We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful David Chapman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with David below.

David, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry.

I have the immense pleasure of being able to review tabletop games and products, and people seem to want me to continue doing so. When I left the website that I was previously working for, one of the things I needed to decide was how I wanted to put my voice out into the world.

I grew up chewing on cameras, almost literally. Taking pictures of games is a path that would have made sense for me.

I have a background in performance and in production, both live and on video. YouTube is big, I can do that.

One of the biggest challenges in my life has been getting thoughts out of my head and onto the page. That would be a terrible path.

Besides, no one has time to read content anymore, they watch it or listen to it. YouTube just keeps getting bigger. Twitch, despite its recent choices regarding the treatment of the creators on its platform, is unlikely to be going anywhere soon. Video killed the written word. Then you have TikTok which has reinvented (again) how a generation communicates, with short-form videos that other platforms have tried to emulate. Whether it is long form or short form, video killed the written word.

But I’m not so sure I believe that anymore. Two of my written reviews were finalists for the Review of the Year in the Origins Awards. The eventual winner, was also a written review. So while the pen may not be mightier than the sword, it still does a hell of a good job describing it, and there is still a place for the written word.

David, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hi, my name is David Chapman, and I am the Owner and Lead Reviewer of TheRatHole.ca, a tabletop gaming review website based primarily in Alberta, Canada.

What are “tabletop games”, you may ask? (If you aren’t asking, don’t pretend you haven’t had to explain it to someone who has asked you.) These are games that aren’t originally made to be video games. Depending on your generation, we could be talking about games like Checkers, Chess, Poker, or Bridge. We could be talking about Monopoly, Uno, or Scrabble. Maybe you know Card Against Humanity or Settlers of Catan. There is even this little game called Dungeons & Dragons which has been getting a bit of press coverage recently. All of these are fine examples of tabletop games, but the tabletop gaming industry has been seeing a new golden age of late. People want to interact face-to-face with their friends, not just behind a screen and microphone, There are thousands of new games released every year, and I get to tell people what I think about a very small number of those releases.

I started as an event photographer and eventually a comic book reviewer for a site that is currently on hiatus. TheRatHole.ca was a way for me to take control over my own destiny, and make sure what I wanted to go out into the world, actually went out into the world how I wanted it to. The buck stops here. I wanted to sink or swim based on my own work and merits.

Eventually, I found myself a finalist for a Spacy Award, against the Hangin’ With Web Show and The Legend of the Traveling TARDIS. I didn’t win, but I did get asked to be a guest on TLTT. They seem to like me since I’m still there, now as a regular co-host, and I’ve come out to Florida on several occasions to attend events like MegaCon with them. This spun off to guest appearances on the ESO Network, having my Doctor Who game reviews published in magazines, and even being asked to write about not-games on occasion.

As the years have gone by (closing on six of them, this November, for TheRatHole.ca) I have been joined on parts of my journey by several other creators and writers, who I have been privileged to be able to give a platform for their thoughts. Some were friends before, some became my friends along the way. But more than anything else I’ve done, I think I’m most proud of the communities I’ve helped cultivate.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

It is less a specific “lesson” that needed to be unlearned, but rather the entire way I was taught to learn lessons. When I was young, and dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was taught that to be a “good” writer you needed to follow all the rules. All of them, all of the time, regardless of whether they actually applied to the situation. I was told by a teacher in junior high that I would never graduate high school. “The system” routed me into a lower level, of English classes, which were not sufficient for postsecondary. When I upgraded my English, I had to drop the class and challenge the diploma exam (something I was only able to do because I had already graduated.) I was given an entire additional semester to complete the work for the generic postsecondary Intro to English course that almost everyone takes. I failed an Oral Communications course because I didn’t use recipe cards for my notes. (It took about a 2-minute conversation with the head of that program for them to award me credit for the class. Communicate that.)

I was told I needed to learn things the way the teacher wanted me to learn them, not how I needed to learn them.

But by taking away the restraints of those academic rules, I flourished. When given the freedom to manage my own workflow and process, I surpassed my classmates and peers, If a new teacher clamped down on the arbitrary way they wanted me to work, my work suffered for it.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for proper grammar and spelling. We need to be able to communicate with one another clearly and correctly. There are specific forms of writing that very much require strict adherence to requirements. But at the end of the day, those things are the minority. When I have a new creator ask me what I want from them, I tell them that I want *them.* I want their voice. I want to read or watch what they send me and recognize them in it.

At this point in my life, my writing has been published in multiple magazines and has been nominated for awards. I’ve been asked to write things. People have told me I’m good at writing after years of always being told I do it wrong. I still have to remind myself that the only way to do almost anything is to not do it at all. Write that thing. Create. Exist on your own terms, and don’t let anyone tell you not to. Not even yourself. *Especially*, not yourself.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

To go back and reinforce what I just said, a person needs to exist on their own terms. For “a creative” there can be no higher goal in life than just to live. Money is necessary to live in the modern world. Success is a wonderful way to measure yourself against that same world. Awards and acknowledgement of your work is heartening. But at the end of the day, we do what we do because we are driven to do it.

But here’s the thing, in their own way “non-creatives” do exactly the same thing. They exist on their own terms too, their terms are often just more in line with what “society” deems proper. I choose to live my life as a professional nerd. I review tabletop games. I’m a photographer and videographer. I’m me, and too often people don’t think that’s good enough.       

Contact Info:

• Website: TheRatHole.ca
• Instagram: instagram.com/TheRatHole.ca
• Facebook: facebook.com/TheRatHole.ca
• Twitter: twitter.com/TheRatHoleDOTca
• Youtube: youtube.com/TheRatHole.ca
• Other: twitch.tv/TheRatHoleDOTca
• Photography: facebook.com/PapaRazzo.Library

Image Credits
‘Papa Razzo’ David Chapman