As a beloved (and much missed) former Newswire editor, Wil Wheaton needs little by way of introduction within the SuicideGirls community. A revered Star Trek: Next Generation alumni, after his role on the show came to an end, Wheaton turned to writing, carving a significant niche for himself as a geeks geek in the early blogosphere. He was also one of the first power users on Twitter, and is a prolific poster on G+ and now Facebook (a platform hed deliberately avoided until recently). Wheaton has also been working as an actor with increasing regularity of late, thanks to reoccurring roles in Eureka, Leverage, The Big Bang Theory, and Felicia Days hugely popular web-based show The Guild.
For his latest project, TableTop, Wheaton and Day have joined forces again. The new web series will be broadcast on Days Google-funded premium YouTube channel Geek & Sundry. This time Wheaton is also wearing the executive producer's hat, as well as appearing on camera as the shows host. TableTop aims to combine the aesthetic of celebrity poker with Wheatons passion for tabletop games something he hopes to instill in even the most reluctant of gamers via the show.
We caught up with Wheaton by phone to talk TableTop.
Nicole Powers: This new show sounds like a whole lot of fun.
Wil Wheaton: It was a lot of fun to do. It was a lot of work. We were cramming twenty episodes into two five day shoots, doing two games a day with four different players every time. But it was really, really awesome. Im super proud of it.
NP: It was sounding mid-sentence there like youd somehow managed to make playing games seem like a chore.
WW: Well, you know, production of a television show is not something that just happens. A lot of people have to work together with a whole lot of planning. I was involved in this show at a level that Ive never been involved in a show before because I was the executive producer. I was responsible for a lot of important pre-production decisions. Im still doing post-production work. I was talking to my friend about it the other day. I was hosting the show, I was playing a game, I was making sure that all of the guests were happy, and then I was running around making sure that we were on schedule and that things were looking good. Ultimately we have to make something that is compelling to an audience. It needs to be fun, it cant be too long, and it just needs to flow together really well. I didnt realize how much work that was going to be.
NP: You seem to be taking the concept of a YouTube video cast to the next level. This is no webcam production.
WW: Yeah, this is not a thing where we sat down to play a game and just turned a camera on. We had I think six cameras. We have three full time editors working on the show. We put together something that would completely fly on broadcast television. Were just choosing to put it on the internet instead because Felicia Day and I believe that thats really the future of people watching shows.
NP: I understand that longer format content is actually the direction YouTube is going in businesses-wise.
WW: Yeah. When we were originally looking at the show we thought we would aim for each episode to be an hour. Then it turned out that an hour is just way too long to watch people play games. So we instead decided to make it roughly a half an hour, but instead of trying to fit into the time frames that network television demands, which is 22 or 41 minutes, we aimed for about 30. Some of them are a little bit longer and some are a little bit shorter depending on what the content demanded.
NP: You mentioned Felicia Day how did this show and the Geek & Sundry channel come about?
WW: Well, Felicia and I are extraordinarily close. Were very, very good friends. We worked together on The Guild, then we worked together on Eureka, and we wrote the Fawkes issue of The Guild comic together. We just work really well together and when she was going to pitch Google, when Google was doing their grants, she called me and she said, Do you want to do a show together? I didnt even have to think before I said yes. Shes so smart and shes so talented and shes so driven and she doesnt do something that is not going to be awesome. So I saw an opportunity to do some work together that wed both be real proud of that would be a whole lot of fun, and we just started throwing ideas around and thats where TableTop came from.
NP: So this level of production is made possible by Google funding?
WW: Right. Were one of the new YouTube premium channels. The way the premium channels work is Google...they had like a big block of money and they said, come pitch us what you want to do and some people are going to get what are effectively television networks but theyre called YouTube premium channels. Chris Hardwick has one, its called The Nerdist, and its a lot of his Nerdist oriented program. Felicias is Geek & Sundry and the shows on Geek & Sundry are TableTop and The Guild, Season Five. Paul and Storm have a show called LearningTown that nobody knows anything about yet, but oh my god, its brilliant. Its going to be so great. Dark Horse in Motion Comics will premiere on Geek & Sundry. Veronica Belmont has a podcast called Sword and Laser thats a fantasy sci-fi book club show. And then, Felicia does this thing called The Flog, which is sort of like a video blog of her going and doing these really weird and entertaining things. And then TableTop is part of it too.
