Five Games I Think You're Going To Enjoy

7

So I talked with Esquire when I was in New York to promote the Newcastle scotch ale, and the interviewer asked me about board games.

Here's five games that I love, that I think you will also love, but before you read the article, I want to address two things in it.

1. The spelling is messed up in a lot of places. I mention this because this seems to happen fairly frequently, and it drives me crazy. Someone needs to be editing these online magazine posts for grammar and spelling, because they are replacing print magazines, and no print magazine would ever go to the newsstand with the types of errors I am seeing regularly in these publications.

2. The author asserts that, "Like Chris Hardwick and Patton Oswalt, Wheaton has risen up the celebrity food chain in recent years by tapping into the nerd demo."

I take issue with this framing, because it sounds like I identified a demo, then cynically tapped into it by pandering to that demo. The fact is, I've always been interested in things that are considered nerdy, and rather than "tapping into the nerd demo" as some calculated strategy, I've just been myself, celebrated and shared the things that I love, and since those things happen to be things that self-described nerds love, I've attracted that demographic to my work.

Let me be very, very clear: I reject the notion of a "celebrity food chain" and even if I didn't, I wouldn't care where I am on it. I love to make things, I love to share those things, and I love to geek out about not only the things I've made, but the things that have inspired me to make them.

I don't think the author intended anything malicious with his framing, and I suspect that Esquire's readership *does* care about things like the "celebrity food chain", but I don't, and I wanted to be clear about that.

Now, with that out of the way, please enjoy.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/wil-wheaton-board-games

big_j:
Interesting... I imagine that to a lot of their readers we do look like some new unique demographic to be tapped. It seems only natural for them to try to associate their social structure to any unknown entity in an attempt to identify and bring it into their comfort zone. 
shawntloe:
I agree that the author probably didn't intend to be malicious, but rather intended to sound plugged into the "nerd culture." I can't speak for Esquire, but I did work as an editor at an online publication (a much bigger one than Esquire in terms of traffic) and it damn near killed me... and a couple other co-workers. We tirelessly worked to make the articles as grammatically correct as possible, as well as coming up with interesting content and tracking the metrics, but the pace at which we were expected to work was mind-blowing; at one point I was editing 20-25 articles a day, each ranging from 400-1,600 words. That's insane when you consider that the accepted word count on a manuscript page is 250. The bullying we received from our editor in chief (and I know this wasn't a figment of my imagination because the whole editorial team felt it) is a completely different story. One of my former co-workers from that time is currently writing a book about it... names changed, of course. Rant over... sorry.

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