Friends

In December of 2001, Anne I were really struggling financially. It had already been a pretty lousy year, as far as work went, and after September 11th, things only got worse. As Christmas got closer, it was clear that we simply couldn't afford to put many things under the tree for our kids, let alone each other. 

One night around the second weekend of December that year, Anne and I had a long talk about the impending holidays. We never wanted the holidays to be about stuff, anyway, so we used the opportunity to introduce the concept of "Little Christmas" to our kids. We told them that, contrary to what television told them, it wasn't about shopping and things, as much as it was about spending time with people you love (and music, and spiced cider, and walking through the neighborhood at night to look at all the pretty lights.) Little Christmas began as a financial necessity, but we discovered that putting the emphasis on the holiday "spirit" rather on the holiday "stuff" made us all happier, and we pretty much removed ourselves from the consumerism that bummed out Charlie Brown so much in 1965. 

Even though things eventually got better, we crossed a Rubicon that year, and we never went back. Instead of submerging ourselves in Christmas Crap, we got a few gifts for each other, but we always did some sort of cool thing together as a family, like a trip to the Grand Canyon, or a night out with my parents to see a play. The idea was that Christmas Crap usually gets old and dusty, but the memories we created doing something together would last for the rest of our lives, and that's a better gift to give or receive than anything we could get at the store.

This post From The Vault features a portion of a post I read on this week's Radio Free Burrito, about our 2006 Christmas trip to Julian, in San Diego County, which included a day at the San Diego Wild Animal Park with my brother, his wife, and my parents:

We stayed at the Wild Animal Park until it got dark. On the way out, Nolan came over to me and he said, "I'm really glad we came here today."

"So am I," I said.

"I wasn't all that excited when you told us what we were doing," he said, "but now I'm really glad we did this. I've had a lot of fun today."

"Yeah, your mom and I were a little bummed out that you weren't into doing this when we told you about it," I said, "but we were pretty sure you'd like it once you got here."

"Well, I just wanted to spend the weekend with my friends," he said, "because I'll be gone all next week and I won't get to see them."

"I get that," I said.

"But it was totally worth it to come down here. Thank you."

"I'm really glad you told me that, Nolan," I said.

He smiled, walked over to Anne, and told her the same thing. Then he told my mom.

Nolan is 15, chronologically and in every other sense, and I feel like I'm dealing with something from another planet more often than I'd like these days, so it really meant a lot to me that he made the effort to let the people who pulled the trip together know that he enjoyed it, instead of finding lots of reasons to be sullen and unhappy because . . . well, that's what teenagers do, if I remember correctly.

After dinner that night, we drove back up to Julian, and the rest of my family drove back to their hotel down in the valley. When we got back to the B&B, we put another fire in the stove and watched A Charlie Brown Christmas together. As much as I've loved that special my entire life, this was the first time I watched it and really felt its message about the meaning of Christmas. 

We're not religious, and we're not into the consumerism of the holidays, so it would be easy to feel like we're not part of the whole Christmas thing, but as we sat there, basked in television's warm glowing warming glow, and drank hot apple cider together, we were surrounded by the joy of the season.

Did you know that I used to write a weekly column called The Games of Our Lives for The AV Club? It was about classic arcade (and occasionally console) video games that were just far enough off the mainstream radar for Gen Xers to realize that they remembered playing or seeing them, even if they hadn't thought about them since the 80s.

I worked very hard to keep it funny, nostalgic, and even a little informative. Though I didn't always come up with heartbreaking works of staggering genius, I'm really happy with about 95% of the columns I turned in ... like this one for Satan's Hollow:

The flyer from Bally advertises "The hot new battle game that dares you to cross the blazing Bridge of Fire to do battle with the Master of Darkness-Satan of the Hollow!" After languishing for years in the obscurity of role-playing games, Satan finally crossed into the mainstream of arcades everywhere. Parents panicked as kids eagerly coughed up pocketfuls of quarters to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight.

Gameplay: It's 1982, so of course you have to enter Satan's Hollow in a spaceship. To pull this off, you build a bridge across a river of fire by picking up pieces from the left side of the screen and dropping them onto the right side of the screen. You have a shield that will protect you (for about .08 seconds) from the gargoyles and demons dropping World War II-style bombs. When the bridge is completed, you cross into the game's eponymous locale and face down Satan himself. If you avoid his magic pitchforks and destroy him, you won't save mankind from eternal damnation, but you will earn bonus points and an extra laser blaster for your space ship.

Before you complain that none of this makes sense, please remember that the number-one song of 1982 was "Centerfold" by J. Geils Band, and the number-one film was Tootsie.

Could be mistaken for: Galaxian, Dark Tower, Phoenix

Kids today may not like it because: Satan looks more like a sea monkey than like the Prince Of Darkness.

