Unwinnable Weekly Issue
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UNWINNABLE WEEKLY ISSUE #### INNA W B L N E U 20 W E E K L Y In this card, I see your past. In this card, I see your present. And in this card I see...oh. Oh no. Copyright © 2014 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 TWENTY Contributors Luke Pullen Shawn Alexander Allen Marjorie Jensen Aurelius Ventro CONTENTS From the Desk of the EIC Backward Flow by Luke Pullen Practice by Shawn Alexander Allen Cards are Told: The Skills of Poker and Tarot by Marjorie Jensen Dear Space Marine by Aurelius Ventro Biographies and Illustrations From the Desk of the Editor in Chief Whenever you try to trace its outline, it changes, splits, grows, sloughs off parts and creates new ones. It shrieks and wails and blubbers and screams incoherently. It flails appendages blindly, independently of each other. It is immune to reason and it seems to want just one thing: to consume. If you think I am going to talk, yet again, about John Carpenter’s The Thing, you’re mistaken. I am talking about GamerGate. I will spare you the details of its origin and its history. If you’re reading this, you already know. It isn’t worth recounting. This movement that claims to be about ethics with one mouth and harasses women out of their homes with another. It espouses a desire for truth and honesty while distorting facts to fit elaborate conspiracy theories. Its partisans shout that they want change, but GamerGate will never change anything. It will never make anything. It cannot create. All GamerGate can do is destroy. The way it has tried to destroy the lives and careers of Zoe Quinn, Leigh Alexander, Jenn Frank, Dina Abou Karam, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu and more. The way it systematically silences discussions it disagrees with. The way it seeks to rob journalistic websites of advertisers through a coordinated, bad faith letter-writing campaign. The way it exhausts its opponents with endless, senseless gibbering. The way it fills us with rage we’re too reasonable to dump out on strangers. It whispers with a falsely sweet voice; it tries to sooth, like a siren, like a leucrocotta, like a manticore. We have to stop listening. We must not fight it on its own terms. It sings a carrion song to cover up the roar of a thresher. All that awaits us there is a storm of teeth and claws. It is dying. That is why is mewls so loudly. It is desperate to lure fresh prey into its clutches. Let it starve. The world knows what it really is. We know what it really is. Let it crawl out of its hole, into the light. Let it come to us. Or else, let it stay down there in the dark. All the hate and delusion will focus inward, devouring itself. It will be hard at first. The sounds coming from that pit will be horrible. But eventually, there will be silence again. * * * We’ve got four great stories for you this week. First is Luke Pullen’s amazing look at Frank Herbert’s Dune and the games it inspired. Shawn Alexander Allen gives us a look into last year’s Practice conference at NYU Gamecenter - if this doesn’t make you want to go to this year’s in November, nothing will. Marjorie Jensen draws comparisons between Tarot and Poker in our cover story and Space Marine Aurelius Ventro is back from the future with another advice column. Got something to say? Say it to my email at [email protected]. Stu Horvath, Kearny, New Jersey October 22, 2014 Backward Flow By Luke Pullen he trike is a pixellated metal cock crawling across the desert. It penetrates Tthe darkness at the edge of my vision, tracing a tiny path across the planet’s golden skin, dark granite clefts, orange rashes of spice blistered with red sores ready to burst. It lifts the black veil from the desert’s contours so that my fleet of greedy harvesters can crawl to the spice. It finds my enemies so that I can crush them with steel tracks and bury them under fire until nothing at all remains, no color staining the sand but my own. When my city is a vast concrete scab swollen with spice and my enemies are mapped and surrounded, the trike keeps pushing. I force it mindlessly against every remaining mystery until the map is complete. The trike is painted in Atreides blue. Atreides are the good guys, so they are blue. In fact, blue is not the color of the Atreides at all. My Dune education was backwards, starting with Westwood’s Dune II and ending, recently, with Frank Herbert’s novel. The original, it turns out, is full of surprises for someone who grew up on the games. In this case: Atreides wear black uniforms emblazoned with red hawks. Their flag is black, green and red. The change doesn’t surprise me. Can you really have good guys in black and red uniforms? Isn’t the flag a bit Middle-Eastern for a personification of Anglo-Saxon power and virtue? Herbert’s book bristles with these little barbs of disquiet. The trike is a striped metal condom encasing nothing. I’m at the murky dregs of adolescence, mind at sea on a tide of antidepressants and unable to feel or think. My waking moments are Dune 2000 or Diablo II or Alpha Centauri. At least, these games are the concrete colonies on my mind’s terrain, the paving laid over a field of unhealed wounds. Blood and terror and unrequited love are welling up somewhere within, but I can coax the three-wheeled rover out once again and make Arrakis sing. The voice of this planet is passive-aggressive: chimes and moans and growls, sand that will keep blasting against concrete until only the desert remains. The planet is distant. It broods. I dimly understand that my relationship with Arrakis is an abusive one, but I keep pushing. When I eventually see David Lynch’s film, the drug-addicted scrotum monster he uses for a Guild navigator will tell me what I already know: that the spice is something terrible, stolen by my harvesters from a place that will always hide secrets just beyond my vision, no matter how far I send the trike. I realize now that Frank Keplacki’s score for Dune II and Dune 2000 has more in common with the gilded luster of Lynch’s baroque abomination than Herbert’s stilted prose, but it remains true to the mythos: arabesque pastiche mashed with bloody animus, half paean and half dirge. Herbert seems to revel in the mystical and antiquarian, but he also surprises and teases. ake young Paul Atreides. Clearly the hero. He is the Kwisatz Haderach, Tthe chosen one gifted with prophetic powers and destined to overthrow the emperor, and he follows the traditional arc of the hero’s journey, being thrust from his sheltered aristocratic life into the planet Arrakis’ desert wastes, from whence he will return at max level, with points in mind control and messianic prophesy, to assume his rightful place as Padishah Emperor. Paul’s journey involves an initiation into the society of the Fremen, obscure tribes of the desert. This initiation, like everything in Fremen society, is violent and unforgiving: Paul must fight to the death with a member of the tribe for the right to survive. This contest has no relation to any real desert-dwelling society, but it fits ideas about the “savagery” of non-sedentary peoples. The Fremen are quite a strange concoction, Beduin as noble savages imagined by Thomas Hobbes: one with nature, physically perfect and relentlessly violent. Not only are they engaged in constant internecine warfare, but, in a eugenic twist, they destroy the “weak,” whom they see as a burden to survival in the unforgiving wastes. Paul’s initiation is also a cliché of the pulp tradition going back to cowboy romances, not to mention nineteenth century “racial science.” Paul’s fight reveals his superior, aristocratic savagery to the simple natives. As an upper- class white man, Paul isn’t just better at being civilized; he is better at being uncivilized. Naturally, he eventually becomes not only the leader of his adoptive tribe, but the messiah of all the Freman tribes, after using ethnic superiority to explain the need for unity against their Harkonnen oppressors. The Fremen were already the perfect fascist army; they awaited only their bloody white savior, their Lawrence of Arabia in Furs, to show up in an SS uniform and lead a jihad against the urban interior. There are those barbs again. Unlike the generic pulp hero, who reaches his logical fruition in the late Robert Heinlein’s solipsistic Oedipal fantasies of self-authoring, Paul’s relationship with his parents is more conventionally Oedipal. The Kwisatz Haderach is a project by the mysterious Bene Gesserit Sisterhood to unite some Jungian-sounding masculine and feminine principles into a pliable organic superweapon, and Paul is its premature launch, one generation too soon, due to his mother choosing to have a boy instead of the girl she was supposed to.