TRIFECTA

HELLO WORLD!

I could be anywhere right now.  I could be at the Grand Canyon; I could be at a Motel 6 in Omaha; I could be in the bathroom for all you know.  That’s my discovery of the day.  I can be whatever and wherever I want to be, and I am in complete an total control of that information.  I am a man in front of a green screen telling you, “We’re coming to you live from the war torn Gaza Strip” only to retreat to my 30 Rock dressing room for a massage once the cameras stop rolling.  Only, I have it easier.  All I have to do is coat my thoughts and opinions with enough rhetoric and prose to make you trust and believe where I am.  I don’t even need the fancy cameras.

Well, what a wonderful start!  I probably should have just started by saying, “Hey everybody, I’m full of shit,” but I think we (All three of us, Hi Mom!) can agree that wouldn’t be very much fun.  In reality, I am sitting up in my bed now, but that’s not important.  What is important is that my portal for communicating with you is a series of keystrokes that I enter into an antiquated laptop screen (antiquated now applies to anything more than three years old).  I am the author, editor, publisher, and (if for whatever reason you’re reading this) marketing director.  I control all means of information and delivery.  I could say 2+2=5, and that would be a fact in my book.  My ability to lace opinion with biases and loose facts segues me awkwardly into my next point.

Even though I am not at a Motel 6 or the Grand Canyon, I could be. In fact, I might as well be. That’s the beauty of it. A moment I like to refer to as...wait for it...The Day the Board Games Died. Yes, that just happened. It’s like when the guy in the movie says the name of the movie in the movie. Hell. Yes. The Day the Board Games died is a curious moment in our generation when any and all elements of our human connection started to move online. Our conversations, our moments, our thoughts, and eventually, our games moved online. We stopped looking each other in the eye when we stopped to talk, and then we stopped talking altogether.

Our conversations often contain that beautifully awkward benchmark where our phone vibrates in our pocket and we instantly grow anxious. “Why the hell am I listening to you right now? I could have gotten a text/email/tweet/pinterest, or worse. I could have been tagged in a photo on Facebook in this brief window of time where I can save myself! Why did my friend bring a camera to Vegas?!? WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING?” Then we stopped taking a break to chat. Sadder yet, something inside of us still yearned for that human connection. So we turned to the only place we knew. The Internet.

I say “we” because I am guilty too. I am very comfortable sending text messages and tweeting from the safety of my bedroom (or cockroach-ridden motel room). But not Board Games. No. I love board games. I think they can test anything and everything wonderful about a person’s character. Someone wins (I usually do), and someone loses (the other guy), and I revel in that. I play for that moment. I play because for that brief evening we laughed, we competed, we yelled, we won, we lost, we may have cried, we may have fought, but in the end, we did it together. We rolled the dice. We drank the beer. The internet is trying to steal our moments. I won’t let it.

I’m taking back Game Night. I won’t let a benchmark of our humanity slip away. I want to beat you, and I want to look you in the eye when I do it. Who knows? If game night makes a comeback, phone calls might too. If phone calls make a comeback, maybe grabbing coffee will. And if grabbing coffee makes a comeback, maybe it won’t be so weird when I stand outside your window in a tan duster holding a boombox over my head playing Peter Gabriel (Say Anything, watch it).

 Hello World. I’m excited to be here. Now, let’s roll some dice.

PROFILE

This morning, I read about “A pack of matches on the back of the toilet” because one of my favorite blogs is 1000 Awesome Things written by Neil Pasricha.  Several years ago, Neil embarked on a journey to document all the awesome things about life. Okay, maybe not all the things, but at least the top 1000 (pretty close). Each day, Neil would document an awesome aspect of human life, ranging from "The Take a Penny, Leave a Penny Bowl", "The Smell of Play-Doh", "Old People Pants", to everything in between.  From the outset, Neil combats cynicism by exploring the world to find crazy things that make people laugh and smile.  He treats each subject with a rhetoric that engages his reader.  At no point in his blog does he claim or pretend to be an academic, but rather just a guy from Toronto, Canada who documents the human experience, one awesome thing at a time.

Neil started the blog on June 20, 2008 with a post titled "Broccoflower", and since then he has blogged almost every single day on a myriad of topics.  Some of his posts are only a sentence long while others can go on for a thousand words or more, delving into deep detail about the topic.  Each post, however, often elicits the response, "You're right! I totally never thought of it like that!" from the reader (At least, that’s how I feel).  In addition, a staple of his blog is that he ends every single post by weaving his concluding sentence into the word "AWESOME!"  