NP: What makes a good game in real life isnt necessarily what makes a good game on TV. How did you go about selecting the games?
WW: Some of my favorite games wont work at all for television, because what makes them fun to play is the amount of silent mental strategy. Its sort of like poker before hold card cameras, when you just saw people kind of stare at each other. We had to choose really carefully. We needed games that were very fun to play, that would look good on camera, and I wanted to choose games that were not especially complicated. There are some games that are unbelievably complicated that are really fun to play but they take three hours to play. Even if we had time to film a three hour game, we arent going to be able to do that game justice when we edit the thing down to a half an hour. So we had to look for games that were going to photograph well, that were going to be a lot of fun to play. Games that the publishers would give us permission to do, which was not as easy as we thought it was going to be.
NP: Really?
WW: Well, the thing is, we had to go to publishers and say, listen, all we can do is tell you is were doing something awesome and we promise its going to be great for your game. Do we have permission to use it? We cant tell you anything else. I guess we couldve gone through the whole NDA thing, but you know, most of the game industry is run by people who love games and love gamers and we were telling them that were doing this thing that we think is just going to be great for our hobby. We were real lucky. A number of publishers got on board and helped us out. Then, when they found out what we were doing, they gave us games to give our players, which is awesome because people would leave TableTop with a bag full of games. Im still hearing from people who played on TableTop about how theyre still playing Settlers of Catan or theyre still playing Elder Sign, theyre playing Star Fluxx and they love it.
You know, I wrote on my blog that my ulterior motive with this show is to spread the joy of gaming. It is my favorite thing in the world. Of all the nerd things that I do and all the things that make me a geek, nothing is as important to me or brings me as much joy as gaming. Maybe comic books and video games are in second place, theyre like tied for second, but theyre 1,000 feet behind tabletop gaming. Being able to share that joy with the world by example, by showing what these games are like and how much fun we have playing them, Im hoping that I can show people that you dont need to be intimated by games. They might look complicated, but theyre really not, and gamers arent these weirdoes that popular media has portrayed us as being. I want people to see that getting together for a game night is just as normal as getting together to watch a movie or to play video games or to watch the big sports ball contest or whatever. Its just a thing that we do. If the response that Ive gotten in the last 24 hours is any indication, were going to spread the joy of gaming far and wide with every episode.
NP: Theres a kind of irony there because its cool to be a nerd now. A lot of people perceive computer games as cool. But, almost because of that, board games are seen as this old fashioned throwback and have become the unfashionable end of gaming. And I think, especially with the rise of social media and human interaction through computers, its actually become more important for people to play board games. Like you say, part of the strategy of a game is looking at someones face and figuring out whats going on in their head.
WW: Theres a social aspect to it thats so much fun too. When my friends and I get together for game dayI have a huge game library at my house, but my friends bring their own games weve all figured out who owns what games so theres not a lot of overlap. My friend Cal will bring a bag full of games, my friend Shane will bring a box full of games. Well play a game that takes an hour. Well play Settlers of Catan and then well stop and eat a little bit, and then well play Alhambra and then well play Battlestar Galactica, and then well play a few rounds of Zombie Dice. Its a thing that we do all day long, and if we did not have gaming as the excuse to get together, we wouldnt go hang out for a whole day. It just wouldnt happen. If I said to my friends, why dont you come over to my house for a BBQ, no one will show up. If I tell the exact same friends to come over at the exact same time to play tabletop games, then theyre all coming over. Its a wonderful social experience.
NP: I have to say Wil, you might just need to work on your BBQ skills.
WW: [laughs] I also think theres a little bit of a stigma attached to board games. I think theyre intimidating and theres this fear that if you havent been playing all along that youre not going to be able to play with people. Theres absolutely a style of game thats like that. The American style war games, theyre very low luck, theyre very high strategy, theyre very high skill. They really reward people who have played hundreds of hours of those games. But theres an entire class of games, Euro-style board games or German-style board games where the concept of attacking another player is eliminated entirely or made so insignificant that its not even really part of the game. Everyone who plays a game is involved, in some cases theyre involved on every turn. Theres this one game called Dixit. Its a communications game with these beautiful cards where everyone is trying to tell a story with a card and youre trying to guess which card goes with which person. Every player in the game is involved on every single turn. Theres a game called Alhambra where everyone is involved in the game until the very last turn because of the way the scoring works. Theres a game called Revolution that does the same thing. Everybody is involved. Its not like these are games where youre just going to get your ass handed to you in the first three turns and then youre stuck in this game for an hour trying to catch up. Thats not fun. So we chose games for TableTop and I choose games in my regular life that are like that, that allow people to be involved all the time. Where everybody has a stake from the very beginning to the very end.
