UNWINNABLE MONTHLY Volume 6, Issue 7 - July 2019

ISSN 2572-5572 UNWINNABLE MONTHLY Volume 6, Issue 7 - July 2019

DEVOTION REVIEW BOMBING • THE SIMPSONS TAPPED OUT U N W I N N A B L E

Monthly

117 Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath

Managing Editor | Amanda Hudgins

Senior Editor | Astrid Budgor

Design | Stu Horvath

Asst. Editor | Jason McMaster

Social Editor | Melissa King

Copyright © 2019 by Unwinnable LLC Unwinnable All rights reserved. This book or any 820 Chestnut Street portion thereof may not be reproduced Kearny, NJ 07032 or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission www.unwinnable.com of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For more information, email: [email protected] Unwinnable LLC does not claim copyright of the screenshots and promotional Subscribe | Store | Submissions imagery herein. Copyright of all screenshots within this publication are owned by their respective companies This machine kills fascists. Shortform a brief introduction to the issue Letter from the Editor | Stu Horvath revisiting stories, new and old Backlog | Gavin Craig must-watch streaming documentaries Documentary Sunday | Megan Condis fresh beats for your month Noteworthy Hip Hop | Noah Springer searching for the reason behind the collective lol Memescape | Alyse Stanley where videogames meet real life Collision Detection | Ben Sailer the intersection of games and world history Checkpoint | Corey Milne ridiculing and revering everything Rookie of the Year | Matt Marrone finding deeper meaning Another Look | Yussef Cole architecture and games Forms in Light | Justin Reeve a monthly soapbox Here’s the Thing | Rob Rich bucking the consensus No Accounting for Taste | Adam Boffa art, and words about making it Artist Spotlight | Seb Wescott

Longform the truth behind Devotion’s review bombing Silly Old Bear | Dick Page a more perfect Simpsons’ city Springfield Forever | Noah Springer a developer Q&A, sponsored Revving the Engine: THE KREMER MUSEUM |

Contributors From the Desk of the Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath

uly is here, bringing with it fireworks, god awful heat and a new season of JStranger Things, which I am sure you’ve probably already binged. How about a new Unwinnable Monthly to read in a single sitting? Our cover story is a wild one. Dick Page looks at the recent controversy surrounding the Taiwanese developed game Devotion and digs into the things Western audiences missed while having a chuckle thinking about how Chinese president Xi Jinping resembles a certain cartoon bear. Seb Wescott’s rather nightmarish cover gives you some sense of the tangle of threads you’ll find within. Seb’s work isn’t always so dark, by the way. You can see amusing images of birds trying to work cell phones in our Artist Spotlight this month. Our second feature, by Noah Springer, is a short musing on the mobile game The Simpsons Tap Out that winds up touching on interesting questions about the digital worlds we visit and create through videogames. In the columns, I’d like to welcome Justin Reeve to the fold. Justin has been on a bit of a tear recently in Unwinnable and I am psyched to have him contributing regularly to the Monthly now, looking mainly at architecture in videogames. This month, his column is about how people form mental maps of cities and how the developers of The Witcher 3’s city of Novigrad proves cities don’t have to be physical for the phenomenon to work. Gavin Craig repeats himself and wonders what that is all about. Megan Condis ponders the appeal of TV game shows. Noah Springer submits several new hip hop albums for your approval. Alyse Stanley checks out a choose your own adventure-style Twitter thread. Ben Sailer revisits the Oddworld franchise ahead of the release of its latest installment. Corey Milne succumbs to Nintendo nostalgia despite having only limited exposure to Nintendo products in his youth. Matt Marrone wonders if his long time Words With Friends partners think he is dead. Yussef Cole digs deep into Evangelion (a piece that resonates a bit with Gavin’s musing on repetition). Rob Rich remembers comedian Mitch Hedberg. Adam Boffa revisitsNausicaä . And that rounds things out. Thanks for checking us out. We’ll be back in a couple weeks with another issue of Exploits. Until then, stay cool gang!

Stu Horvath Kearny, New Jersey July 12, 2019 Backlog | Gavin Craig

Repeating Being

epetition, I think, is a thing that even those of us who find meaning and Reven transcendence in the idea struggle with. What is repeating? Why do we repeat ourselves? Why do we do and say the same things again and again, collectively and as individuals, even when these things are distasteful? Even, and sometimes especially, when these things are reprehensible?

* * *

Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans is a novel of repeating. Over its more than 900 pages the same few words are reused so often that when an umbrella is described as purple the word is so vivid that it is almost hallucinatory. After pages and pages of spiraling gerunds, the visual center of my brain lit up and I could almost swear that I could see the umbrella.

* * *

Western religion seems to struggle with repeating. Christianity, ostensibly a religion of historical singularity — one person lived once and died once to move humanity out of one state of relation with divinity into another — is enacted through repetition (literally or symbolically, depending on the denomination). Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me. The church year repeats — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time — world without end at least, of course, until the world ends. * * *

Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard records a pilgrimage the author undertook in 1973 to a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas. Matthiessen meditates frequently and richly on samsara, the endless cycle of birth, suffering and rebirth from the which the only release is enlightenment and nirvana. He also acknowledges that this journey is almost certainly something he will only complete once in this lifetime, that he is seeing things he may never see again.

* * *

In The Making of Americans, the narrator advances a theory of personality stating, in part, that being is repeating being. We are the things that we do again and again, and our being is the repeating of these things. To love someone is to love their repeating, the things that they are and do again and again, and most of the time we do. We love people for the things they are and continue to be. It is more difficult to be novel and to love novelty. It is a challenge to love the things we are not and may yet become.

