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.

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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 Ileast. 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 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. Sometimes a game compels you but sometimes you are compelled to play a game by external factors. Maybe all of your friends are playing it or it’s a beloved classic that you feel bad about having missed. Maybe you’re a writer who is being subjected to trash because your editor says that’s what you have to do. (I’ve been in that position on more than one occasion.) These things will affect your experience with a game. Why you’re playing a game is important. And when you’re thinking back on how you felt about it, remembering that context can help you better understand your own reaction to it. That reaction is everything. Returning to our earlier point: a review score should do more than just wrap up your text; it should tell a story of its own. A score is a reaction. A score signifies a word, which signifies an emotion. That emotion is the thing that a review will convey. A number can’t do it so eloquently, but it can also create its own narrative. For instance, the critical response to Swery 65’s masterpiece, Deadly Premonition told a narrative, and that narrative was told in two numbers: IGN’s 2 out of 10 and ’s 10 out of 10. Those scores say less about the game and more about the people playing them. IGN’s Erik Brudvig saw the game’s rough parts and hated them all. That was the end of it. For Jim Sterling, it was more than the sum of its parts. These polar opposite scores are fascinating for a lot of reasons (including serving as excellent evidence that “objective” scores are a meaningless concept), but they serve to highlight this question of how a thing compels a person. Deadly Premonition is not really “fun.” In terms of design it’s subpar in an , but that world and its inhabitants are the things that compel players. Games like Deadly Premonition show players what is important to them, what compels them. And those narratives are told not just in the text but in the scores themselves. A review score is a proclamation, a political statement. It’s the thing that will be widely disseminated. And I’m sure a lot more people know about those two polarizing scores than actually read the accompanying text. People who had no interest in Deadly Premonition saw that 10/10 and suddenly they were interested. (I know I was.) It doesn’t matter if the game actually deserves the score or not, because that score made it very clear: You need to play this game right now. Making the score an afterthought ignores this fact. You may feel ambivalent about a game but ultimately believe that’s it’s important for the medium. Your text may reflect a 6, but you believe that the game transcends that. There is something beyond the game that compels you in a way that maybe you can’t even understand. You can’t bring yourself to change the text (other than add the caveat that it’s possibly better than you make it sound), but you know that a 6 will guarantee nobody will think twice about it. So you’re compelled to give it an 8. Because an 8 will get someone’s attention, especially if it’s a game that hasn’t been on their radar. Here, what is “worthwhile” and what is “compelling” may diverge, and it’s a personal decision which matters more. A game that isn’t necessarily so compelling can be so worthwhile as to deserve a score that someone reading the text may not understand. The text and the score are separate entities, but if treated right, they can create a discussion with each other. And with the increased openness behind the scenes – something game journalism has been lately striving toward – writers can explain why they made those kinds of decisions. Instead of doing away with review scores, let’s liberate them. With games that are ever-changing, the old way of doing things is slowly but surely slipping into irrelevance. As critics focus less on the bullet points of a game and more on the experience, trying to match a number to a game becomes even harder. I’ve been speaking primarily as a writer, but this is important for readers as well. A review score is chosen for the readers, to give them a snapshot of what they need to know. Yes, this represents a pretty serious conceptual shift, but reviews are already changing. Review updates, reviews in progress, provisional reviews; all of these things are attempts to rework a decades old system that simply doesn’t work anymore. But if we acknowledge how important the score is and what it can do, if we change the context and the purpose of review scores, then we can also rethink the review. Perhaps scores can do what reviews do now, and the text can do the really important thing: drive the conversation about our medium forward. U

