I've never really been able to identify more eloquently than "post-PAX blues." A fellow PAX attendee e-mailed me this morning, though, and summed up the feeling in one word: Homesickness. I'm home, yet I feel homesick. I know that may sound weird, but it perfectly sums up how I feel today.

I spent a lot of this weekend feeling grateful, and that feeling continues today: I'm grateful for my friendly local game shop, I'm grateful for my game group, and I'm especially grateful that I only have to wait about 3700 hours for PAX Prime, instead of the usual 8760. 

Uh, not that I'm counting down, or anything. (Except that I am.)

greetings from the future (and 38000 feet), with a quick story from PAX

I'm posting this from an airplane that is currently 37966 feet above Port Stanley, Ontario. It's -78 Fahrenheit about 7 feet from where I'm sitting.

And I am currently on the internet, while my position is updated on Google Maps in front of me in almost real time.

There's just enough turbulence to be annoying, but not enough to be upsetting or frightening. It should stop in in about 15 minutes, if I am reading the map I have from Weather Underground in another tab correctly. A small child a few rows behind me is having a full-on tantrum. I feel really terrible for her parents, who are doing everything they can to calm her down. I am very grateful for noise-cancelling headphones.

Now we are over Detroit. Hi Detroit, sorry I keep missing Penguicon.

This is the first time I've flown with in-flight internet, and while I totally understand that a lot of people take this completely for granted, it's pretty awesome to me that I can do this. You see, I remember a time when our headsets were nothing more than plastic tubes with uncomfortable foam cylinders on the ends. We paid up to $4 to use them, and we watched the most banal and idiotic programming ever, because it was all we had. I remember airlines switching to headsets that were deliberately incompatible with our Walkman (remember those?) headsets, so they could continue to charge us outrageous fees to be "entertained" in-flight.

The captain just turned off the seatbelt sign, earlier than I expected. (In my defense, I was estimating my position.) My Weather Underground map says that the flight should be smooth until we get over the Colorado/Nebraska border. When I was a kid, turbulence freaked me out. When I was a teenager, and understood what caused it and how planes were designed to handle it, it stopped freaking me out, but I always wanted to know about how long it would last. It's was easier to deal with something like that when I knew it would eventually be over. It blows my mind that I can not only be online, but I can access a map to find out that information for myself.

Behind the Google Map, I was listening - live - to The Rachel Maddow Show until it ended. now I'm watching Vanguard (probably the greatest investigative journalism show on TV today) on Current TV. Anne was watching a rerun of The Big Bang Theory next to me, and now she's channel surfing.

We're over Lansing, Michigan, right now. Someone with math skills may be able to figure out how fast I'm writing this.

I know it's not a big deal to a lot of people, but the fact that we can do this brings me as much joy and excitement as being able to carry a mobile version of the Internet in my pocket. I was so excited, the very first thing I did once I got connected was tell Twitter, "I don't know what's more amazing to me: that I can say, "hey, I'm online from the airplane," or that I can say it to 1.6M people at once."

All of this is prelude to something I really wanted to post about, which is in itself a prelude to what I imagine will be a fairly lengthy post about PAX...

Last night, I joined Scott Kurtz, his awesome former intern Mary, and Kris Straub in the lobby bar for a quick Guinness. We didn't get to see each other very much during PAX (I almost reflexively wrote that #PAX) so it was our only chance to catch up since we last saw each other. 

The lobby was filled with gamers, playing all sorts of games: Magic, Dominion, Settlers, a euro board game I didn't get close enough to positively identify, but could recognize from the scoring track.

After I'd finished my Guinness (about 5 rings, I guess, for those of you who know what that means; it was the end of the con, after all) a guy who I figured was in his early thirties stopped me on my way back up to my room. He pointed to the guy next to him, who had some card games in his hands, including Zombie Fluxx and We Didn't Playtest This at All.

"Would you like to play with us?" He asked.

