Emperor of the Fading Suns

UNWINNABLE WEEKLY ISSUE FORTY Copyright © 2015 by Unwinnable LLC All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Unwinnable LLC does not claim copyright of the screenshots and promotional imagery herein. Copyright of all screenshots within this publication are owned by their respective companies Unwinnable 820 Chestnut Street Kearny, NJ 07032 www.unwinnable.com For more information, email [email protected] Editor in Chief Stu Horvath Managing Editor Owen R. Smith Senior Editor Steve Haske Design Stu Horvath UNWINNABLE WEEKLY ISSUE FORTY Contributors Alec Kubas-Meyer Stu Horvath Luke Pullen Leo Johnson CONTENTS From the Desk of the EIC ê ê ê ê ê by Alec Kubas-Meyer Toy Box II by Stu Horvath A Dark Age of Infinite Scope by Luke Pullen Southern Blood by Leo Johnson Biographies and Illustrations From the Desk of the Editor in Chief Hi there, Today, I woke up thinking about Anton Maiden. His real name was Anton Gustafasson and he was a young man who, you guessed it, loved Iron Maiden. I mean, really, really fucking loved Iron Maiden. He loved Iron Maiden so much that he created MIDI versions of their songs and then sang over them. Sang is, perhaps, a strong word. The charm of Anton’s songs, and what would eventually lead him to become one of the first examples of an internet celebrity in 1999, is his terrible singing. I mean, truly awful. I have never heard someone sing so much and be so astoundingly flat. Your first reaction when you hear Anton’s Iron Maiden covers is to laugh. It has been so long since I first heard them, I can’t remember what sort of laugh passed my lips. I hope it was one of amazement, perhaps disbelief, but it was probably mean-spirited, mocking laughter. In an interview with a Swedish newspaper Expressen, Anton said that Iron Maiden fans, “think that my interpretations are a disgrace to Iron Maiden. But that was never my intent.” This being the internet, I can’t imagine how those Iron Maiden fans inflicted that opinion on Anton. They were wrong, of course. Anton honored Iron Maiden. His love of their music was so strong, so uncritical, so overflowing...it doesn’t matter that he couldn’t sing with even a fraction of Bruce Dickinson’s talent. It matters that he threw himself into that music in his entirety. Aesthetic concepts of good and bad are meaningless here - it is the doing that counts. Alone, unpretentious, fervent – Anton’s blazing love for Maiden is one of the greatest tributes any fan has given any band. After releasing one CD, Anton Gustafsson cut short his career as an internet celebrity and removed all mention of Anton Maiden from his personal website. He focused on his passion for travelling, circling the globe and spending months at a time in Asia and the Middle East, often without guidebooks. In 2003, Anton committed suicide. No one has any way of knowing why Anton did that, but I don’t imagine his treatment at the hands of zealous Iron Maiden fans helped. I can’t imagine how much that hurt – to have been harassed and bullied and made fun of by the people who should have appreciated it the most. I saddens me, too, that the internet didn’t learn, that it has gotten worse, that is has become so cold and filled with anger. I fear for the next Anton Maiden. * * * Sorry to be a bummer. This week’s cover story is given over to Luke Pullen’s look at the old strategy game Emperor of the Fading Suns. Alec Kubas-Meyer philosophizes about review ratings. I share another set of toy photographs. Finally, Leo Johnson gives a southerner’s take on Southern Bastards, the brutal image comic by Jason Aaron and Jason Latour. Tomorrow is Geek Flea 9, so if you are in the North Jersey/NYC area, definitely come down and hang out for that. Jeeze, OK, I gotta go set up. See you next week! Holler if you need me at [email protected]. Stu Horvath, Kearny, New Jersey April 17, 2015 ê ê ê ê ê By Alec Kubas-Meyer spend a lot of time thinking about review scores. An above average amount, at I least. Stars, letter grades, ten point scales, two hundred point systems, whatever. I’ve seen them all, used them all and found each one uniquely fascinating, because the way a review score is utilized is not just a reflection of a game, but of the person playing the game and the outlet that person is writing for. Review scores have long been misused, especially in gaming. Though you rarely hear about it anymore, the publisher abuse of developers by withholding pay for low Metacritic scores was big enough to reach outside of the enthusiast press. In 2013, Indiewire’s Criticwire blog posted an article called “What Would Happen If Filmmakers’ Compensation Was Tied to Movie reviews?” with the subtitle, “Believe it or not, it already happens in the world of videogames.” It was a harsh moment, in part because developer compensation shouldn’t rest on critics’ shoulders and also because critics can’t let something like that affect their work. In recent months and years, outlets have begun to change. Increasing numbers of outlets don’t score their games at all, but that’s not necessarily the way to go. As someone who writes a lot of reviews (and has written review guides for two separate outlets), I put a lot of stock in the number at the bottom of a review. And I put a lot of stock in what that number means. Because that number tells a story. For many, a review score is merely a reflection of the text, but why? The score is far too important to be an afterthought. In a utopian world, everyone would read a full review and the score would only be useful for aggregation purposes. That isn’t how it works. The reality is that in the grand scheme of things, a score matters far more than the text. And so the score should be chosen with care, not just as a reflection of the words that accompany it but as its own statement. But before we get into that, let’s talk about what a review score is intended to represent. In the past couple of months, I’ve heard high-ranking editors from multiple outlets refer to a review score as a quantification of “fun.” That is wrong – horribly, sadly wrong. Thinking that a game’s fun factor is not just inherently tied to its worth but is its worth entirely cuts off greater conversation. Yes, many games just want to be “fun,” and being “fun” is a noble goal for any game designer, but it is not and should not be the only metric by which games are evaluated. If it is, then This War of Mine is a failure of a game, because This War of Mine isn’t fun. It isn’t meant to be fun. “Fun” would undermine the core of a game that is trying to teach players about the experience of surviving horrible experiences. That cannot be enjoyable and it cannot be fun. If review scores were reflections of fun, the game’s Metacritic score would never go above a 40. But it doesn’t have a 40. It has an 83. That’s because, though it may not be fun, This War of Mine is worthwhile. “Worthwhile” is a great word. It gets at the heart of great art. You may not enjoy watching a soul-crushing European drama (or playing the equivalent of one), but when enjoyment (“fun”) isn’t the point, we must broaden our definitions to take that into account. So we must replace this obsession with “fun” by striving for the “worthwhile.” But while that may be what we’re ultimately after, there’s more to it than that. Even if something is ultimately worthwhile, that isn’t enough to keep a player engaged. You can watch a movie that’s worthwhile (even if sometimes you don’t want to go on) because it’s happening regardless. An interactive work needs to keep players interested in some way. It’s ridiculous to think that players will actively continue to play a game if they’re not getting that something. But if it’s not “fun” or “enjoyment,” what is it? What a game needs, above all else, is to be compelling. And thus a review and its score are reflections of how compelling that game is. The compelling thing can be “fun,” of course, but it can be so many other things. It can be a compelling narrative or compelling characters. It can be a compelling world or even just one compelling bit of design. It might compel you for hours upon hours at a time or for ten minutes each day forever. It may compel you to throw a controller through a window, which is usually but not always a bad thing. Maybe it won’t compel you at all. When we talk about how games affect us, we’re really talking about how they did (or did not) compel us, because the only thing that will keep us engaged is something compelling. And if we begin to think about it in these terms, we realize that this goes beyond just the game and into the greater context.

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