Kids today may like it because: Freaking your parents out because you're playing a game with Satan in it is always cool, whether it's 1982 or 2005.

Enduring contribution to gaming history: Doom wouldn't have been able to take players right into Hell in 1993 if Satan's Hollow hadn't opened the portal 11 years earlier. 

Every column had a different byline, which I tried very hard to make some kind of clever "nobody's going to get this, except for those few people who do and totally love it" joke: 

.mraf ynnuf eht, notaehW liW ot seilper rouy dnes esaelP .egassem terces eht dnuof ev'uoY !snoitalutargnoC

See what I did there? It's a game with SATAN in the title, so I put at BACKWARDS MESSAGE in the column. Ha! Ha! Ha! I am using the Internet!

I loved doing this column, and deliberately retired it while it was still going strong, so it didn't turn into [Pick some series that should have ended years ago while it was still funny. This is not a placeholder note to myself, it's a free option for you, dear reader. Merry Christmas.]

Yesterday, I decided that I'd reach into The Vault a few times this week, and reprint some holiday-related posts. 

While I combed through the WWdN archives, I came across this post, which I haven't thought about pretty much since I wrote it. It has nothing to do with the holidays, but I still like it. I'm reprinting it today so I can remember a time when I didn't feel so self conscious about my writing, could totally lose myself in a moment, and do my very best to fearlessly capture it in words.

We are under partly cloudy skies today here in Pasadena. All day long, the blue sky has been brilliant and beautiful. The few clouds that dot the sky are small and fluffy, blown at incredible speeds by the high altitude winds, and illuminated to a magnificently bright white by the sun.

About 20 minutes ago, the sun began to set, and I watched as it put silver linings behind cloud after cloud as it sank into the west. Shortly after the horizon took it away for another day, the sun did an amazing thing: it illuminated the only cloud in the sky, a monstrous one — several thousand feet cross, at least — which hung over my house. The cloud acted as a giant reflector, bouncing yellow, then orange, then red light down upon my neighborhood.

At first, the yellow light was beautiful, bringing out a brilliance in the lawns and leaves seldom seen in winter. Then, the orange light became a little creepy, casting the same muted color as sunlight filtered through the smoke of a brushfire.

When the light turned red, though, it was positively scary. The red glow that it washed over the Earth was straight out of the fires of Mount Doom.

As the light turned from orange to red, my mom called me, and asked me if it looked like the world was coming to an end over my house, too. I laughed, and told her that it did.

Then a Ring Wraith knocked on my door, and I politely hung up the phone.

Remember when Lord of the Rings ruled the world with a power and inevitability challenged and equalled only by frozen yogurt shops in the 80s? Those were some magical days, Precioussss. We loves them.

There are few picturebook-makers as cool as Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman, and their latest collaboration, Crazy Hair (Bloomsbury £11.99), for 3-6s, is wild. It’s about a father whose hair is so big it contains tigers, pirate ships and carousels. Distortions and magnifications make the images strange and dark, rivalling the text for energy and verve.

While you're out doing your last minute holiday shopping, you may happen upon a little device known as The Slap Chop. You may have seen it on TV, and you may have heard that it purports to: "Chop up vegetables, nuts, & fruits, quickly and easily" with just a few simple slaps. And who doesn't like slapping their food around into ever-smaller pieces?

Now, some of you may wonder if this gizmo actually fulfills all of the nearly-unbelievable claims it makes, thereby making it a worthwhile gift for that lucky person on your list who you've put off shopping for, and who already has as many Chia Pets as any single person could be expected to care for.

Well, Popular Mechanics says maybe not so much:

The Slap Chop produces inconsistent, indiscriminate chunks, foodstuffs wedge in its numerous nooks and crannies, and it consumes as much kitchen real estate as a coffee grinder. 

On the other hand...

Happy shopping, everyone.

No endorsement of the product mentioned should be assumed or implied. Use of Slap Chop does not automatically guarantee funky hip hop singing and dancing ability. In fact, you're probably better off spending your money on something else, and just watching the video over and over again, until you feel the tingling warmth of insanity spreading across your delicious brain.

The gaming industry, like the voiceover industry or the genre fiction industry is not very big, when you really get down to it. In fact, among creators, the overlap between "industry" and "community" makes almost a perfect circle. Everyone pretty much knows everyone else, and good news travels as quickly as bad.

Yesterday, one of the truly great people in the gaming industry, who I think we all believed had reached maximum character level, surprised us all and leveled up a little bit more:

John Kovalic's Dork Tower joins WIRED's GeekDad.

If you know of Dork Tower, then you’re already squee-ing in excitement right alongside us. If you don’t know what Dork Tower is, then either you’re about to add a new layer of happiness to the Photoshop composite of your life, or you’re slowly beginning to realize you didn’t click through to the Monkey Bites blog.

