Los Angeles Gamer Gallery: David Nett

In this first entry in the Los Angeles Gamer Gallery series, we'll be taking a quick look at David Nett. He is a gamer, actor, webseries producer/writer/director, one of the founders of Nerdstrong Gym, and a tremendous advocate for the role playing game hobby. David came to Los Angeles after attending the University of Minnesota at Duluth in order to pursue a career in acting.

I first became aware of David Nett when he and his production company put together an interesting webseries entitled GOLD. The series was about a professional role playing gamer who suffered an injury during a championship match that left him emotionally scarred and unable to effectively lead the U.S. team in international competition. His story takes place at a time when viewers are abandoning watching live games in favor of computer based competitions surrounding MMORPGs. At the time, I thought the story seemed far fetched. Who would watch live role playing game sessions? Other than me that is. In the years since, David seems to have been on to something. While online Game Streams aren't competitive in nature, they can be quite sophisticated and very entertaining.

GOLD: Episode 1 (HD) from David Nett on Vimeo.

Where the first season/series of GOLD displays all of the rough edges one expects from an early project, and a significant amount of what I call pilotitis, the second season is a very entertaining and far more personal tale. That series, entitled Night of the Zombie King, doesn't appear to be available for streaming right now, but it is well worth tracking down a copy. Where the first season of GOLD tried to simulate a world with professional gaming on a large scale, this season brings it down to the individual level and tells the tale of a gamer coming home to finish a campaign left unfinished when he moved away from his small town to a larger community. It's a tale of returning to old friends and reliving fond memories while overcoming past wrongs. It's very good and deserves to be expanded into something more.

David recently stopped by Geek & Sundry's GM TIPS show with Satine Phoenix where they discuss what to do when your stories get derailed.

From his acting and directing career, to his work at Nerdstrong Gym, David has found a way to incorporate his gaming experiences into his work and creative endeavors. This is a common theme in the Southern California gaming community, and one of the things I love about it. The gamers I've met down here are about expanding the hobby and using what they've learned in the hobby to make them better at everything else they do. When my friends and I were working on the pre-production of our failed documentary about the "gamers hidden among us" called Dice Chuckers, David was one of the people we wanted to have as our principle interviewees.

Los Angeles Gamer Gallery: A New Series at Advanced Dungeons and Parenting

Los Angeles Gamer Gallery is a series of posts discussing the Los Angeles gaming community and some of the wonderful people who play and promote games in Tinseltown and abroad.

Why the Los Angeles Area?


Though the Los Angeles area has long been a vibrant part of the role playing game community, it is often overlooked in histories of the hobby. In my experience the Midwest and Bay Area tend to dominate histories and discussions of the people involved in the promotion of the hobby, because TSR and Chaosium. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I took a few days to drive around the area to seek out game stores and gaming groups. I had expected to find some, but not too many. After all, Los Angeles is a big city with a lot of distractions, beautiful weather, and all sorts of entertainments. Such a place didn't seem to me to be a good growth environment for people who gather around a table to tell collaborative stories. Okay that should read, "to gather around a table to tell collaborative stories without money being involved," as a large part of Los Angeles' economy is based on sitting around tables and coming up with stories collaboratively. I expected hard core gaming to develop in small towns with long winters, where people are looking for constructive things to do with their time that have to take place indoors.

Yes, those were my assumptions. Yes, they are overly reductive and bad assumptions. But I came from a small town with cold winters, and those were my assumptions. What I quickly discovered was that the Los Angeles area had a rich gaming community, one that has been central to several developments in the gaming hobby.

Shortly after the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game was created, members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society began playing the game and writing about it in their long running fanzine APA-L. In 1975, authors of APA-L branched out to create Alarums & Excursions under the editorship of Lee Gold. Alarums & Excursions is one of the most influential, if not THE most influential, fanzine in gaming.

1. It was gamers at Aero Hobbies who created the Thief class for D&D in 1974. 
2. Students at CalTech played a version of the game called Warlock that was published by Balboa Game Company. 
3. John Eric Holmes, a professor at USC, wrote the first Basic Set of D&D and in his book Fantasy Roleplaying Games can be seen playing D&D at Long Beach's War House game store.
4. While Superhero 2044 is the first published superhero role playing game Jay and Aimee Hartlove's Supergame was the first point build superhero rpg that was fully playable out of the book. Like Champions, the Hartlove's work is clearly inspired by Superhero 2044 in how its combat system works.