10 /10 plate 00. Warduke, Evil Fighter, from Dungeons & Dragons, 1984, LJN

Toy Box II By Stu Horvath recently came across an auction selling the Ibulk of LJN’s Dungeons & Dragons PVC toys for a reasonable price so I scooped them up without hesitation. I didn’t have any of them when I was a kid, so I don’t have any particular nostalgia for them (though I do have a nostalgia for the desire for them, strange as that may sound). I bought them mostly because they are so profoundly ugly. As you’ll see, there is a crudeness in the sculpts that I have never seen, before or since. They’re distorted, strange, like cheap Hong Kong toys you might find in the check-out aisle of the supermarket, but they also possess a knack for realism in their proportions, posture and in easily-overlooked detail work. I can see potential kinetic movement in their poses. In fact, these twisted visages with their bulging eyes and wide mouths remind me, in a way, of the work of Goya. They appear tortured. Malformed. I can’t imagine being a child and playing with these grotesqueries. U plate 01. Goblin from Dungeons & Dragons, 1983, LJN plate 02. Stalward Man-at-Arms from Dungeons & Dragons, 1983, LJN plate 03. Troglodyte from Dungeons & Dragons, 1983, LJN plate 04. Goblin from Dungeons & Dragons, 1983, LJN plate 05. Dwarf of the Mountain King from Dungeons & Dragons, 1983, LJN plate 06, Sarke Mercenary from Dungeons & Dragons, 1983, LJN plate 07. Skeleton of Sith Goblin from Dungeons & Dragons, 1983, LJN plate 08. Goblin from Dungeons & Dragons, 1983, LJN plate 09. Terrible Troll from Dungeons & Dragons, 1983, LJN A Dark Age of Infinite Scope By Luke Pullen mperor of the Fading Suns is a monster. Ancient, shambling; mostly forgotten. ELike most monsters, it’s also a reminder of something repressed. Emperor, for those not in the know, is a turn-based 4x – that is: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate – strategy game set in the universe of the Fading Suns role- playing game. A mélange of Herbert, Wolff and Simmons, Fading Suns is known for having everything: mystery, intrigue, aliens, demons, monsters, priests with psychic powers and knights riding spaceships. Sometimes this works – scheming nobles and religious ascetics coming face to face with nightmarish demons that may or may not be advanced technology – and sometimes you get badly drawn aliens and camp Herbertese. The kitsch is piled high and it decays, stinks, takes on a life of its own. Surprising things take root. The galactic dark age standard, for example, is taken seriously and used to great effect. In a sense, this is an anti-Dune: where Herbert’s toffs and mystics willingly discarded machines, Fading Suns’ teeming humanity fell screaming from its iron caul as the great and the good of the universe hoarded guns and intellectual property. The new reality is infected, alien and terrible. The nightmares of the preterit world still linger, and sorcerers who traffic with these demons can unleash catastrophe, wittingly or otherwise. Plagues ravage the galaxy. Sinister monsters, visible and invisible, lurk at the edges of understanding. The masses are kept poor and ignorant, and the magnates who would protect them are often little better than the dangers they fear. The suns themselves are disappearing one by one, driving people to hopelessness and superstition. In such a galaxy, the Orthodox Church offers consolation for a re-enchanted world and protection from its devils and princes. The dark age of the Fading Suns universe might not be a fair account of the twilight of Rome (interestingly, Fading Suns’ universe is centred around “Byzantium Secundus”, the new Constantinople, as well as the Islamic and Germanic models chosen by Herbert), but it does a good job of encouraging players to empathise with institutions that modernity holds in contempt. Create a mediaeval setting and players might roll their eyes at the ignorant Church with its hypocrisy and persecutions and preening nobles with their serfs and vendettas; but in a universe in which demons and miracles seem to be real, no one cares for ordinary people but the Church. And when the end may truly be nigh, priests and heroes, while pernicious, may well be humanity’s last best hope. This goes for Emperor as well. The Church’s habit of proscribing technologies as “odious to humanity” and sending squads of bright-eyed, flamethrower-toting zealots to crucify those who research them and burn the evidence is a nice twist on the standard tech tree. On the one hand, as a player, these proscriptions seem like arbitrary and irritating obstacles to the will to power. On the other: that’s the point. Civilization has trained me to view relentless technological progress as my God-given right and duty. When the Church insists that, actually, no, I don’t have a right to transform my conscripts into cybernetic monstrosities or bombard my enemies with pustulator artillery, it might just have a point. There’s nothing like having your researchers crucified by Avestite Inquisitors to make you reconsider your scientific priorities. Emperor further emphasizes the Church’s perspective by writing its entire codex (the equivalent of the “civilopedia”) in the voice of a certain Bishop Holst, who offers a mix of catechism, sardonic commentary on his Church’s occasional over-zealousness, and frank horror at the grotesque weapons employed by the galaxy’s secular powers. This is a universe in which humanity has reaped the rewards of uninhibited technological progress in the service of authority, and the Church preserves the memory of these stigmata. Emperor, then, can