I told him I'd love to, but I was on my way upstairs to go to bed, because I'd had a really long day, and I was pretty close to dead on my feet.

He told me that he understood. Then, I saw this look in his eye that told me he wanted to say something more, so I waited a second, and he continued. I'm going to recall the things he said as best as I can:

"I've played games my whole life, but this is the first con I've been to," he said.

"That's awesome," I said. "You picked a great place to start, but I should warn you that you've been ruined for all future cons that aren't PAX."

He grinned and said, "I really wanted to play games with people, but I'm here by myself. I wouldn't have had the courage to find people to play with if I hadn't heard your keynote where you talked about playing games together. So I just came down here and found some people who were playing, and joined them."

I felt myself starting to tear up. This had been a theme throughout the weekend, because I lost count of the number of people who told me something I said in my keynote inspired or validated them in some way. Shit, I'm tearing up now just thinking about it (while I'm over Lilly Lake, Wisconsin, listening to South Park behind the map).

"So I started playing with them, and that guy over there," he pointed to a guy sitting on the other side of a nearby table, "has a weekly game night that he invited me to. I'm going to start playing with him.

"I just wanted to say thank you, because if I hadn't heard your keynote, I wouldn't have come down here to play games, and I wouldn't have met these guys. This is something I've wanted my whole life."

Something was seriously getting into both of my eyes. I would have hugged him, but I was doing my best to leave a PAX without getting sick, so I gave him the Iron Guard Salute and told him how much it meant to me that he took the time to share his story.

See, I try to speak as eloquently as I can about why I believe games and gaming are meaningful and important, and why PAX is awesome ... but it's never going to be as meaningful or as good an example as meeting someone who exemplifies those words.

I'll have much more to say about PAX when I get home and have time to reflect on the weekend, but now I'm thinking about watching something on-demand, just on principle ... or maybe I'll build an amazing downtempo playlist from the giant MP3 library, and listen to it while I play my DS. 

Whatever I do, I'll be doing it from the future, where I live, because I am one of the luckiest people in the world ... but I'm waiting until South Park is over, because this one (about Catcher in the Rye) is surprisingly funny. 

(For those of you who are keeping score at home and need closure, I'm now over West Liberty, Iowa.)

games are important. games matter. #PAX is where we come together to celebrate that.

The adrenaline and excitement from an incredible day at PAX East is finally wearing off, and I'm on my way to sleepy time, where I am a viking.

Before I go to bed, though, I wanted to share a little bit from my keynote today. This is excerpted from my speech:

Gaming is the foundation of the best friendships I’ve ever had, and it’s the mortar that has held my group of friends together for almost 25 years. 

We are all here today because we love playing games. Some of the happiest days of our lives would not exist without games and gaming. Games are important. Games matter. PAX is where we come together to celebrate that, and today, I’m going to talk about the power games have to inspire as well as entertain us.   

When you play a game - any game - you’re using your imagination to bring a world to life, and that’s truly special, because while all destruction is essentially the same, when you create something, it’s different every single time. When you create something together, you’re building bonds with your fellow gamers that could last for your entire lives. The Venn Diagram of my best friends, my gaming group, and people from high school I still hang out with is one perfect circle. I suspect that for many gamers of my generation, that’s equally true ... and I know that my kids will be saying the same thing in 20 years about people they’ve never met face to face, but interact with almost every day in an online game that will make Call of Duty look then like Pong looks today.

Andrew said that he was watching Twitter while I was giving the keynote, and the word he saw most frequently was "inspiring." He said the second most frequent word was "funny," so I'd say that, even though I initially thought I dragged a bit in the middle, everyone in the main theater (~4000!) got out of it what I hoped they would.

I'm having an amazing time here. Thank you to everyone at PAX East for being so awesome and kind to me. I can't wait to play games tomorrow!

the play's the thing

I spent most of the morning and afternoon rehearsing my speech, listening to how it sounds, and making sure it times out right. The old improviser in me even played New Choice a few times with some ad-libs that amused me so much, I ended up writing them into the text.

