It’s not easy to be me.
—Five for Fighting, “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” (EMI, 2001)

In response to some of the criticism of the events of the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, Bill Gibron recently asked in an article, “Why are so many picking on Superman for destroying a few hundred thousand people when his actions clearly save billions?” (”Man of Steel and the Wanton Detruction of Human Life”, PopMatters, 17 June 2013). There is, I think, an answer to this question that is directly linked to the kind of character that Superman is and what he represents.

As I wrote in my post about Journey, I love the contradictory nature of video games, their use of cold hard programming logic to create an emotional reaction that’s not logical at all. It’s a wonderful contradiction, and I’m always amazed when a game gets it right. As such, I love breaking games down into their mechanics. I love tinkering with their systems in order to better understand how this process works.

I couldn’t do this with Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I’ve tried playing the game again. I’ve tried breaking it down to its core components. I’ve tried to analyze it from a distance to figure out how it’s able to so effectively hook my emotions, but I can’t break it. Every time I try to replay an episode, I am drawn to the same choices that I made before. They felt so right, both morally and logically, that to make another choice was to betray myself.

I suppose this post has spoilers for Proteus.  It’s hard to know, as it’s not a traditional game when it comes to its story or systems.  In fact, popular opinion is split on whether this Proteus is a game at all.  If something has no clear faiure or win states and no in-game actions besides simple locomotion, is it a game?

The question has re-spawned a labyrinthian debate around the nature of medium: the philosophies, semantics, and hurt feelings are quite hard to untangle.  Because of this, I admire Matthew Burns’s Alexandrian response: the idea of video games as a unified medium has become intractable.  In his words, trying to reconcile experimental design with the mainstream publishing scene is akin to “a faculty member from Juilliard express[ing] a desire for ‘a dialogue’ with Sid Vicious about chord progressions.  It’s not that these two don’t see eye to eye on matters of music theory ... it’s that the punks have arrived on the scene with such a completely different set of values that they might as well be from different planets” (“Our Immiscible Future”, Magical Wasteland, 27 April 2013) It’s sad that we cannot return to “the prelapsarian niceness of thinking that everyone should hang out with everyone else ... but there is an element to defining the self that is made out of forsaking something else.”  Things change, but that’s okay.

Twine is a relatively new game development tool that makes it easy to create a simple game. I hesitate to describe it any further because many different people have managed to make it do many different things. However, when someone says Twine game, the image conjured in their mind is that of a choose-your-own-adventure-style interactive fiction experience.

Everything about Twine is contentious or rather it’s causing people to at least check their assumptions on what they knew about games or their genres. There are some in the interactive fiction community wondering if games in this style qualify as such next to games developed with parser based interfaces. You have those of the formalist persuasion saying that they are not games at all and the less thoughtful members of the gamer population saying they are utter wastes of time.

With the intent of providing continued intelligent and entertaining content in the PopMatters’ Columns section, we are looking to broaden our staff of columnists and the voice of our writers’ community. We’re particularly interested in writers who live and work outside of the US, but that is not a deciding factor; in all cases, no matter the writer’s locale, we’re looking for those who can approach an array of cultural subject matter from their patch of the world with an international sensibility; that is, contextualize the local with an awareness of its place, historical and current, in the broader world.

Qualified writers are already readers of PopMatters (as but one vital supplement in their varied intellectual diet). They are familiar with the work of our current columnists, as well as other areas of the magazine, and they have a solid sense of what we’re looking for in content and caliber in these essays. We deliberately use the terms “essays” and “columns” interchangeably; as pieces are broad in scope yet grounded in real-world examples, and they are tied to regular deadlines and an established identity (and therein lay the “columnist” element). With these expectations in mind, we have monthly and every-other-month column slots available. Suitable writers are dedicated to regular deadlines and enjoy participating in friendly, ongoing communications with their editor.