be read as a morbid reminder of just how much Western moderns (and their videogames) take certain ideas for granted: progress, rationalism, individual and societal betterment and empowerment. That said, I don’t want to overstate the sympathies of the source material. Fading Suns, the pen and paper game, describes itself as a “passion play,” but it also emphasizes the attempt of the new Emperor Alexios to escape feudal strictures, discern the cause of the fading suns and return to something like liberal progress. Emperor, which makes its players warlords during the brutal civil war before the pen and paper game’s imperial restoration, is necessarily more cynical. Perhaps it would be better to say: the game is about the tension between hope for progress (and despair over its fragility) versus the dark forces it unleashes. The Byzantine references are significant here: Fading Suns’ Constantinople is imagined, as it often is in reality, as the bridge between stereotyped Western provincialism and Islamic sophistication, simultaneously brilliant and degenerate, the last remnant of the glorious Republic (Fading Suns had one of those, too). There is another sense in which Emperor is a monster. A “monster” is a type of wargame. Monsters are defined by sheer mass; they take a maximalist approach to everything, piling on rules, units and terrain until the result is a nigh-unmanageable mess. The time investment required to actually play a monster means that they tend to be poorly tested, with balance and flow often lurching off in strange directions. I can’t accurately judge how well balanced Emperor is, because I simply haven’t played it enough; but there is something enchanting about its ludicrous ambition. This isn’t a game, it’s an entire galaxy. Each planet has its own hex-map to be conquered and developed, Civilization-style, and there are dozens of them. There are hordes of similar but slightly different units, whole tech trees worth of tanks, infantry in power armor, psychic terror troops and genetically engineered horrors to shuffle around the galaxy as you expand your influence. There is a diplomatic sub-game of trading council votes in order to elect a regent who can then appoint other players to imperial offices, each with its own perks. The Church and the merchant League have their own diplomatic offices. You will never lack things to do in this game. More likely, you will be overwhelmed. Even Earth is there, though the so-called Holy Terra is ruled by the Church. I think this is symbolic of the game as a whole. Someone had to map Earth into the game, build its cities and resources, create a Church AI to command its formidable defences and yet there is very little reason for any player to interact with it. In a more modern design, the Church, like the alien Symbiotes or the planetary maps in general, would be abstracted and simplified. Except, modelling the temporal power of the Church in with the same mechanics as everything else makes it more real somehow. You can conquer Earth, even though you probably won’t. This is a game enraptured by its own fiction, one that refuses to compromise. As with the equally ambitious Star Citizen, enthusiasm for the setting seems to drive the game’s systems to the point where it becomes a fetish. It’s childish and a little embarrassing to watch, but it’s also somehow glorious, and I think it raises questions about just what games are or should be, and why we play them. If Emperor is a bad game, is it bad because it’s not enough of a game, or because it’s pure game? Frankenstein was repulsed by his patchwork creation, the fruit of his fanatical pursuit of science and progress as he imagined them. Some monsters run amok; others are left to decay. U Southern Blood By Leo Johnson s a comic reader growing up in a small Alabama town, I never saw a comic set Asomewhere familiar to me. The Avengers were too busy in New York, while Batman was busy saving Gotham and Superman was preoccupied with Metropolis, all places too big and too far removed from my home to really mean anything to me. The occasional comic that did take place in the South rarely used it as more than a stereotype, if it ever left those prominent Southern cities like New Orleans or Houston. There was never a real look at those small Southern communities that I knew. Then came Southern Bastards. Southern Bastards is something different than most books. It’s created by two of the seemingly rare Southerners in comics, Jason Aaron and Jason Latour, with Aaron hailing from Jasper, Alabama, and Latour from Charlotte, North Carolina. Their own years spent growing up in the South gave them the history to accurately create a fictional small Southern town that captured all the beauty and ugliness of the real thing. But it still raised the question, could comics accurately portray these small hamlets, these places of contradictions, where Southern hospitality and deep prejudice were both still at work? When the first issue finally arrived, it was like a revelation. As someone who’s never quite fit into the rural South, as an atheist and a nerd, I have an interesting relationship with my hometown. It’s both one of my favorite places and a personal hell. I love so much about that place, but couldn’t wait to get away from it. Aaron and Latour crafted a comic that is as much a love letter to the South as it is scathing hate mail. It embodied everything you love about growing up there, but touched on all the things you’d rather forget as well. It’s the most realistic portrayal of Southern town as scary as that is. In the back matter of the first