I think also, when you were talking about video games, theres this thing where you can sit in front of your TV alone in your house and sort of communicate with people through the handset in a game. I enjoy that with my friends. I do not enjoy that with strangers. I will not play video games with people I dont know because Im really tired of a 12-year old telling me what a big nigger fag I am. Im over it. Its a huge, huge problem in gaming and it makes video games with strangers suck and not fun. One of the big advantages that in-person tabletop gaming has is that people arent assholes when theyre playing games. You can be competitive in a game; If youre playing Magic or Dominion or if youre playing Small World, of course you can be competitive, but theres a difference between being competitive and being a competitive dick. And people who are competitive dicks just sort of get run out because they dont have that anonymity and the ability to just sort of turn off the game to hide behind. So its a wonderfully social activity that draws people who want to be with other people.
NP: Right. There is that fine line, you want people to care enough for it to be fun, but you dont want people, as you say, being out and out dicks.
WW: Yeah. One of the lessons that I taught my kids when I was younger and they were growing up was that you should never lose the joy of playing a game in pursuit of victory. That goes for not just board games. Thats for little league and for high school sports or anything like that. Its fine to do your very, very best, but if the only time youre really happy is when youre winning, then youre going to be unhappy a lot of the time, and Im afraid that youre going to make a lot of other people unhappy also.
NP: Thats one of the saddest things I hear when I ask people if they want to play a game: I dont want to play that because I never win. Thats not the point. You should enjoy the process.
WW: There are some games that I really dislike playing because Im just not very good at them. Thats why I dont like to play Scrabble with my wife. Shes insanely good at word games and Im really bad at word games, but we have a really good time playing Settlers of Catan together.
NP: What are your early game memories? What games did you play growing up that gave you the gaming bug?
WW: I was really into Risk when I was a little kid and actually played Risk with my parents. Then we got this old board game called the Mad Magazine Game, its been out of print for years. At this point, its been out of print for decades. And it is an absolutely amazing game that is humorous. Its Mad Magazine turned into a board game. My entire family played that game all the time. It was really a family activity. It wasnt until I was 12-years old and I started playing Dungeons & Dragons that I realized that there was this whole other world of board games that you couldnt find at K-Mart. That these were games that you had to go to a special game store and they used weird looking pieces. Back then, back in the 70s and the early 80s, the games were not as accessible as they are today. A lot of them involved a lot of math and a lot of charts and that appealed to the nerd in me. But as I got older, I just wanted to play games that were fun. I didnt want to play games where I needed to prove to everybody how good I was at math. Right around that time was when I discovered games like Illuminati and Car Wars and Diplomacy and Warhammer 40000. Just these games that allowed me to get together with my friends and create these entire realities in my imagination and in some cases carry them on from week to week and in other cases build these complicated things and destroy them at the end of the day.
NP: I noticed a lot of the games you picked combine role playing with a board that makes it more accessible.
WW: I love storytelling. I love the storytelling games. In fact, Im convinced that one of the reasons Im a successful writer and Ive had a successful acting career as an adult is because Dungeons & Dragons in 1982 when I got it for the first time encouraged me to use my imagination. And the people that I played with, we were all about using our imaginations to tell stories and create characters and to explore worlds that only existed in our minds. Even when I would play a tabletop war game like Warhammer Fantasy Battle or Warhammer 40000, theres a whole amazing world that exists in that game system. I was just telling somebody yesterday, I have not painted a 40K mini in 20 years and I certainly havent played the game in at least that long, but I still have my rule books because the world is just fantastic.
When I gave my PAX East Keynote I was talking about the difference between watching a movie where we can really enjoy it but have nothing to do with the outcome and playing either a video game or a tabletop game where what happens in the story is largely dependent on what the players do. Theres a whole group of indie role playing games now that are essentially collaborative storytelling games. Those are games like Fiasco and Inspectres and A Penny For My Thoughts, or The Dresden Files RPG. These are games that just encourage you to get together with your friends and build a world and explore it, and I really love that.