Writing this speech and preparing it have been the singular focus of my life for so long now (in linear time, it's only been 6 or 8 weeks, but in hyperfocused mental writing time it's been much, much longer than that) that I feel sort of adrift, now that it's finished, like I don't know what to do with myself.

This reminds me of something an acting teacher once told us near the end of a 10-week acting class.

He stood on the small stage where we did our scenes and leaned against a tall chair. "You guys are all here because you love performing," he said, "and you hope to beat the odds and make a living as actors."

He absently scratched at his beard. "If anyone told you that this would be easy, they lied to you. It isn't."

I knew this, because I took this class in my early twenties, when I felt like I was never going to be a successful actor (or anything) again.

He continued, "This class is almost over, and whether you choose to come back here and do more workshops or not, you should keep performing, whether it's in a 99-seat theater, or in a scene study workshop that meets once a week." He leaned forward, folded his arms across his chest, and lifted up one hand, extending his index finger. Over the course of the class I'd come to think of it as his I'm about to tell you something very important pose.

"Some of you will be lucky enough to have several auditions a week, and when you do, you'll start to feel overwhelmed by the preparation ... if you're doing it right, you should feel overwhelmed, because if you don't, you're not working hard enough. But sooner or later, you're going to consider dropping out of plays or stopping your workshops, and just focusing on the auditions. That makes sense, because you're getting to perform at auditions all the time, and we all know that nobody really goes to see live theater in Los Angles, right?" He pointed around the room as he said this, and let his palm fall open, like Hamlet contemplating Yorick, when he asked the question.

Some of the students murmured in agreement. Every last one of us would have been delighted to discover that we were so overwhelmed with auditionsNot enough time to perform because we're so overwhelmed with auditions?! This was a problem that all of us would have loved to have. 

The instructor shook his head, and folded his arms back around himself. He took a few small but dramatic steps - this was an acting class, after all - and faced us again from the other side of the stage.

"That's the worst thing you can do."

We all waited for him to elaborate, and after a very long few seconds, he did. "When you're performing in a theater or doing workshops, you're working with other actors, and you're doing it because you love the performance. You love the character, you love the story ... you love something about it enough to do the work for the sake of the work.

"When you're auditioning, though, you're not in a performance environment. You're never on a stage, and you're rarely in front of people who are fully engaged in what you're doing."

Many of the frustrating auditions I'd had around that time, where I felt like the people in the room were interested in everything but what I was doing, flashed though my mind.

"So if you make auditions the only place you get to perform, it will slowly but surely unravel you. Because you're not really performing, you're auditioning. Do you all follow me?"

All of us nodded in agreement. He spoke as deliberately as I'd ever heard him speak, punctuating almost each word by pointing his finger or waving his hand.

"You have to give yourself a place where you can perform for the sake of performing, and you have to go there every week. Think of athletes: they practice between games, and so should you."

He started to walk back to his desk at the foot of the stage, and then abruptly stopped. He whirled around and said, "You know you're actors because if you don't act, you feel like something is missing. Don't give an industry that doesn't care about that the same way you do control over when you do it."

It could easily have been a sales pitch to get us all back for more workshops, but it wasn't. It was a life pitch, from the same teacher who told us all that, if we hadn't already, we had to find something we loved, something that truly mattered to us, that wasn't acting. "You can't let acting consume your life," he said, "you can't let it be your life, because life experience is part of what makes great actors great. You have to live a full life, so you have something to bring to a character when you create it."

I don't know how many of you who read my blog are actors or creative types, but I hope you'll heed the advice that acting coach gave me, thirteen or so years ago, because I have, and it's made all the difference to me, both personally and professionately.

