Editor’s Choice

If you’ve been keeping up with The Escapist for any length of time, you probably already know we obsess over our Editorial Calendar. If it’s not on the calendar, we don’t do it. Period. We pour our hearts and souls into it, and every quarter or so, we gather in a dimly lit room to cook up another one.

“What intriguing insights can we share with our readers this quarter?” we ask ourselves, cackling maniacally and rubbing our hands together to spread around the oily residue left behind from endlessly handling our piles of ad revenue. “What as yet unplumbed depths of the gaming and new media universe can we plumb for our readers’ delight?”

Then we pour out the scotch and debate the finer points of nihilism and existential irony for several hours, perhaps days, before, in a cloud of cigar smoke, the new Editorial Calendar appears, as if born fully formed from the head of Hunter S. Thompson. Each issue covering a central theme, each article adhering to that theme, each reader admiring our handy work, bestowing on us the honor of gods among men. Our e-cocks swelling with pride.

Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work. In spite of our best efforts to keep all the creative juices in the universe flowing in the same direction as the stream of our editorial impetus, occasionally something comes out of left field and throws everything out of whack. What to do with a work of editorial genius that doesn’t quite fit any of our molds? What to do with a piece of writing that’s brilliant, yet covers a topic to which we haven’t yet devoted an entire issue of our magazine? What to do with the inspired oddball that’s so juicy and de-lovely we can’t figure out where to put it, but don’t want to let go? What to do? What to do?

Enter: Issue 140, Editor’s Choice. The Editor’s Choice issue is our safety valve. It’s our way of saying “we don’t know what to do with this stuff, but we think you’ll enjoy it.” It’s like a good gumbo. You don’t ask where the ingredients came from, you just eat it.

In this week’s Editor’s Choice issue, Ray Huling talks Heidegger and humanity in reference to Mass Effect; Thorin Klosowski talks to a true game artist; Erin Hoffman takes a tour of the Elliott Avedon Museum and Archive of Games in Waterloo, Ontario; Zoran Iovanovici embraces the dark side of cheating to win; and I’m tackling the subject of how to get famous on YouTube. Crack open a bottle of Dixie and Enjoy!