My wife was really intimidated by D&D. She saw me playing with our kids and we were playing Fourth Edition with all of the maps and minis. I enjoy Fourth Edition, but its more like a board game than a role playing game to me. But she was never interested in that, she just thought there was too much stuff going on. Then she watched me play Fiasco with Paul and Storm and my friend Ed whos a writer. We were playing a play set that takes place in Los Angeles in 1936 and we were doing noir movie voices and describing things in a noir movie and things like that. And she said, I didnt realize thats what that game was, I want to play that game with you. That was a huge thing for me. Ive been trying to get my wife to play RPGs with me for 16 years. She saw what fun we were having telling a story and just using our imaginations and she was immediately on board.
NP: I guess thats what youre hoping this TV show will do for a larger audience.
WW: Yeah. Im hoping this will remove some of the stigma associated with gamers. It will demystify the gaming hobby. My wife and I joke that were in a mixed marriage. Were in a nerd/normal mixed marriage and it will give couples like us an opportunity for the nerd to sit down with the normal and go, Look, see this is why I love this, this is why its fun.
And its not just about gaming. We have a lot of really interesting people who are playing with us throughout this season. So even if someone is not necessarily a fan of a game like Dixit, if they like Leverage, they might want to watch Beth Riesgraf play a game and then, after watching the game, maybe they want to go and play it.
By lunch on the second day of production, we had played three games and our crew was going to the game library at lunch, getting games they had never played before and then breaking off into groups of four and five to play board games, because they saw how much fun we were having. When I saw that happening, I knew that we were going to be successful. That my goal of showing non-gamers why I love this, that that was a realistic, attainable goal.
NP: Which game was the biggest hit amongst the crew? Thats maybe a litmus test.
WW: They loved this game called Jungle Speed, which we actually cant play on TV because it moves so fast it doesnt really translate in television. They loved Settlers of Catan. Dixit was really popular. Star Fluxx went over really, really well. Basically games that have a high luck but also a high strategy component, were the ones that seemed the most popular with the non-gamers.
NP: I always think the best games are the ones that have a good balance between luck and strategy, rather than relying too much on one or the other. I think thats because they mirror life, which is a mix of strategy and luck.
WW: YeahTheres a ratio; The more luck is involved the shorter a game needs to be. So, if youre playing a game like Zombie Dice, where youre rolling a lot of dice and the whole thing is basically random, that game is over in ten minutes and then you just play again, and thats great. But a game thats very, very high strategy like Puerto Rico, that game could take you hours. Theres almost no luck at all involved in that game. Its really just thinking ahead and out foxing your opponents I guess.
NP: So Season One is all in the can now, and it starts April 2nd. Is their a game for Season Two that you couldnt get for Season One, that youre maybe hoping that once people see the show youll be able to get?
WW: Were not even thinking about Season Two right now. I mean, Season One hasnt even started yet. I am very hopeful that we will have enough viewers, enough subscribers, and enough interest to warrant doing a second season. If that happens, then we will apply the things that we learned doing the first season and then well be able to make an even better show. I will say that if we have a second season, one of the things I really, really want to do is figure out some way that we can have some viewers come play on a couple of the shows. Either by doing some sort of charity raffle or something like that. Maybe for the Childs Play charity or the EFF. I would really love to do something like that. Its one of those things that people have already been asking me, how can I come play on your show, and it hasnt even aired yet.
Im actually getting nervous. I really like the show and Ive seen all 20 episodes. Ive seen them so many times that nothing surprises me in the them when I see them anymore because Ive been editing them and locking them down and approving the music and just doing a lot of work. Im so close to it and I have no objectivity. All I know is that every time an episode is over, I want to go and play that game and like five other games. It just makes me want to go and play games. So Im hoping that that reaction kind of comes out of the audience as well, because people are so excited for this now. When we were making the show, I just wanted to make a good show. I wasnt really worried about having a thing to live up to because we were just sort of challenging ourselves. Now people are so excited about it, I hope that we can meet their expectations.
NP: Well, Im really looking forward it. I have to say, friends of SuicideGirls, Destin Pfaff and Rachel Federoff from Millionaire Matchmaker, I just tweeted them about the show because I know theyre big board game fans and they were like, That sounds so fun! We want in! Its that kind of show. That was one tweet and they immediately got it.
WW: Thats awesome. A lot of people have said, "Wow, I cant believe this show doesnt exist already." Thats the kind of reaction were hoping for. Were hoping that people get real excited about it, and that people who love games can use this as a way to sit their friends down and say this is why we love it, now lets go play.