Dork Tower has, in its decade of life, existed as a standalone comic book, a featured comic in Dragon, Scrye and Games magazines, and one of the earliest regular webcomics online. Its creator, John Kovalic, is also the illustrator and co-creator of world-renown games Munchkin and Apples to Apples. But perhaps his greatest creation is his new daughter, whose existence has transformed him from a simple, Bruce Banner–like comics and game illustrator, into a hulking green(bay) GeekDad. Which is where we come in.

This is kind of like my favorite indie television show getting picked up by a major network. It's such a perfect match, I can't believe nobody ever thought of it before. You know those people who are so delighted to be a parent, they sort of jingle and glow and levitate off the ground with joy when they talk about their kids? That's John. You know those guys who you know you can speak to in the most obscure geek dialect, secure in the knowledge that they'll grok you? That's John.

Congratulations to John and GeekDad, and to all their individual readers who are about to discover an awesome new level of the dungeon to explore.

I've discovered that, unless I specifically set aside Geek Time for me, Wil Wheaton, I end up doing nothing but work. This isn't entirely bad, because most of the work I do is geek-related, but I eventually run out of HP, and I have to recharge. by doing some private geeky thing, like reading comics, playing a little Xbox, or getting together with my friends 

Think of it this way: reading a comic book gives me a little HP, like 1d4. Reading a graphic novel gives me 1d6+2. Settling in with a good book (Currently reading Spook Country) gives me 1d10, but I can't do anything else for several turns and have to save versus distractions at -2. Playing a video game gives me 1d8+1, unless it's Rock Band with my friends or family, which gives me 2d10+5.

In fact, doing any geeky thing with friends is an automatic additional d10, which is why I like to get together with my friends at least once a month to play hobby games. During these gatherings, I can usually count on going all the way back to my starting HP, and if I'm especially lucky, I'll gain 1d10 additional HP that is lost at a rate of about 1 point every two hours after we've all gone back to our regular lives.

(Incidentally, writing those three paragraphs gave me 1d6-2, in addition to the 3d6+10 I got earlier today when I got to be a voice actor for four hours.)

So recently, I had a bunch of friends over for a game day, and we played some games I loved so much, I wanted to share them with the rest of the class, in case some of you are dangerously low on HP and need some healing:

Dominion

This is a card game that plays like a CCG (think Magic: The Gathering) without requiring you to buy a bunch of booster packs and participate in the deck-building arms race that makes most CCGs a meta game of "who can spend the most on cards." BoardGameGeek says: 

In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can "buy" as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end.

Dominion is not a CCG, but the play of the game is similar to the construction and play of a CCG deck. The game comes with 500 cards. You select 10 of the 25 Kingdom card types to include in any given play -- leading to immense variety.

Dominion plays very fast, and is one of those games that you can play while drinking a beer (or three) and still play (mostly) competently. 

There are expansions, but I won't buy them on principle, because that path leads to the CCG stuff I'm trying to avoid or at least limit.

Revolution!

Steve Jackson Games is famous for putting out the classic RPG GURPS, irreverent card games like Munchkin and the Chez games, and war games like Ogre and Car Wars. This is the company's first offering that could be considered a Eurogame, and I absolutely love it. Quoth BGG:

In Revolution! players take advantage of the fluid political situation by secretly bidding for a number of characters, each yielding a combination of territory control, points (popular support) and more currency with which to bid next round. Players win by gaining the support of the people (the most points). Players can gain bonus points by controlling an area of the city at the end of the game. This game is for 3-4 players and takes 60 minutes to play.

What I love about Revolution! is the lack of one clear perfect strategy to win the game. In many respects, it's like poker: you win by playing against the other players as much (if not more) than you play the actual game. It's very simple to pick up (I'd say it takes about 5 minutes to teach) and really needs four players, though you can play with three.

Bonus soon-to-be-released SJ Games: Cthulhu Dice (I played this at RinCon and loved it) and Zombie Dice (which I haven't played, but looks like a whole lot of fun.)

Pandemic

I love cooperative games, where the players are working together against the game itself. Some games, like Shadows Over Camelot, toss the uncertainty of a traitor into the game, while others, like Arkham Horror, are so purely cooperative, they can even be played as solo games. Pandemic is a purely cooperative game that BGG describes thusly:

You are specialists at the CDC/Atlanta where you watch several virulent diseases break out simultaneously all over the world. The team mission is to prevent a world-wide pandemic outbreak, treating hotspots while researching cures for each of the four plagues before they get out of hand.

