ENnie's entered, but what to wear?

I'm pretty excited to say that I just completed our application process to get The Hopeless Gamer nominated for the 2011 ENnie Awards for Best Blog. For some reason beyond me, I decided it was too much effort last year to submit the blog. When I saw this morning that the Sly Flourish D&D 4e blog (a very nice 4e blog with an even nicer name!) had been accepted I knew I couldn't put this off for another year.

This being the first time I've ever nominated anything I've ever done for any reward... ever, I kind of enjoyed two different aspects of the entry process. First, you had to pick out a song to be played at the ceremony if you win your category. I instantly began looking around on my itunes playlist for something fun, light and celebratory. I settled on OK Go's Crash the Party. You can't steal it, I called it!

The other big decision, which actually feels relevant to my interests, was to decide which "must read" blog post since last May I would put forth as our best work here on the blog. This was a tough choice since I feel like we've actually had a really good year. Seriously, just look at our most recent post, How to Build a Mountain for an example of what we can put out. I don't do a lot of theory wankery around here, but I'm also pretty proud of my recent musings on a new type of RPG structure - the Anthology Game. Gencon is what inspired the blog in the first place, and our coverage of last year's Geneva Convention was a huge improvement over our first attempt with pictures, interviews, and reviews all over the place. Finally, I would be remiss to overlook our jam-packed Shocktober 2010 features where we focused on all things horror. I gotta be honest (cause apparently I can't be modest), sometimes it can feel pretty good toot your own horn.

So what did I end up submitting? There's one game above all else that has me excited to be a GM right now, and that's Dragon Age. Above that, I like to think that THG is about trying to generate innovation without adding complication. All this means that I decided to go with the single article that I'm most proud of and put the most work into, my post about GM'ing with my Droid X. There's a lot of scare in the RPG hobby crowd about how technology is destroying the tabletop experience. From video games to internet message boards to texting, there seems to be less and less time to putz around and more and more things to putz around with. Ever the anti-luddite (which I guess would be a futurist... or maybe a cyborg?), I'm eager to find ways we can incorporate these technologies into making a better overall tabletop gaming experience. That's why I'm dedicated to continuing my work with the Droid X and any other technologies I can get my grubby hands on to drag tabletop gaming into this century. We're by no means an exclusively technology-based blog, but I gotta be me, and me am a tech nerd at heart. Me not sorry about this at all!