* * *

In Russian Doll, Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia is trapped in a repeating cycle of a few days starting with her 36th birthday and ending with a variety of sudden deaths after which she awakens again at a party thrown by her friends. Eventually, after discovering that there is at least one other person trapped in the cycle with her, Nadia’s release of her traumatic past and compassion for her companion are rewarded not with understanding — neither she nor the audience ever really finds out the exact nature of what is happening or why — but with release. The cycle, we are given to understand, ends. Unless we, the audience, load up the first episode and enact it again.

* * * We can love what Nadia is. We are not (yet) asked whether we can love what she may become.

* * *

Repeating is difficult. When I readThe Making of Americans, which reuses the same several dozen words, often in the same phrases, across several hundred pages, an attentive teacher asked how many repetitions were in the book. I looked, and re-looked, and was forced to conclude that if repetition meant repetition without variation that there were no repetitions in the novel.

* * *

Learning is at least in part a function of repetition. In the kitchen, we cut our first onion, and then our second. In the film Julie and Julia, Meryl Streep’s Julia Child, then a novice in Paris, chops onions until the pile rises to what seems to be a foot above the table. A blogger who recreated the scene estimated that it required 30 pounds of onions. This estimate may be spurious, and the scene itself apocryphal, but anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen or attended culinary school will tell you that developing knife skill and speed requires a lot of cutting. We play a lot of catch to learn to throw. We draw a lot of hands. We fold a lot of paper. We build. We crash. We build again. We crash again. We get better. We read again. We read better. We love again. We love better.

* * *

I have not yet learned what I mean by repeating. I will try again. U Documentary Sunday | Megan Condis

hy are game shows so very comforting? Perhaps some of the reasons Ware aesthetic: the hypnotically repetitive theme songs, the pleasantly avuncular hosts with their corny jokes and catch phrases, the ritualistic evocation of The Board or The Wheel or whatever technical apparatus serves as the focal gimmick of the program in question. But I think that they are also comforting for ideological reasons in that they represent a tiny slice of the most idealized (or perhaps the most naïve) version of the American dream. Most classic game shows like Jeopardy! or Wheel of Fortune revolve around ordinary people being rewarded for performing ordinary feats, provided that they can supplement their abilities with a little bit of moxie and a little bit of luck. All the while, the hosts, unlike the bosses and managers that permeate our working lives, are cheering them on, eager to compensate the contestants lavishly, crossing their fingers in hopes of awarding the biggest, most exciting prizes instead of looking for excuses to undercut them or to set them squabbling amongst their fellows for scraps. And so, to viewers, although the likelihood of ever setting foot on a game show stage feels vanishingly slim, we continue to tune in week after week just to vicariously experience the joy of being plucked out of the crowd and given the chance to succeed on our own merits, absent the corrupting influences of office politics or the constantly looming threat of impending layoffs or the heavy, burdensome gaze of a micromanaging administration bent on achieving efficiency above all else. I argue that this evocation of the spirit of fairness and justice lies at the core of the popularity of the television game show. As such, game show scandals, of which there have been plenty since the origins of the genre in the 1930s, arouse conflicting emotions in us, depending on the source of the scandal. Some, like the controversial attempt by the producers of The $64,000 Question to rig the game against female contestant Joyce Brothers in 1955 by sabotaging her with extra difficult questions (which, much to their chagrin, she was able to answer, becoming the first woman in the show’s history to win its titular ultimate cash prize) or the intentional scripting of outcomes on shows like Twenty-One and Dotto in the late 50s, raised the ire of viewers by stripping away a bit of the illusion of meritocracy that made these programs so popular in the first place. Others, like the infamous case of the contestant on Press Your Luck who, with the help of a VCR, memorized the supposedly random pattern of turn-ending “Whammies” to take home a record $110,237 in prizes, surprise and delight us with their cleverness and their willingness to go the extra mile to beat the house fair and square. 2017’s Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much (Wallis), on the other hand, goes one step further, profiling a man who spent years cracking The Price is Right only to use his knowledge in service of his fellow contestants. Ted Slauson is the perfect mix of studious geek and savant who just wants to see someone take home a big prize, even if it isn’t him. He obviously has a genuine affection for the show and he proudly shows off his home-made study tools (a database-turned-computer game complete with the show’s signature 70s fonts and cheesy sound effects). Surprisingly, the folks working behind the scenes on the show seemingly have a genuine affection for him, even after he helped a Showcase Showdown contestant make a “guess” that turned out to be correct down to the exact dollar. Producer Roger Dobkowitz and long-time host Bob Barker both show up for interviews where they remember this good-natured pest as a loyal friend and true, thus further cementing the idea that these people are on the little guy’s side after all. In other words, not unlike the game show that it chronicles, watching The Perfect Bid is a lot like staring at the poster in the office featuring a kitten telling you to just “hang in there.” It is a bit of feel good fluff that disintegrates if you think about it too hard but provides you with a sense of pleasant hopefulness in the meantime. Just make sure that, if you are going to watch it, you budget an extra hour or so for the Price is Right-themed YouTube rabbit hole that you will inevitably fall down as soon as the credits roll. U Noteworthy Hip Hop | Noah Springer

ast month, I introduced myself to all of you beautiful, talented Unwin- Lnable readers. This month, I’m hoping you’ll tell me a little about yourself. Who are you? Where are you from? What kind of hip hop tickles your fancy? And, probably most importantly, who should I be covering that I missed? Have I been sleeping on somebody you love, or do you have an album that would other Unwinnable readers would love? Hit me up on Twitter @noahjspringer or on my website www.noahspringer.com and let me know! I’d love to know what music you guys are into, and whether you’re digging my tastes!