Neil completed his list on April 19, 2012 with a post titled "Anything you want it to be", and it is the only post that is entirely blank.  A perfect ending.  Over the course of almost four years, the blog took on a life of its own.  It's popularity exploded, and it even lead to two books being published titled The Book of Awesome, and The Book of (Even More) Awesome.  There was a massive following of people that participated in the comments section, some even contributing their own ideas.  As everyone sat on pins and needles to find out what was next and what was going to be number one, Neil made it very clear that the list no longer belonged to him.  He shared his thoughts with the world knowing full well that there were only so many numbers remaining.  This is perhaps what I find most fascinating about this blog.  There was comfort in its finality.

While most blogs can just go on and on forever, offering a new perspective daily, I knew 1000 Awesome Things was going to end.  I knew that at some point there would not be another post, and I enjoyed that.  I enjoyed that after enjoying the blog day-to-day, I would turn the last page and there would be no more.  I know I’m not the only one who loves to read top-ten lists.  Neil gave us a top-one thousand.  He documented the human experience better than almost any academic I have ever witnessed because he chose to look at the big and small things that make everyday personal, not trivial. At the same time, he looked at the big and small things all people have in common.  In my blog I have a loose sense of nostalgia for old forms of communication, and I am trying to understand the way the human experience changes when it moves online.  1000 Awesome Things is built on nostalgia.  Neil explores his childhood, and at the same time, he explores mine.

I won't be updating my blog daily, nor do I expect to garner the same following, but there is a lot to learn from 1000 Awesome Things. It is easy to get caught behind a singular mind trying to combat the forces of deteriorating human connection, but I need to maintain a wide perspective.  Just because my opinion can appear predominantly cynical, when I open my eyes I can still take into account that the world really is AWESOME!

VOICE CRITIQUE

It's a bit of a challenge for me to find a blog that is on the same topic as The Day the Board Games Died.  I usually walk a line between writing about online social networks and board games, but there aren't many others out there drawing similar comparisons.  But hey, we can't all enjoy trying to catch a greased watermelon in a swimming pool, right?  So anyways, I'm going to take a look at the blog Gaming With Chuck.  Why? Because when I went on a search for social network related blogs, I found a lot of prosaic malarkey strewn with a few angst ridden teenagers wanting me to look at their tumblr and be friends with them on Beebo.  Is that last sentence true? No, but once again, I digress.

So, Gaming With Chuck, how did we meet? Google. You had an inviting blog title.  So, in that sense, the voice analysis starts here: Nice title Chuck. You didn't say, "Games with Charles", or "Charles Gaming Emporium", or "Wednesdays with Charlie", all potential titles for Mitch Albom tribute novels.  (They have to start somewhere) You used your own nickname, and you invited me to read as if you yourself were inviting me to play a game with you.  So, I clicked the link and started reading.

Wowzers! You really like board games!  That's awesome! Even more so, you look to understand board games in an academic and explorative fashion.  Simply playing a board game does not suffice, you delve deep into enhancing the board game experience.  In calm prose, you provide an informative and self-reflexive look at board games.  One of your posts takes a look at Edgar Allan Poe in Music and Gaming.  Woah!  That title is smart. The post goes on to take an investigatory look at what exactly the title suggests.

I like to think of you Chuck as a documentary filmmaker.  There are a couple different types: there are the Michael Moores that center themselves as a character in their films, and then there are Warren Millers who loosely dangle themselves in the film as commentators, and then there are ethnographic filmmakers who desperately try to remain entirely omniscient, remaining an outside observer to reality.  You, Chuck, flirt between the two latter.  You choose to write almost entirely in third-person, which makes you more of an informant.  You provide insight: "Poe was an incredible influence on H. P. Lovecraft, who has had a huge impact on gaming", but you ground them in further support, "Robert Bloch (yes, the Robert Bloch that wrote the story used for the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho, amongst other horror tales) wrote a very interesting comparison of the two men."  I trust you Chuck; you're not inundating the story with your opinion.

That said, your opinion is still visible.  You pose rhetorical questions as a method of communicating your own chain of thought: "All by Edgar Allan Poe, but how has Poe affected and influenced gaming?"  Other posts aren't necessarily as academic, some even delve into first-person, but you still carry a necessary honesty.  There is no heavy inflection or bias, but more a presentation of facts.  You are the Edward R. Murrow of board games.  I think it would be fun to find us a high-strung Joe McCarthy condemning 12-sided dice as the devil in our living rooms.  In your featurette "Wargame Wednesdays" you provide a thorough breakdown of the actual gameplay experience before providing any type of editorial of your own.  Thank you for your patience.

So, Chuck, here's to you shaker of the dice, weaver of the roads, and tallier of the scores.  Your passion for games is obvious.  You treat them almost like people.  Withholding judgement and giving them time to breath.  You put wooden pencil to paper, tallying scores, and then you put hardened fingers to keyboards, reporting the news. The games may be foreign, but you take the time to make them feel at home.