Southern California influenced the early days of the hobby and remains the home to a vibrant and innovative gaming community to this day. I'll leave discussion of Southern California's place in the history of games to those who already make it their career to document gaming history, what I want to do with the Los Angeles Gamer Gallery is to write short posts that highlight members of the community who inspire or intrigue me.

My first post, which will be posted shortly after this one, will be David Nett. I chose David because he exemplifies the way a lot of Southern California gamers incorporate their gaming experience into their lives in interesting ways.

All Too Rare Geekerati Podcast Update

I post surprisingly few updates about the Geekerati podcast that Shawna Benson and I do on a fairly regular basis. I think that it is time for a change on that front. Shawna and I have been doing the podcast, along with a couple of other co-hosts like Bill Cunningham, since 2007 and will be live streaming our 126th episode this evening. We average 2,400 downloads an episode with most falling between 1,000 and 5,000 depending on who we have as a guest in a given week. We have had one or two episodes with over 40,000 downloads, but those were with guests who had very large followings and who heavily promoted their appearance on our humble show.

We live stream the show on Wednesdays at 8:30pm Pacific, although this has changed over the years to match our busy lives, and episodes are available for download on the website or on iTunes immediately after the show finishes airing. We recommend listening to the show on the website and putting up with the advertisement at the beginning of the show, as this helps us recoup some of the costs of hosting the show with Blog Talk Radio. The live streaming format has certain advantages for time crushed people like Shawna and me, but it does come with the requisite risks of technical glitches. We have certainly had our share of those. If you want to hear how throttled bandwidth affects Skype audio, check out our conversation with Stephanie Thorpe about the Elfquest Anniversary.

Over the years Shawna and I have had some fantastic guests, including:
 

1. Matt Forbeck (Game Designer) -- Matt's actually been our most frequent guest, with Shelly Mazzanoble coming in at second. This makes them our favorite guests.
2. John Rogers (Leverage, The Core)
3. James Lowder (Game Designer and Editor)
4. Marc Bernardin (Alphas)
5. Susan Palwick (SF Author)
6. Tim Minear (Firefly)
7. David Goetsch (Big Bang Theory)-- Back in 2008 even.
8. Aaron Ginsburg (Thrilling Adventure Hour)
9. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

This is far from an extensive list. Shawna and I are quite proud of what we've been able to do with the show. So why don't you join us tonight as we chat with Clark Perry to discuss the upcoming show DEFIANCE.

The Face of "Television" is Changing and Becoming "Internetelevision"

For the past few years, I have been talking about how our television viewing habits are being changed by the internet and how soon most of our viewing choices will be made "on demand."  Providers of digital narrative viewing entertainment will be able to reap great rewards from the system, even as it shatters some of the older models.  The studios, big and small, will likely benefit by the changes and affiliate stations will suffer as people move away from "command" television of the kind that local affiliates provide, and move toward "on demand" television where the viewer is empowered to watch shows directly from the provider.  The content provider and the distributor system will change, but likely not be completely eliminated as trusted "content hubs" will make finding new content easier for viewers.  The overall shift will likely empower creators and viewers and lessen the power of distributors -- though the need for effective marketers will be significant.

I began imagining this future before anyone offered streaming video content, but after reading The Future of the Mass Audience in a political science class as an undergrad.  Since I started talking about the topic -- which was a topic for a couple of early Geekerati podcasts -- we have seen the rise of Hulu, Netflix streaming, television stations streaming their own shows, FunnyorDie!, and many DiY Web Series of varying quality -- some quite excellent.

Now one of the leaders in the field is moving forward toward the purely on demand future.  It is one thing for television networks to provide their content online after it has aired through traditional channels, it is quite another for a streaming provider to purchase and produce a high end show strictly for streaming.  That provider is Netflix and they are looking into the possibility of providing two upcoming on demand televisions shows in the near future.  The first is House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey and the second is an unnamed show by the Kenji Kohan (the creator of "Weeds).

Change is in the wind, and that change looks very interesting indeed.

The Glamorous Life of a Hollywood Assistant

Wonder what people with Master's Degrees do while they are "writing their screenplays" in the hopes of a great job in Hollywood? The Back of the Class are rapping Truth to Power in this video.

Hollywood ASST from Back of the Class on Vimeo.