In which I finally finish writing my PAX East keynote

The last two months have featured sleepless nights, 10-hour work days, and constant battles with the voices of Self Doubt, You Suck, Why Did You Agree To Do This, You're Boring me Zoidberg, and They're All Going To Laugh At You.

But a little earlier, when I finally got to turn this:

 

into this:

 

I could tell all those voices to shut the hell up.

I know that this speech is going to be compared to the one I gave in 2007, and quite frankly, that scares the hell out of me. My 2007 keynote was probably the best speech I've ever written or delivered, and I don't think it can be equalled, much less topped, by anything I'm capable of writing at this moment in time. But things are different in 2010 than they were in 2007, so this is a different speech with different goals. I'm way too close to it right now to be objective, but given a chance to stand on its own, I think it's got some entertaining and inspiring stuff in it. I'm really excited to deliver it on Friday.

...

*blink*

*blink*

Holy fuck. I'm delivering this speech on Friday. Well, shit, now I'm terrified again.

(I'm sure people will ask, so: the "WW_AH_WW..." on the title is how Andrew and I track our revisions on each draft. As you can see, we spent a lot of time perfecting the first draft of this one.)

James Randi: "I'm gay."

James Randi says:

Well, here goes. I really resent the term, but I use it because it’s recognized and accepted.

I’m gay.

From some seventy years of personal experience, I can tell you that there’s not much “gay” about being homosexual. For the first twenty years of my life, I had to live in the shadows, in a culture that was — at least outwardly — totally hostile to any hint of that variation of life-style. 

[...]

Gradually, the general attitude that I’d perceived around me began to change, and presently I find that there has emerged a distinctly healthy acceptance of different social styles of living — except, of course, in cultures that live in constant and abject fear of divine retribution for infractions found in the various Holy Books… In another two decades, I’m confident that young people will find themselves in a vastly improved atmosphere of acceptance.

I hope he's right. I hope that, one day, we will live in a more tolerant and enlightened world, where people won’t feel like they have to keep their identity hidden from all the ignorant bigots who reflexively hate them. Until then, I applaud people like James Randi who have the courage to speak up, and the greatest sympathy for those who feel like they can’t.

The Fantastic Mister Fox is a cussin' great movie

Last night, Anne and I watched The Fantastic Mister Fox. I completely missed this movie when it was in theaters, and didn't know a single thing about it except that, according to our friends, I'd really like it.

About fifteen minutes into the movie I turned to her and said, "This is awesome. It's like Wes Anderson made a stop-motion movie."

...like I said, I didn't know a single thing about it, and for those of you who are like me, it was a Wes Anderson movie.

Anyway, I don't think it's available on DVD yet (we watched a screener), but when it is, I highly, highly recommend watching it. It's one of those movies that is entirely appropriate for children, with some humor for their parents that will fly harmlessly over their heads.

time keeps on slippin'...

As some of you know, for the last six weeks, I've been working night and day on my PAX Keynote, which I deliver in 176 hours. It's been a long and sometimes agonizing road but after intensely bouncing drafts back and forth with Andrew this week, I have a draft that I can begin polishing.

This means that, today, I'll be reading it aloud in my office so I can time it out, find places where I can move words around, maybe add a phrase, and maybe take something out if it doesn't sound quite right (for example, I changed a "didn't" to "did not", because the words around it obscured the n't just enough that it could confuse people who didn't - I mean, did not - hear it clearly; stuff like that.)

I don't own a stopwatch, so I grabbed my iPod Touch (I mean my iPad mini! HA! HA! HA!) and fired up the little stopwatch thingy that comes with it. Here's what I saw:

(Please forgive the crappy Blackberry photo; I don't have my "real" camera handy.) 

I guess I started it about 5710 hours ago, and forgot to press stop. Now I don't want to reset it, because it would be 237 days before it happened again. Also, this is probably only funny to me.

In other news: OMG my keynote speech for PAX East is so close to being finished!