TableTop premieres on YouTube.com/GeekandSundry on April 2, 2012. For more information visit GeekandSundry.com/Tabletop and follow @GeekandSundry. To find out more about the games mentioned in this interview visit BoardGameGeek.com.
For his latest project, TableTop, Wheaton and Day have joined forces again. The new web series will be broadcast on Days Google-funded premium YouTube channel Geek & Sundry. This time Wheaton is also wearing the executive producer's hat, as well as appearing on camera as the shows host. TableTop aims to combine the aesthetic of celebrity poker with Wheatons passion for tabletop games something he hopes to instill in even the most reluctant of gamers via the show.
We caught up with Wheaton by phone to talk TableTop.
Nicole Powers: This new show sounds like a whole lot of fun.
Wil Wheaton: It was a lot of fun to do. It was a lot of work. We were cramming twenty episodes into two five day shoots, doing two games a day with four different players every time. But it was really, really awesome. Im super proud of it.
NP: It was sounding mid-sentence there like youd somehow managed to make playing games seem like a chore.
WW: Well, you know, production of a television show is not something that just happens. A lot of people have to work together with a whole lot of planning. I was involved in this show at a level that Ive never been involved in a show before because I was the executive producer. I was responsible for a lot of important pre-production decisions. Im still doing post-production work. I was talking to my friend about it the other day. I was hosting the show, I was playing a game, I was making sure that all of the guests were happy, and then I was running around making sure that we were on schedule and that things were looking good. Ultimately we have to make something that is compelling to an audience. It needs to be fun, it cant be too long, and it just needs to flow together really well. I didnt realize how much work that was going to be.
NP: You seem to be taking the concept of a YouTube video cast to the next level. This is no webcam production.
WW: Yeah, this is not a thing where we sat down to play a game and just turned a camera on. We had I think six cameras. We have three full time editors working on the show. We put together something that would completely fly on broadcast television. Were just choosing to put it on the internet instead because Felicia Day and I believe that thats really the future of people watching shows.
NP: I understand that longer format content is actually the direction YouTube is going in businesses-wise.
WW: Yeah. When we were originally looking at the show we thought we would aim for each episode to be an hour. Then it turned out that an hour is just way too long to watch people play games. So we instead decided to make it roughly a half an hour, but instead of trying to fit into the time frames that network television demands, which is 22 or 41 minutes, we aimed for about 30. Some of them are a little bit longer and some are a little bit shorter depending on what the content demanded.
NP: You mentioned Felicia Day how did this show and the Geek & Sundry channel come about?
WW: Well, Felicia and I are extraordinarily close. Were very, very good friends. We worked together on The Guild, then we worked together on Eureka, and we wrote the Fawkes issue of The Guild comic together. We just work really well together and when she was going to pitch Google, when Google was doing their grants, she called me and she said, Do you want to do a show together? I didnt even have to think before I said yes. Shes so smart and shes so talented and shes so driven and she doesnt do something that is not going to be awesome. So I saw an opportunity to do some work together that wed both be real proud of that would be a whole lot of fun, and we just started throwing ideas around and thats where TableTop came from.
NP: So this level of production is made possible by Google funding?
WW: Right. Were one of the new YouTube premium channels. The way the premium channels work is Google...they had like a big block of money and they said, come pitch us what you want to do and some people are going to get what are effectively television networks but theyre called YouTube premium channels. Chris Hardwick has one, its called The Nerdist, and its a lot of his Nerdist oriented program. Felicias is Geek & Sundry and the shows on Geek & Sundry are TableTop and The Guild, Season Five. Paul and Storm have a show called LearningTown that nobody knows anything about yet, but oh my god, its brilliant. Its going to be so great. Dark Horse in Motion Comics will premiere on Geek & Sundry. Veronica Belmont has a podcast called Sword and Laser thats a fantasy sci-fi book club show. And then, Felicia does this thing called The Flog, which is sort of like a video blog of her going and doing these really weird and entertaining things. And then TableTop is part of it too.
NP: What makes a good game in real life isnt necessarily what makes a good game on TV. How did you go about selecting the games?