Injury Reserve – Injury Reserve I was disappointed that Injury Reserve didn’t blow up off of their debut studio album last month, but I guess I can’t force fame. Regardless, Injury Reserve marks the trio’s third project and it continues their tradition of grimy but clear production, mixed with pop aesthetics and playfully traded verses. They are strictly a product of an Arizona-suburban culture that is inundated with hip hop through the internet, but it makes their music distinctly contemporary. They ride the edge between experimental and pop hip hop, and maybe if they fell off a little further into the pop side of that ridge, they would get the clout they deserve.

Rico Nasty X Kenny Beats – Anger Management This short EP starts out hard and doesn’t let up. Rico spits angry verses over industrial(ish) production from the boards of Kenny Beats. Her raspy delivery and Ken- ny’s aggressive beats make Anger Management an un- compromising album, if a short one. Rico blasts us with energy, but it feels a little different from her previous work. She’s evolving, and we get to come with her on this journey, even if it only lasts 1,125 seconds.

Zilla Rocca – 96 Mentality The dream of the 90s is alive in South Philly? Well, it is at least in the mind of Zilla Rocca. 96 Mentality is an unapologetically 90s, east-coast rap album. Nobody is messing with autotune; nobody is crooning odes to their lovers. Rocca spits hard bars over boom bap beats, backed with big horns and a golden-age aesthetic. Not that I even have a problem with autotune or crooners particularly, but sometimes, it’s nice to relive the feel- ings of a classic era of hip hop with the energy of today. giallo point – Loop Drama If Humphrey Bogart starred in a Jordan Peele movie, Loop Drama would be an ideal choice for the soundtrack. giallo point’s noir-inspired samples and instrumentals create an eerie, paranoid vibe, perfect for a smoky bar with a neon sign that says BLUES. Jazz horns and dusty drums echo out of back rooms, while ominous voices give instructions to men in trench coats. Noir and hip hop may seem like a strange combination, but Loop Dra- ma proves that odd couplings can make for dope beats.

Psalm One – Flight of the Wig Flight of the Wig is album that speaks to this moment. Psalm One attacks all of the standard targets of politically conscious hip hop (white supremacy, government oppression), but she also works in targets that are often overlooked by the standard bearers of politics in hip hop. Psalm One is here for the LBGTQ+ community and the feminists and for anyone who doesn’t fit into the standard hip hop narratives, and she’ll let you know when you’re on the wrong side of history. She speaks to the now, but her lyricism and messages are timeless. U Memescape | Alyse Stanley

Choose Your Own Twitter Thread

hile memes have always required a certain amount of interactivity W– after all, if someone dabs in the middle of the forest and no one’s around to see it, is it still sad? – more and more seem to rely on a collective experience. Especially when there’s more than one outcome. There was the infamous dress incident a few years back. Then Yanny and Laurel tore families and friends apart, dividing the nation so thoroughly even the White House’s PR team felt compelled to weigh in. Instead of for a laugh, people shared these out of curiosity, eager to see each other’s answers and ready to launch into argument if it didn’t match their own. Recognizing vine references or the latest copypasta may signal you’re “in” on the internet’s newest inside joke, but it doesn’t necessarily start a conversation. “White and gold or blue and black?” does. If you subscribe to memetics – the study of, well, memes essentially – an idea’s chance at virality boils down to three elements: longevity, fecundity and replicability. But just because a meme has the capacity to go viral doesn’t mean it will, much to the dismay of public relations managers and marketing agencies. That deciding factor usually comes down to something much harder to gauge: what role it plays in our collective consciousness. When a choose-your-own-adventure style Twitter thread went viral last month, it struck me as the natural evolution of these more divisive memes. Especially after Netflix’s recent “Bandersnatch” special proved audiences are still every bit as captivated by the genre as they were in the ‘80s and ‘90s, back when you’d be hard-pressed to find a library that didn’t have entire shelves packed with the things. Though it’s much harder to cheat when I can’t simply flip forward and sneak a peek at which choices will leave me mangled at the bottom of some pit or gobbled up by snakes. The thread, originally posted by the wonderfully named user @CORNYASSBITCH, puts you in the shoes of Beyonce’s personal assistant for the day. Straightforward choices about what the Queen Bee should eat or do quickly spiral into elaborate fever dreams if you can manage not to get fired. I wasn’t so lucky. On my first try, I got canned shortly after convincing Bee to wile away the hours before a red carpet event by getting thoroughly wasted. In retrospect, I’ll admit it wasn’t the smartest choice. While writing this column, I learned that other folks have tried to incorporate similar choose-your own-adventure endeavors into Twitter’s format, though not quite as seamlessly. Part of the ingenuity of this Beyonce thread is just that: the game exists entirely in a series of threads, all woven together into a single continuous experience that I can only imagine took hours to construct. Over the years, users have tried using bit.ly links, polls and individual Twitter accounts for the different outcomes of players’ choices, but the results feel more like someone manipulated the platform through sheer force instead of creating an experience native to its design. In subsequent attempts at being Beyonce’s assistant, I caused a horrific plane crash after deciding to take off without the crew, discovered I was actually kidnapping the superstar and the whole “assistant” schtick was just a drug-induced hallucination and I helped her take Jay-Z’s ass to Red Lobster for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who’s listened to “Formation.” The thread has nearly 100,000 retweets, and with how funny the writing is, I completely understand why. There’s also a lovely irony in so many people delighting in role-playing on a social media platform, a place where you can literally be anyone anytime you damn well please. Then again, just like when these stories were bound by pages instead of character limits, it’s fun to compare with other players to see how they did. Figure out what endings y’all might have missed, spot a few easter eggs. Except when it happens in real time on a global stage like Twitter, the scale feels just a bit bigger than I remember it being at my local library. U Collision Detection | Ben Sailer

