Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

I’ve got a new column at Edge Online. It started this morning and it’ll run every Wednesday on the site. The gist? I’ll be covering the “offbeat” beat, looking for unusual angles or strange topics. I’ll err on the side of the obscure, the strange, and the irrelevant. I’m not positioning myself as any kind of an expert. I’m opinionated, but I’m setting out not to write an opinion column, or say that “games should do this” or “games should be that,” or publish my 600-800 word thought nuggets for the world to disagree with. Rather, I’m going for a column that asks, “Hey, did you know … ?”

Looking back on the other columns and features I’ve written, the ones that I enjoyed the most were based on discovery – like covering what the music scene is like in Antarctica, or sneaking onto the Avril Lavigne eTeam. I wrote 40 columns for Pitchfork and the ones I still remember the best were the first ones, where I interviewed a burlesque dancer or internet film critic Mr. Filthy, just to find out, “Okay, what’s your deal?”

In that vein, this’ll be rooted in games – but if I talk to a comic creator or a TV personality for another interview, and I find something I can use here, I will. I’ve always wanted to do a truly multimedia column, and let’s face it, not many people consume just one or two or eight media in their daily routine. The more I can crossover, the better.

I’ll also riff on whatever I’m playing that week, or bug my friends and colleagues for their opinions. Or I’ll make fun of my four-year-old. I’ve got about eight columns in draft form, they’re all over the map, and I get a kick out of all of them.

This should be fun.

Interviews are a hoot. Nothing puts art in context like talking to the person who made it and learning what was really going on in their head at the time. But the best interviews I’ve done are the ones where you sit with a master and learn things that change the way you think about art, work, and life.

My interview with Steve Bissette, which I conducted in Vermont in February and which just went up on the Onion AV Club, was one of the most educational, most valuable, and most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever conducted. To their kudos, the Onion let it run long on the site today, and I can’t stress enough: even if you don’t know Bissette from his work on Swamp Thing, Tyrant, or Taboo, you should read this.

On top of detailed and often very funny or very tragic stories from his long career, Bissette also had a ton to tell me about creators’ rights and independent publishing. He’s a rigorously ethical person who’s put a great deal of thought into his business practices – more than most indies (in say, the games field). But also read what he says about the nature of horror. Or the creative process. Or “the trance.” Or parenting. Or dinosaurs.

I’ve done interviews where I just tried to get information, or once in a while even ferret facts out of a subject. But at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, most of my best interviews were like this one – an opportunity to learn from the masters, get it into text, and pass it on. This was one of the best.