Players must plan their strategy to mesh their specialist's strengths before the diseases overwhelm the world. For example, the Operations Specialist can build research stations, which are needed to find cures for the diseases. The Scientist needs only 4 cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal 5. But the diseases are breaking out fast and time is running out: the team must try to stem the tide of infection in diseased areas while developing cures. If disease spreads uncontrolled, the players all lose. If they can cure all four diseases, they win.

This game looks and feels beautiful, and though it's probably the most complicated to learn on this list, it's not nearly as complicated as an RPG, a historical wargame, or understanding one of us geeks. You can adjust the level of difficulty (from easy to legendary) and if you get the expansion, On The Brink, you can add mutations and virulent strains of the various diseases, as well as a bioterrorist who is working against the other players. You rarely breeze through a game of Pandemic, and even though you start out sort of losing, victory is almost always decided by a razor-thin margin. 

Pandemic is so frakking hard to beat, it shouldn't be fun, but I have had more fun losing games of Pandemic than I've had winning a huge list of other games.

Small World 

Days of Wonder is probably best-known for games like Ticket To Ride and its sequels, Battlelore and its sequels, and Memoir '44 and its sequels. Small World is a very recent release from Days of Wonder, and I think it's one of the best games they've ever published. One more time, let's borrow from Board Game Geek:

Small World is inhabited by a zany cast of characters such as dwarves, wizards, amazons, giants, orcs and even humans; who use their troops to occupy territory and conquer adjacent lands in order to push the other races off the face of the earth.

Picking the right combination from the 14 different fantasy races and 20 unique special powers, players rush to expand their empires - often at the expense of weaker neighbors. Yet they must also know when to push their own over-extended civilization into decline and ride a new one to victory!

Okay, so that description doesn't really capture what's awesome about this game. Let me try to explain why I love it so much: first, it's a map conquest game that comes with different maps for different numbers of players, so you get a balanced game whether you're playing head-to-head or with three or four other friends. Second, the zany characters get different unique special powers every time you play, so there's no point in developing a strategy (or counter strategy) exclusively for Flying Amazons or Dragonmaster Ghouls, because you may not get to use it that often. Third, it employs an elegant scoring system that tends to keep the games close (are you sensing some commonality among the games I really like?). Fourth, it just looks beautiful. The counters and the boards feature great artwork, so it's easy to buy into the theme. Finally, it's a relatively quick game, which is important to a guy like me who doesn't have nearly enough time to play all the games he wants to play.

All of these games are suitable for ages 12 and up, with the exception of Pandemic, which I think is >just< a little to complex for the under-14 set.

Now that I've spent enough time on this post to have actually played one of these games, I'd like to close with three RPGs that I haven't played, but desperately want to play:

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay from Fantasy Flight
• Savage Worlds from Pinnacle
• Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin

Okay, now that I've regained some of my HP, I think I'm ready to go ahead and attempt the Drop Off Packages At The Post Office quest. If I don't come back, avenge my death and immortalize me in song.

Did I mention that Radio Free Burrito finally grew up and moved into its own URL at Radio Free Burrito dot Com?

You can get all 13 of the old Radio Free Burritos (which I've christened "the archives"), as well as two new shows (cleverly numbered 14 and 15) which were recently recorded by me, Wil Wheaton*.

My plan is to do a RFB every week in place of the Futurecast, until the Futurecast gets going again in a few months, but I'm not promising anything. Unless you want to bribe me with Burrito money, in which case I'll make it a top priority, with a giant warehouse and wooden crates and everything. No, seriously. I know a guy who can get me a giant warehouse for, like, cheap.

Yes, Virginia, there is an RSS feed for the Burrito, helpfully located at: feeds.feedburner.com/radiofreeburrito Yes, Virginia's shy roommate, you can subscribe to it in iTunes. No, Virginia's weird talking cat, I don't know if it's in the Zune Marketplace. Also, Virginia? I invited you over for Rock Band, and it's kind of a dick move that you brought your whole fuckin' apartment with you. And what's with all the questions? JEEZE!

Of course, if I've already mentioned this but the information fell victim to the history eraser button in my brain, you have my apologies.

*That's a callback I bet 99% of you won't get, so allow me to explain: a million years ago, I did a Classic Television Talk Show - I'm not sure why I capitalized that title but it feels right - at the ACME Comedy Theater. It was hosted by J. Keith vanStraaten, and I played the role of Ed McMahon (or Andy Richter, as the case may be.)

When I started the show, we did a reoccurring bit where I wore this shit-eating grin, and talked about "Me, Wil Wheaton." For example, "Yes, Keith, it was a delightful evening, particularly because all the people in attendance were graced by the presence of me, Wil Wheaton."

I think this is losing something in the translation, but now you know why I'm giggling right now. Which I guess I should have told you before, because then you would have been all, "Hey, Wil, why are you giggling when you say that?" And I could be all, "Well, that's a callback, so let me tell you about it.)