Abe’s Oddysee, Ahead of its Time

he most remarkable thing about the PlayStation Classic is how literally Teveryone agrees it was a weak cash-in attempt that failed to cash in. This is evidenced by the fact that its hit $29 (down from $99 last fall) at some retailers, also signaling that it is, in fact, possible to get gaming’s internet hive mind to achieve consensus on something. While it’s a shame the retro console flopped despite the depth of the original PlayStation’s library, that also means now is the perfect time to grab one cheap and revisit the endearing and sharply prescient Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. Originally released in 1997 as the first part of a five-part series, the game was well-received by critics and consumers alike, selling over one million copies and earning enough interest for a modern remaster titled Oddworld: New ‘N’ Tasty in 2014. However, as a 2D side-scroller hitting store shelves at a time when 3D looked like the only way forward, it was treated like a niche title and its sharp critique of capitalist excess and environmental degradation was largely overlooked. However, with direct sequel Oddworld: Soulstorm due out in 2020, it feels fitting today to revisit what the game was trying to say back then, while looking forward to where the story might go next. Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey tells the story of a Mudokon (a human-esque alien race) named Abe, who works for a meat processing company called Rupture Farms. When he discovers a new product they’re working on is made from Mudokons like himself, he resolves to escape the factory while freeing as many coworkers as possible. What plays out next is a HUD-less survivalist puzzle- solver similar to 16-bit classics Out of this World and Blackthorne (which had a similar mechanic of liberating your compatriots). Releasing a two-dimensional platformer in the wake of Super Mario 64 was a bold move. The oversaturation of side-scrollers during the 16-bit era was still fresh in people’s memory, and it seemed like the world was moving on. An affable blue-collar alien with stitches through his mouth wasn’t exactly the type of protagonist mainstream audiences were used to either. It was difficult to make heads or tails out of the game on its surface, and unfortunately, most journalists didn’t make much effort to try. Making socio-economic issues core to the game’s narrative, on top of sticking with what was perceived as an outmoded genre, with a main character that didn’t obviously ooze charisma, was tripling down on creative risk-taking in a way that was rare at the time. Critics mostly missed how remarkable this was too, choosing to focus on the game’s mechanics without digging deep into its underlying message (though to their credit, IGN praised its puzzles and level design as forward-thinking).

This isn’t an attempt to drag those publications more than 20 years after these reviews were published. Rather, revisiting the critical reception of Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee helps illustrate both how far ahead of its time it was in 1997 and how the game’s themes were less at the forefront of public attention than they are today. While the deleterious effects of overconsumption and self-interest were very much in the public discourse, the volume of those conversations certainly feels louder and the tone more urgent today. In some ways, it would seem that current headlines have finally caught up with series co-creator Lorne Lanning’s vision. In a recent interview with Newsweek, Lanning explains how working for a large defense contractor in the 1980s motivated him to create art that railed against environmental destruction, militarism and self-interest. Given that Oddworld: Soulstorm is intended to be a direct continuation of the story that started with Abe’s Odyssey, where will that story go next, given modern hardware and a player base that’s more open to issue-oriented game narratives? That same interview may have offered some insights, as Lanning claims the series isn’t inherently politically driven. Taken at face value, that might sound like a PR-controlled statement to avoid misinterpretations around what “politics” are, keenly aware of the development costs the game will need to recoup. He further explains:

How do we create a character that you could see yourself in his shoes, and it’s not political? They’re finding out that their life was scheduled to be short, unfairly, for the profit and greed of someone else. Who can we identify with, if someone is just trying to stay alive, but they haven’t done anything wrong?

Even if the story doesn’t advocate for the advancement of any specific policy agenda, it’s difficult to parse its ideas from politics entirely. But it seems his point is the story isn’t about politics specifically, so much as how one chooses to cope with the consequences of unjust social, political and economic systems and decision-making they’re mostly powerless to change. When Abe realizes he and his friends are in danger, he takes action as a matter of survival, not making a statement. He’s just trying to get by. How do those of us living in powerful Western democracies relate to his character, then? We do have some degree of influence over political outcomes through electoral politics and conscious consumerism, though the former has limitations and the latter is in many ways an oxymoron. What does it say about me then if riding my bike instead of driving my car, using a reusable coffee cup and maybe calling my elected officials are the most radical things I do in a day, just to do my part? Those aren’t questions Mario ever prompted me to ask, and I’m not sure I can totally relate to Abe; maybe I haven’t done anything wrong, but I’m also not saving the world by myself. Playing a videogame on a novelty retro console isn’t going to get me closer to any answers either, but if Oddworld: Soulstorm can continue to provoke those thoughts, then maybe that’s enough to ask from a game whose time has arrived. U