issue, it became clear Aaron had a deep love of the South, but also a fear and repulsion of it. He summed it up nicely with, “I love the South. The South also scares the living shit out of me.” And this was how I felt about my hometown for the longest time. It was small, comfortable, intimate. Not a bad place to grow up, but it’s not somewhere you’d want to spend the rest of your life. It’s a place you’ll remember fondly, but fear to go back. Latour was angry at all those who made him be ashamed of the South. “So this book is for them. The assholes you might think Southerners are. The ones we’re afraid we might really be. This book is designed to bury them sons of bitches. To spit on their graves. Because I fucking hate those bastards with every part of me. Because I love the South with all I’ve got.” It was only as I traveled more that I began to see this perspective. Most anywhere you go outside the South, you tell them you’re from Alabama and you get some funny looks. People may talk a little slower, ask you to say things a couple times because of your accent and almost always get surprised when you’re well-read and well-spoken. The South, and Southerners, aren’t what most people think, when you really get down to it. In the first issues of Southern Bastards, Earl Tubb is incredibly reluctant to ever return to his home in Craw County, opting to move to the “big city” of Birmingham instead. That’s the charm of the South’s small towns: they’re often idyllic in a way. Rich in nature, modest and comfortable. You know most of the people. You have family there. The sights are like coming home. As you age, though, these things don’t hold near the allure they once did. They become tainted. You discover how an isolated town can become hell. For the most part the rural South is a great place to grow up, but not a great place to live. Yet it somehow manages to keep many people there. It’s like a black hole, keeping you trapped in its gravity as your life slowly wastes away. I’ve escaped it, having moved away from my hometown about six years ago, but I can already see it catching my friends. They get stuck in a rut, slowly ending up in a dead end life in a small town, never able to leave the comfort to escape the stagnation. Even as someone who’s escaped it, and is glad to do so, I can’t help but be pulled back in every year or two for a visit. Once Earl Tubb gets back home in Southern Bastards, the violence begins. Violence isn’t a rare thing in places like these. Many people own guns. Most know how to use them fairly well. They sometimes get used for more than hunting. Violence in the South often isn’t very personal. Sure, a fist to the face is fairly personal, but it’s often not meant to be down here. The violence is often reactionary, especially when blood runs hot. With so many dry counties, Southern states have more than their fair share of drunken brawls. Violence is in our history. Most every inch of land we call home was taken from some group of people or another. My hometown, Jacksonville, is built upon an old Native American village, with prominent buildings on the town square reportedly sitting where the chief’s residence once was. The Civil War defined decades of our history. Civil Rights defined a few more. For all the Southern hospitality – which I sincerely believe is a real thing – no one can hate like a Southerner and few places continue to hold onto that hate like the South does. It’s a beautiful place, but one with a dark past, offsetting Southerners polite nature with a long history of bigotry. It’s a primal place, but one with a deep sense of spirituality. That’s the “duality of the Southern thing”. The South is exactly what it seems, and not at all. The South, in short, is anything but simple. It’s a strange relationship, but the South is a strange place. And this is exactly where Southern Bastards gets things so right. This can be an ugly place, and it’s only after embracing ugliness that you can gain a richer appreciation for anything. After years away from my hometown and my own struggle to embrace my roots, Southern Bastards helped me realize that there’s something special about the South, even for all its dirty past. As much as I wanted to get away from my hometown, I still can’t leave the South. It’s beautiful and scarred, spiritual and primal, and while I hate it like nothing else, I’m also pretty sure I’ll still be here when I die. It’s a place full of Southern Bastards and I guess I’m one of them. U Alec Kubas-Meyer writes about movies and videogames on the internet. He also makes movies, but he doesn’t make videogames. People tell him he tries too hard. They’re probably right. You can follow him on the internet in general at alecjkm.net and on Twitter at @Alecjkm.

Stu Horvath is the editor in chief of Unwinnable. He reads a lot, drinks whiskey and spends his free time calling up demons. Sometimes, he plays with toys and calls it “photography.” Follow him on Twitter @StuHorvath.

Luke Pullen is lost in time and space. He sometimes writes words. Gaze upon the abyss with him @gorice_xii.

Leo Johnson has been writing about comics for a few years, with varying degrees of success. He can currently be found at the Eisner-nominated Multiversity Comics and on Twitter @LFLJ.

Illustrations: Cover: Unknown Five Stars: Illustration by Geo Images Toybox II: Stu Horvath A Dark Age of Infinite Scope: Photo courtesy of NASA Southern Blood: Illustrations from Southern Bastards, courtesy of Jason Latour and Image Comics CLICK A PLANETARY BODY TO GO TO A DESTINATION

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