PAX East obliterated Jared Sorensen’s voice but he still had an event left to run. Players were counting on him. The convention schedule had the game session locked in. Sorensen, his voice already spent on conversations and events in the noisy convention venues, seemed fucked. But Jared Sorensen didn’t quit.

Sorensen was on the hook to run one of his new Parsely games on Sunday afternoon. Parsely games, if you don’t know, evoke classic text adventures through live, face-to-face play. One or more players (sometimes many more than one) issue commands to a person who parses (get it?) the players’ instructions in the fashion of an old text adventure, thereby navigating intriguing, frightening, exciting adventure environments like in days of yore. The players take on the role of explorers and collectors and the parser takes on the role of computer emulator, taking in the player inputs and doling out brief descriptions of the environment and the action.

“You’re in a dank cellar. The water here is ankle-deep. You smell gasoline,” the parser might say, then: “Exits are North, East, West.”

“Go East,” says a player on her turn.

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Wil Wheaton! TableTop!

Writer, actor, geek, gamer, and producer Wil Wheaton has a shiny new web series coming to the shiny new YouTube channel, Geek and Sundry. The show’s called TableTop and its something like Celebrity Poker meets Dinner For Five except instead of dinner or poker there are fun and funny people playing fun and funny tabletop games. The first episode debuts on Friday, April 2nd, on the aforementioned Geek and Sundy YouTube channel.

Word from the WonderCon panel at which the network was announced by executive producer and prolific writer/actress, Felicia Day, is that the show will feature a variety of board games, plus RPGs like Dragon Age and Fiasco. Check out the show trailer and the channel’s sizzle reel for a glimpse at some of the guests coming to the show, too. I am maximum eager to see this show light up my computer monitor and, one hopes, to give eventual DVDs as gifts to would-be players seeking primers on a variety of fun tabletop games.

Check out the TableTop debut trailer and subscribe to the YouTube channel to let them know you’ll be watching.

We hope you’ll join us for two Gameplaywright events at GenCon this week:

Robin Laws will be talking about Hamlet’s Hit Points, presenting the system of analysis behind his ENnie-nominated book and taking questions about its theory and application. (Friday, 10:00 am, Marriott Santa Fe)

What do Dr. No, Casablanca, and Shakespeare have to teach us about making the stories in our RPGs awesome? Roleplaying design authority and virtuoso Robin D. Laws (Gumshoe, Feng Shui) has written all about it in Gameplaywright book Hamlet’s Hit Points. In this seminar, he presents the nuts and bolts of his approach for analyzing stories in order to improve your RPG narrative. Bring your questions!

Will and I will be hosting Things You Think About Games, a laid-back thinking gamer’s roundtable. (Thursday, 10:00 am, Marriott Indiana Ballroom F)

The Gameplaywright book Things We Think About Games makes more than 100 assertions about games from the obvious-but-overlooked (‘In an RPG, all the characters are wearing pants’) to the deeply zen (‘Be aware that the other players are not necessarily playing for the same reasons you are’). Bring your own cunning, brilliant, or mad assertions to discuss and defend at this thinking gamer’s roundtable, back for its second year.

It’s my goal to write about #Origins2011 every day this week. This is tricky. How much do you want to hear about a convention that already happened, right? Probably not a lot. I played a lot of compelling games, though, and want to share some of what I’ve learned by playing them.

Not counting playtests, I played or ran:

• Ganakagok
• Apocalypse World
• The Dance and the Dawn
• 7 Wonders
• Freemarket
• Bears

I also met lots of delightful people, many of whom I knew from the Internet (in ways great or scant), and finally got to put faces to names I know from Twitter and blogs. I also got to—at last!—play games with people I spend a lot of time talking to about games or the hobby at large. I think I played more games this year than in all previous Origins Game Fairs combined. (Not counting demo events that I’ve run myself.) It was rad.

A few of the games I sat down with were playtests. I got to play mockups of a couple of my own games (codenamed Project: Odyssey and Project: Dark, which I’ve been tweeting about) with designers I heartily admire. It was nerve-rattling in the best way. I got to get notes from cunning and brilliant designers on things that I want to be brilliant and cunning, too. I’m smarter now than I was last Monday.

Jeff and I also presented awards at the 37th Origins of Words Awards ceremony. (Hamlet’s Hit Points didn’t win, but you knew that already.) Then we sat for a minute on a podcast with gaming luminaries Mike Selinker and James Ernest, which you can hear right here. But you knew that already.

So, stay tuned as I talk about games played, thoughts provoked, and forthcoming designs altered all this week. Until then, if you were at #Origins2011, let us know what you thought of the con this year!