Checkpoint | Corey Milne

SMASH

was never a Nintendo kid. I had a Gameboy, which I loved. Link’s Awakening Iis still the best Legend of Zelda game in my eyes. The handheld was my only consistent entry point into the Nintendo world; I never owned any of their home consoles. Back in 1996, I knew I had to get a PlayStation, but Nintendo doesn’t make games that just pass you by if you’re in this space. I was playing the newest Super Smash Bros on the Switch a couple of weeks ago for the first time and I wasn’t prepared for how nostalgic it made me feel. I had only ever played the original on the Nintendo 64 over at a friend’s house. We’d pull two tall backed dining room chairs up in front of their large screen and ensconce ourselves in the Smash, undisturbed by adults for hours on end. That was the beginning and end of my Super Smash Bros career. Fast forward to now and you’d find me in my living room, giving my flatmate (who also happens to be someone for who Nintendo passed them by) a rudimentary explanation on the intricacies of Smash Bro combat. “It’s the same!” I yelled at the screen. “It’s the same game!” I honestly don’t know how Nintendo do it. I know for a fact that mechanics and controls have obviously been tightened and refined over the game’s iterations since Smash 64. We don’t have to suffer the N64 controller anymore (anyone who defends that thing is more nostalgia addled that I am), but in my mind the Switch game plays the same as it did back in the early 2000s. For my first match, I selected my old main and childhood pal Kirby (Kirby is objectively Nintendo’s greatest character. Fight me.) and that was that. After two minutes of adjustment, the old muscle memory kicked in and I was swinging a mallet around with gusto. I hadn’t thought about that old friend of mine and all those sunny Spanish afternoons spent away from the sweltering sun for years. Mastering Pikachu’s anti-air game or a team of Samus-powered Kirbies fighting back high level AI opponents. I was able to recall the scene with startling clarity. The tangle of wires at our feet and the terrace door opening onto a distant view of the sea and into a world of sunburn and sweat. In my mind, Nintendo are only second to Disney when it comes to pure brand power. They have a roster of classic characters and a number of successful series that’d make any entertainment entity salivate. This is the work of carefully curated work over decades that can’t be replicated overnight. Who else remembers PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale, with it’s lineup of memorable characters like Killzone Dude and Spider-man villain reject Cole Electric Hands? Anyone? It’s that nostalgia that gets you. It’s warm and inviting, but it’s got you in a stranglehold. Nintendo are well aware of what they’ve got and they’ll tighten that grip, leaving you gasping and begging for more. I don’t own a Switch yet, but I plan to eventually. I was quite excited when they announced that Link’s Awakening was getting a full on remake. It’s like they had a list of people who still weren’t giving them money, saw my name and went “I know just the thing to hook this sucker.” Nintendo games already retail for a higher price than your average game and they never come down. £50 for a remake of a game from 1993 does give you pause for thought, because £50 for a game is a ludicrous amount of money whichever way you spin it. It doesn’t matter. I already know it’ll likely be one of my first Switch purchases, because Nintendo are too damn good at their own game. U Rookie of the Year | Matt Marrone

Am I Dead?

’ve been playing Words With Friends on my phone for about 7 years now, and Inaturally I’ve picked up a few regular opponents along the way – complete strangers whom I know little to nothing about but with whom I share an occasional holiday greeting or a compliment on a big score. Lately, though, the only game I play is Blades. I’m not admitting that with any sense of pride – the game, still in early access, is currently an unapologetic time-sink I’d be much better off without. But there’s one side effect of my Blades obsession that has only just occurred to me: Besides once or twice – and only accidentally – I hadn’t opened my Words With Friends app in months. Which means my biggest rivals, like Wilma48 and hugznkissa, haven’t gotten a backbreaking triple-word score from me in ages. Do they think I’m dead? Let’s focus on Wilma48. Home base: Somewhere in Canada. Age: Unknown. I beat her(?) more often than not, but we’re pretty evenly matched. She (let’s go with she) messages me more than I message her and when I’ve been away a couple days or forget to press “Rematch” she sometimes asks if I’m still interested in playing with her. I always say of course I am and then we go on battling, as usual. We’ve played 930 times, with me holding a 487-443 advantage, although we’ve tied a time or three, which the app doesn’t seem to list among our head-to-head stats. She’ll go on a run, I’ll counter with a slightly longer one and, before you know it, another few holidays have passed. Then I’m offline a day or two for whatever reason and I again reinforce my commitment to her. As the tiles turn. But I’d never been gone this long. Not by a mile. And I didn’t have any real desire to return. I had a Golden Chest opening in six hours or so and now that Blades exists in this world, I simply don’t have time for games with even the slightest hint of redeeming value. Does Wilma48 wonder about me? Do her periodic questions about my interest in playing with her point to an insecurity that makes her think she’s part of the reason I’ve stopped? Does she believe beating her got too easy and so I’ve moved on to tougher games with stiffer competition? I figured the only way to find out was to open the app and challenge her to a new match. Which I did. Precisely 32 hours ago as I type this. I also challenged hugznkissa, plus one other longtime adversary against whom I have a lifetime losing record. No response yet from any of them. And so now, after months away but less than two days of being ignored upon my return, I’m suddenly wondering ... are they dead? I know, I know. It’s highly unlikely all three of them kicked the bucket at the same time. And I’m pretty sure hugznkissa has a new profile photo. (Wilma48 has never had one.) So maybe I was wrong about Wilma48. Maybe she and hugznkissa and the others don’t wonder about me at all. Maybe after half a decade of playing elgrandem from New York on a sometimes daily basis they’ve moved on to other wordsmithing strangers. Elgrandem, who? In other words: Maybe I am dead. It’s not a pleasant thought. Still, Severio Scerius is about to finish enchanting my Dragonbone Axe of Breaching (with almost no chance of worthwhile bonuses). Then, it might be time to temper it. I guess also it would be time to start unlocking my Elder Chest, too, since that takes 12 godforsaken hours. There’s no way you’re reading this, Wilma48, but in case you ever were wondering, I’m not dead yet. And even if I am, it’s not your fault. You didn’t drive me away and you surely are not obligated to remember me if I get struck by a bus today and never open another app again. But if I manage to keep making it across Ditmars Blvd while playing Blades or writing Unwinnable Monthly columns in one piece, perhaps I’ll relaunch Words With Friends and try you again. Maybe even in the next 12 hours. Give or take a month. U Another Look | Yussef Cole