WW: Some of my favorite games wont work at all for television, because what makes them fun to play is the amount of silent mental strategy. Its sort of like poker before hold card cameras, when you just saw people kind of stare at each other. We had to choose really carefully. We needed games that were very fun to play, that would look good on camera, and I wanted to choose games that were not especially complicated. There are some games that are unbelievably complicated that are really fun to play but they take three hours to play. Even if we had time to film a three hour game, we arent going to be able to do that game justice when we edit the thing down to a half an hour. So we had to look for games that were going to photograph well, that were going to be a lot of fun to play. Games that the publishers would give us permission to do, which was not as easy as we thought it was going to be.
NP: Really?
WW: Well, the thing is, we had to go to publishers and say, listen, all we can do is tell you is were doing something awesome and we promise its going to be great for your game. Do we have permission to use it? We cant tell you anything else. I guess we couldve gone through the whole NDA thing, but you know, most of the game industry is run by people who love games and love gamers and we were telling them that were doing this thing that we think is just going to be great for our hobby. We were real lucky. A number of publishers got on board and helped us out. Then, when they found out what we were doing, they gave us games to give our players, which is awesome because people would leave TableTop with a bag full of games. Im still hearing from people who played on TableTop about how theyre still playing Settlers of Catan or theyre still playing Elder Sign, theyre playing Star Fluxx and they love it.
You know, I wrote on my blog that my ulterior motive with this show is to spread the joy of gaming. It is my favorite thing in the world. Of all the nerd things that I do and all the things that make me a geek, nothing is as important to me or brings me as much joy as gaming. Maybe comic books and video games are in second place, theyre like tied for second, but theyre 1,000 feet behind tabletop gaming. Being able to share that joy with the world by example, by showing what these games are like and how much fun we have playing them, Im hoping that I can show people that you dont need to be intimated by games. They might look complicated, but theyre really not, and gamers arent these weirdoes that popular media has portrayed us as being. I want people to see that getting together for a game night is just as normal as getting together to watch a movie or to play video games or to watch the big sports ball contest or whatever. Its just a thing that we do. If the response that Ive gotten in the last 24 hours is any indication, were going to spread the joy of gaming far and wide with every episode.
NP: Theres a kind of irony there because its cool to be a nerd now. A lot of people perceive computer games as cool. But, almost because of that, board games are seen as this old fashioned throwback and have become the unfashionable end of gaming. And I think, especially with the rise of social media and human interaction through computers, its actually become more important for people to play board games. Like you say, part of the strategy of a game is looking at someones face and figuring out whats going on in their head.
WW: Theres a social aspect to it thats so much fun too. When my friends and I get together for game dayI have a huge game library at my house, but my friends bring their own games weve all figured out who owns what games so theres not a lot of overlap. My friend Cal will bring a bag full of games, my friend Shane will bring a box full of games. Well play a game that takes an hour. Well play Settlers of Catan and then well stop and eat a little bit, and then well play Alhambra and then well play Battlestar Galactica, and then well play a few rounds of Zombie Dice. Its a thing that we do all day long, and if we did not have gaming as the excuse to get together, we wouldnt go hang out for a whole day. It just wouldnt happen. If I said to my friends, why dont you come over to my house for a BBQ, no one will show up. If I tell the exact same friends to come over at the exact same time to play tabletop games, then theyre all coming over. Its a wonderful social experience.
NP: I have to say Wil, you might just need to work on your BBQ skills.
WW: [laughs] I also think theres a little bit of a stigma attached to board games. I think theyre intimidating and theres this fear that if you havent been playing all along that youre not going to be able to play with people. Theres absolutely a style of game thats like that. The American style war games, theyre very low luck, theyre very high strategy, theyre very high skill. They really reward people who have played hundreds of hours of those games. But theres an entire class of games, Euro-style board games or German-style board games where the concept of attacking another player is eliminated entirely or made so insignificant that its not even really part of the game. Everyone who plays a game is involved, in some cases theyre involved on every turn. Theres this one game called Dixit. Its a communications game with these beautiful cards where everyone is trying to tell a story with a card and youre trying to guess which card goes with which person. Every player in the game is involved on every single turn. Theres a game called Alhambra where everyone is involved in the game until the very last turn because of the way the scoring works. Theres a game called Revolution that does the same thing. Everybody is involved. Its not like these are games where youre just going to get your ass handed to you in the first three turns and then youre stuck in this game for an hour trying to catch up. Thats not fun. So we chose games for TableTop and I choose games in my regular life that are like that, that allow people to be involved all the time. Where everybody has a stake from the very beginning to the very end.
I think also, when you were talking about video games, theres this thing where you can sit in front of your TV alone in your house and sort of communicate with people through the handset in a game. I enjoy that with my friends. I do not enjoy that with strangers. I will not play video games with people I dont know because Im really tired of a 12-year old telling me what a big nigger fag I am. Im over it. Its a huge, huge problem in gaming and it makes video games with strangers suck and not fun. One of the big advantages that in-person tabletop gaming has is that people arent assholes when theyre playing games. You can be competitive in a game; If youre playing Magic or Dominion or if youre playing Small World, of course you can be competitive, but theres a difference between being competitive and being a competitive dick. And people who are competitive dicks just sort of get run out because they dont have that anonymity and the ability to just sort of turn off the game to hide behind. So its a wonderfully social activity that draws people who want to be with other people.
NP: Right. There is that fine line, you want people to care enough for it to be fun, but you dont want people, as you say, being out and out dicks.
WW: Yeah. One of the lessons that I taught my kids when I was younger and they were growing up was that you should never lose the joy of playing a game in pursuit of victory. That goes for not just board games. Thats for little league and for high school sports or anything like that. Its fine to do your very, very best, but if the only time youre really happy is when youre winning, then youre going to be unhappy a lot of the time, and Im afraid that youre going to make a lot of other people unhappy also.
NP: Thats one of the saddest things I hear when I ask people if they want to play a game: I dont want to play that because I never win. Thats not the point. You should enjoy the process.
WW: There are some games that I really dislike playing because Im just not very good at them. Thats why I dont like to play Scrabble with my wife. Shes insanely good at word games and Im really bad at word games, but we have a really good time playing Settlers of Catan together.
NP: What are your early game memories? What games did you play growing up that gave you the gaming bug?
WW: I was really into Risk when I was a little kid and actually played Risk with my parents. Then we got this old board game called the Mad Magazine Game, its been out of print for years. At this point, its been out of print for decades. And it is an absolutely amazing game that is humorous. Its Mad Magazine turned into a board game. My entire family played that game all the time. It was really a family activity. It wasnt until I was 12-years old and I started playing Dungeons & Dragons that I realized that there was this whole other world of board games that you couldnt find at K-Mart. That these were games that you had to go to a special game store and they used weird looking pieces. Back then, back in the 70s and the early 80s, the games were not as accessible as they are today. A lot of them involved a lot of math and a lot of charts and that appealed to the nerd in me. But as I got older, I just wanted to play games that were fun. I didnt want to play games where I needed to prove to everybody how good I was at math. Right around that time was when I discovered games like Illuminati and Car Wars and Diplomacy and Warhammer 40000. Just these games that allowed me to get together with my friends and create these entire realities in my imagination and in some cases carry them on from week to week and in other cases build these complicated things and destroy them at the end of the day.
NP: I noticed a lot of the games you picked combine role playing with a board that makes it more accessible.
WW: I love storytelling. I love the storytelling games. In fact, Im convinced that one of the reasons Im a successful writer and Ive had a successful acting career as an adult is because Dungeons & Dragons in 1982 when I got it for the first time encouraged me to use my imagination. And the people that I played with, we were all about using our imaginations to tell stories and create characters and to explore worlds that only existed in our minds. Even when I would play a tabletop war game like Warhammer Fantasy Battle or Warhammer 40000, theres a whole amazing world that exists in that game system. I was just telling somebody yesterday, I have not painted a 40K mini in 20 years and I certainly havent played the game in at least that long, but I still have my rule books because the world is just fantastic.
When I gave my PAX East Keynote I was talking about the difference between watching a movie where we can really enjoy it but have nothing to do with the outcome and playing either a video game or a tabletop game where what happens in the story is largely dependent on what the players do. Theres a whole group of indie role playing games now that are essentially collaborative storytelling games. Those are games like Fiasco and Inspectres and A Penny For My Thoughts, or The Dresden Files RPG. These are games that just encourage you to get together with your friends and build a world and explore it, and I really love that.
My wife was really intimidated by D&D. She saw me playing with our kids and we were playing Fourth Edition with all of the maps and minis. I enjoy Fourth Edition, but its more like a board game than a role playing game to me. But she was never interested in that, she just thought there was too much stuff going on. Then she watched me play Fiasco with Paul and Storm and my friend Ed whos a writer. We were playing a play set that takes place in Los Angeles in 1936 and we were doing noir movie voices and describing things in a noir movie and things like that. And she said, I didnt realize thats what that game was, I want to play that game with you. That was a huge thing for me. Ive been trying to get my wife to play RPGs with me for 16 years. She saw what fun we were having telling a story and just using our imaginations and she was immediately on board.