Evangelion and Endings

hen I was in high school, I assumed I’d be into anime forever. I was Wthe president of our small anime club, I drew anime characters in the margins of notebooks and built GeoCities web pages devoted to my favorite characters. I even planned on and ultimately wound up taking Japanese in college to better understand the shows I was so fond of. Then, in the midst of senior year, I started watching Gainax’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (via VHS bootlegs picked up during weekly trips to Elizabeth Street Mall in Chinatown). Two decades on, while I still follow Studio Ghibli’s latest and might catch an episode or two of whatever franchise is burning up everyone’s tongues, Neon Genesis Evangelion remains the last anime series that I seriously watched. It’s no coincidence, either, that Evangelion was the series that indirectly capped off an entire trunk of my media consumption habits. It’s a painful and often confused mess of a story that, regardless, succeeds at tearing down many of the assumptions and clichés long embraced by the massive industry that precedes it; making them all much tougher to swallow later on. It may borrow aplenty from the nerdy empowerment fantasies that anime famously trades in, with teen Mecha pilots saving the world from waves of monstrous “Angels.” But this superficial layer is worn away with every minute spent watching the distorted and fractured vision that makes up Evangelion’s twenty-six original episodes. It’s difficult not to be immediately bowled over by the many contradictions of the series. Because, in spite of the thoughtful material that it often descends into, Evangelion remains an anime-ass anime. As complex as the show’s characters ultimately wind up being, they still lean heavily on a bevy of cheap and clichéd traits. Its women are either hyperbolically sexy pin-ups or childlike, innocent Lolita dolls. The men are either emotionally muted walls of propriety and honor or infantilized, supplicant figures, harmlessly perverted, their drooling faces eagerly presented for aggrandized slaps. During intimate scenes at home the camera hovers perpetually in between Misato’s thighs or leers down Asuka’s crop tops. And in spite of the background of psychological torture that supports the show’s action moments, the robot fight scenes remain bombastic spectacles, largely peerless within the Mecha sub-genre. The power fantasy is still there, if you’re OK not turning it over and examining what’s wriggling underneath.

Watching as a teenager, many aspects of the show felt wrong, wrong enough to sour me on an entire media subculture, even. It wasn’t that I had any trouble parsing and enjoying the surface fantasy, catered as it was to my gaze and circumstances, but I couldn’t entirely swallow something so evidently twisted, so achingly hollow. It took coming back and watching the series again in my mid-thirties to truly wrap my head around everything Evangelion was doing, both as a commentary on genre and a psychological study of a group of painstakingly crafted, emotionally broken characters. Two decades afford plenty of room for contemplation and shifts in perspective. High school Yussef had posters of Rei Ayanami on his wall, and fantasized about her quiet mysteriousness, her surprisingly mature outlook. Observing her arc as an adult, I see a Frankensteined mommy figure, not a person so much as a walking traumatic memory kept aloft by her attachment to the living members of the Ikari clan. She certainly does have a bizarrely mature outlook for an adolescent girl, but this only serves to make her story all the more sad and horrifying. Evangelion twists the Lolita character cliché with Ayanami, putting an ancient and unknowable figure into the body of a child, joining the oedipal currents of maternal love and sexual fixation into one barely held together body, trying to absorb it all.

Asuka Langley Soryu is another character who has so dramatically shifted under my aging impression as to be nearly unrecognizable. Unlike Ayanami, Soryu is brazenly, messily, human, and the distinction defines her character in stark, painful relief. Her personality is shaped by her depressed and suicidal mother, who took her own life and left Soryu orphaned. This trauma leaves her insecure and cripplingly narcissistic, someone who craves the attention of those around her even as she pushes them away. Her behavior confounded my own teenage perspective as profoundly as it does Shinji Ikari’s in the show. She’s a character you can’t help but care about, but who won’t let herself be easily admired, or loved. When I first watched the series, Soryu was an emotional dead end. She remains that way if you don’t watch the movie released a year later, End of Evangelion. In that movie, even though she does not succeed, Soryu stops running from the trauma that formed her, recognizing instead the humanity inherent in the pain and separation she lived through. Riding the wave of self- satisfaction born of embracing an inherent truth about herself, she becomes as powerful as she has ever been, takes on insurmountable odds and veers as close to triumphant as the series’ creator Hideaki Anno, ever allows. Auteur theory tends to be overused as a tool for talking about films and their directors, but Evangelion is unmistakably Hideako Anno and Anno is unmistakably Evangelion. This has only become more clear to me after years of working in the arts and struggling with the results of my endeavors. Making yourself vulnerable and opening up to the rest of the world is a brave act partially because there is absolutely no guarantee that it will pay off. Sometimes you get in the damn robot and fall on your face: your peers ignore your output, you shout into the void and receive nothing in return. Sometimes someone whose opinion you hold highly compliments your work and buoys you for weeks and months to come. Apart from being a show about trauma, Evangelion, is also a show about trying to create something, trying to make your mark on the world and become confident in your own abilities. Anno’s proxy in this respect is Shinji Ikari, the center point around which the rest of the show revolves. Watching Shinji back in high school, I also saw myself in him: a shy boy who didn’t quite know how to fit in, who was never able to stand up for himself. I saw my own petty crushes and confused adolescent self-torment. Now I see him for what he clearly is: the epicenter for Anno’s exploration of his own psyche and his own struggles with depression and shame.