NP: I guess thats what youre hoping this TV show will do for a larger audience.
WW: Yeah. Im hoping this will remove some of the stigma associated with gamers. It will demystify the gaming hobby. My wife and I joke that were in a mixed marriage. Were in a nerd/normal mixed marriage and it will give couples like us an opportunity for the nerd to sit down with the normal and go, Look, see this is why I love this, this is why its fun.
And its not just about gaming. We have a lot of really interesting people who are playing with us throughout this season. So even if someone is not necessarily a fan of a game like Dixit, if they like Leverage, they might want to watch Beth Riesgraf play a game and then, after watching the game, maybe they want to go and play it.
By lunch on the second day of production, we had played three games and our crew was going to the game library at lunch, getting games they had never played before and then breaking off into groups of four and five to play board games, because they saw how much fun we were having. When I saw that happening, I knew that we were going to be successful. That my goal of showing non-gamers why I love this, that that was a realistic, attainable goal.
NP: Which game was the biggest hit amongst the crew? Thats maybe a litmus test.
WW: They loved this game called Jungle Speed, which we actually cant play on TV because it moves so fast it doesnt really translate in television. They loved Settlers of Catan. Dixit was really popular. Star Fluxx went over really, really well. Basically games that have a high luck but also a high strategy component, were the ones that seemed the most popular with the non-gamers.
NP: I always think the best games are the ones that have a good balance between luck and strategy, rather than relying too much on one or the other. I think thats because they mirror life, which is a mix of strategy and luck.
WW: YeahTheres a ratio; The more luck is involved the shorter a game needs to be. So, if youre playing a game like Zombie Dice, where youre rolling a lot of dice and the whole thing is basically random, that game is over in ten minutes and then you just play again, and thats great. But a game thats very, very high strategy like Puerto Rico, that game could take you hours. Theres almost no luck at all involved in that game. Its really just thinking ahead and out foxing your opponents I guess.
NP: So Season One is all in the can now, and it starts April 2nd. Is their a game for Season Two that you couldnt get for Season One, that youre maybe hoping that once people see the show youll be able to get?
WW: Were not even thinking about Season Two right now. I mean, Season One hasnt even started yet. I am very hopeful that we will have enough viewers, enough subscribers, and enough interest to warrant doing a second season. If that happens, then we will apply the things that we learned doing the first season and then well be able to make an even better show. I will say that if we have a second season, one of the things I really, really want to do is figure out some way that we can have some viewers come play on a couple of the shows. Either by doing some sort of charity raffle or something like that. Maybe for the Childs Play charity or the EFF. I would really love to do something like that. Its one of those things that people have already been asking me, how can I come play on your show, and it hasnt even aired yet.
Im actually getting nervous. I really like the show and Ive seen all 20 episodes. Ive seen them so many times that nothing surprises me in the them when I see them anymore because Ive been editing them and locking them down and approving the music and just doing a lot of work. Im so close to it and I have no objectivity. All I know is that every time an episode is over, I want to go and play that game and like five other games. It just makes me want to go and play games. So Im hoping that that reaction kind of comes out of the audience as well, because people are so excited for this now. When we were making the show, I just wanted to make a good show. I wasnt really worried about having a thing to live up to because we were just sort of challenging ourselves. Now people are so excited about it, I hope that we can meet their expectations.
NP: Well, Im really looking forward it. I have to say, friends of SuicideGirls, Destin Pfaff and Rachel Federoff from Millionaire Matchmaker, I just tweeted them about the show because I know theyre big board game fans and they were like, That sounds so fun! We want in! Its that kind of show. That was one tweet and they immediately got it.
WW: Thats awesome. A lot of people have said, "Wow, I cant believe this show doesnt exist already." Thats the kind of reaction were hoping for. Were hoping that people get real excited about it, and that people who love games can use this as a way to sit their friends down and say this is why we love it, now lets go play.
TableTop premieres on YouTube.com/GeekandSundry on April 2, 2012. For more information visit GeekandSundry.com/Tabletop and follow @GeekandSundry. To find out more about the games mentioned in this interview visit BoardGameGeek.com.