Shame, real visceral shame, sits firmly in Evangelion’s wheelhouse as it rarely does in other anime. Sexual antics abound in the medium: an accidental upskirt, finding yourself in the wrong changing room, tripping and falling on a character of the opposite sex and touching an inappropriate area. When it happens: a slap, a yell, a casual accusation of “pervert” before things are smoothed over with near immediacy. But in Evangelion, which is replete with similar stuff, it doesn’t really go away. Instead, Shinji’s shame builds up, poisoning his relationships, seeping into the cracks of their foundations like some invading angel. Through this fogged-over prism of his shame I see Anno’s troubling relationship with women, I see maternal longing and compartmentalized sexual desire. It took getting older and looking back at myself looking at this show to understand why this resonated so well with my frustrated, but ultimately blinkered teenage outlook. It took comparing how Evangelion struggles with the disappointing traits of Otaku culture with other shows, that don’t even bother to make the attempt, or that lampshade their pitfalls without any further self-critique. What’s the point of watching something that won’t let me look past the gleaming robot plate armor and show us a glimpse at the ugly gristle and sinew? I admit that there are likely shows and films outside of my remit that have done service to Evangelion’s legacy. But, as in the case of videogames (with which my relationship grows more tenuous with each passing year) the bad tends to overshadow the good, both in ubiquity and relative volume. Evangelion started something by struggling with itself, with its history, with its shortcomings, that I’m not convinced was successfully carried on by its contemporaries into today. It created a world full of pain and mistakes and trauma and sexual perversion and tried to destroy it, again and again, through successive re-edits and sequels. But it lives on, like some twisted Angel, blithely un-self-aware, endlessly replicating, seemingly eternal. U Forms in Light | Justin Reeve

Planning Novigrad

omething about The Witcher 3 makes finding your way around its largest Scity, Novigrad, surprisingly intuitive. This defies an easy explanation, but at least part of Novigrad’s legibility comes from a quirk of our own psychology. People put together mental maps of the places they inhabit. The process is completely automatic, so it’s performed without even the slightest thought, care or intent on our part. The reasons for this are purely biological. Helping to ensure the success of our species, we evolved in such a way as to quickly and easily recognize patterns in the world around us. We use this ability for several different purposes, but the most important is probably navigation. In a highly influential study by the urban planner Kevin Lynch, mental maps of cities were found to consist of five distinct components: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. While some of these terms probably seem strange, almost everyone is familiar with the spatial features which they represent. Lynch looked at Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles in particular, but you can find these five spatial features in any urban environment. Think about your home town. How many of the streets can you name? Does it have any rivers, railways, or power lines? Where does everyone do their shopping? Are there any public squares or parks? Which buildings are the most distinctive? In answering these few questions, you’ve just identified its respective paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. The developer behind The Witcher 3, CD Projekt, integrated these five spatial features into Novigrad’s urban planning to give the place a sense of structure. This was largely responsible for its legibility. Let’s take a look at what holds the place together. Paths are devices which simplify travel. Guiding people from place to place, paths are primarily important because they provide connections between nodes. Facilitating movement throughout the city, Novigrad’s paths are its weaving, winding and sometimes even zigzagging streets. The shortest distance between two points will always be a straight line, so these may not necessarily be the most efficient means of getting around the place, but you can at least count on them to be going somewhere. Most of them either begin or end at nodes like the public squares in Gildorf and Glory Lane. Few arrive at a random dead end. Edges define boundaries between districts. They come in several different varieties, but the ones which you’ll find throughout Novigrad are mostly modifications of the natural environment. The river separating Farcorners and Glory Lane provides a pretty good example of this. Marking the line between city and suburb, the boundary established by this waterway has been strengthened by means of a massive wall. You can see something similar near Hierarch Square in the form of a steep cliff between the Bits and Gildorf. Spend enough time staring at this cliff and you’ll notice that it’s completely covered with a stone revetment.

Districts are places with shared characteristics. They’re often cultural, but these shared characteristics can be of almost any kind. Take some time to explore Novigrad and you’ll soon see what I mean. You can identify districts by the culture of their inhabitants, but you can differentiate them based on their buildings, too. Glory Lane is filled with irregularly shaped structures made from a traditional material known as wattle and daub. This consists of soil, clay and straw held in place by a wooden lattice. Gildorf by contrast is filled with evenly proportioned buildings made from stone. Nodes are places where people tend to gather. They’re focal points of activity, so nodes are normally found at regular intervals along a path. This definitely holds true for Novigrad where they’re mostly marketplaces. There’s a marketplace in almost every district, but you’ll come across the main ones in Gildorf and Glory Lane. Bustling with various forms of activity, they’re filled with actors, merchants and musicians. There’s always a handful of soldiers to keep the peace, too. Catering to such considerable crowds, most of Novigrad’s marketplaces offer a couple of communal amenities like water wells and covered seating.

Landmarks are devices which allow people to pinpoint their location. You’ll pretty much always find them near a node. Since these two components of a mental map are mutually reinforcing, landmarks lend importance to nodes, but nodes give meaning to landmarks. You can see how this works throughout Novigrad where nodes like the public squares in Gildorf and Glory Lane are closely associated with landmarks like the Passiflora and the Chameleon. With its vaulted ceilings and soaring clerestory, the Vivaldi Bank for example is one of the most distinctive structures in the city. The building is found right beside Hierarch Square. In designing The Witcher 3, the game’s developer, CD Projekt, used these five components of a mental map to give Novigrad a sense of structure. This helped to make the place legible. Why then can you still get lost in it? You’ll come across these five spatial features in any urban environment, but their complexity is necessarily going to be greater in some cities than others. Places aren’t equally legible. Novigrad’s urban planning happens to be particularly complicated. There’s a pretty good reason for this, though. Novigrad was made to look like a medieval city. In contrast to their classical and modern counterparts, medieval cities grew and evolved without any form of regulation by a central authority. Since their development was basically random, the different relationships between their paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks were characteristically complex. Taking the form of strict adherence to a grid system, the majority of classical and modern cities on the contrary were carefully curated. Novigrad reflects this complexity. In other words, these five spatial features can be found in the place, but they aren’t always clearly expressed. This lack of clarity is however due more to historical precedent than poor urban planning on the part of CD Projekt. U Here’s the Thing | Rob Rich

Let’s Talk About Mitch Hedberg

Everyone’s got a favorite comedian – or at least they should. I feel like that’s a pretty common thing. Sometimes we just find someone whose humor lines up with our own so much, or their delivery hits us in just the right way, that they can always get us cracking up. Well, for me that comedian is the late Mitch Hedberg. But here’s the thing: while I’ve been extremely fond of his jokes for years (in college I listened to his CD more often than I listened to the Neverhood soundtrack, which was a lot), it wasn’t until recently that I came to the realization that his jokes are actually super wholesome. And that he, as a comedian, is a shining example of how comedy can be extremely funny without being mean.

If you were walking down the street with a friend who was a tightrope walker, and he fell, that would be completely unacceptable.

I don’t say this because I think comedy has to the wholesome – though I am squarely in the Let’s Not be Sexist or Racist, Mmmkay? camp – but because it actually surprised me when I realized that Mitch’s humor never punched down. Or up. Or at all, really. His jokes were always made using weirdly innocent, observational humor. And he was still extremely damn funny. He had this way of breaking down the absurdity of the world around us that was just . . . clever and inherently silly. He’d poke fun of common phrases we never stop to think about “‘Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture is of you when you were younger.” He’d bust out random statements that made no sense but also made complete sense “I can’t eat spaghetti, there’s too many of ‘em.” But it was never aggressive. Never mean.

The other day I saw a kid flying a kite, and he was so excited that the kite was in the sky. I don’t know why, that’s what they’re supposed to do. Now, if he had a chair on the other end of that string, I woulda known. Imagine trying to fly a chair. You’d have to run like a motherfucker.

Even his jokes dealing with the kind of life and relationship topics other comedians tend to turn into gender things, he managed to make hilarious without dipping into any of that stuff. His joke about getting into an argument with his girlfriend while camping was about the absurdity of not being able to slam a door, but rather a tent flap “What do you do, zipper it up really quick?” Sure he would swear and often joke about smoking pot or drinking, but I’ve yet to hear one of his quips that made me do that sharp inhale followed by an “Ooooooooooo…” And I can’t help but love and respect him even more now that I’ve realized this. Again, I’m not trying to say that all comedy needs to be victimless, or that comedians who make fun of specific people or types of people are bad by default (see “punching up”), but I am saying that it can be. And Mitch Hedberg’s legacy is proof of that. U

No Accounting for Taste | Adam Boffa

Undoing Ruin

nvironmental themes appear consistently throughout director Hayao EMiyazaki’s work, perhaps most famously in 1997’s Princess Mononoke. 13 years earlier, though, Miyazaki released his second feature-length film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which offers something like a template for his later explorations of the relationship between society and nature. In Nausicaä, Miyazaki introduces some of the ideas that seem most urgent in his work: the reality of rampant environmental degradation paired with a steadfast belief in the possibility of better, more just futures. Nausicaä takes place in a world still reeling from the effects of a war that ended a thousand years ago. That war’s pollution and environmental impacts persist in the form of the Sea of Decay, a toxic jungle inhabited by massive bug-like creatures called Ohms that encroach on the humans’ surviving settlements, including the Valley of the Wind, where protagonist Nausicaä lives. In this bleak setting, the Pejite and Tolmekian nations war with each other while also trying to eradicate the Sea of Decay, even if it means using the same technologies that poisoned the world centuries ago. Nausicaä instead hopes to chart a different path, seeking to understand the Sea of Decay rather than destroy it. In the process, she discovers evidence of a vibrant, nontoxic world that the major powers have missed, and she intends to protect it. Nausicaä can be read as a kind of thematic and narrative precursor to Mononoke, employing similar plot beats and general story structure to explore similar ideas. Among other traits held in common, both films feature warring human factions that also target and destroy the natural world in the course of their conquests, triggering violent responses from the representatives of that world (the Ohms in Nausicaä, the gods of nature in Mononoke). And both feature protagonists (Nausicaä and San) that reject the claims of human superiority made by the combatants and instead empathize with nonhuman life in hopes of fostering a better world for all in it. In some respects, the two films act as retellings of the same story, each offering something unique in the details it foregrounds. Like Mononoke, Nausicaä holds out hope that the schisms opened between nature and society might be mended. One moment in Nausicaä stands as a potent warning, though – a representation of the horror and hubris of human antagonism toward the planet. In the film’s finale, an enormous army of Ohms stampedes toward the Valley of the Wind, baited by Pejite soldiers hoping to use the Ohms against the Tolmekians. Facing imminent obliteration, the Tolmekians resurrect an ancient bioweapon, the Giant Warrior, which fires off enormous bursts of laser from its mouth that incinerate huge swathes of the Ohms.

It’s a chilling image, a grim illustration of the incredible destructive power humans can wield. It’s also fleeting. The Warrior doesn’t last long before it collapses in on itself thanks to the Tolmekians having rushed it to the frontlines in an unstable, unready form. Its powers seem unthinkable, but it barely makes a dent in the insect onslaught before evaporating. In this light, the Warrior’s arrival takes on an almost pitiful quality. Even in humanity’s most vicious attempts to dominate nature, Miyazaki sees an inevitable failure. As in Mononoke, we can’t even get the destruction of our own planet right. Neither Nausicaä nor Mononoke depicts a binary contrast between humans and nature, however. The two are not just opposing sides of some conflict but instead deeply embedded within each other. In these films, the central crisis doesn’t develop because nature must necessarily lash out at humanity, or because humanity is destined to extinguish its own habitat. Instead, the problems arise due to a belligerent faction of humanity misunderstanding (perhaps intentionally) its relationship to the world it inhabits. The violence of the natural world results from these humans’ exploitation of that relationship. Nausicaä and San as characters both embody a richer, more reciprocal connection between society and nature, and it’s in that connection that Miyazaki finds hope for the future. Nausicaä ultimately helps prevent both the decimation of the Valley and the slaughter of the Ohms through her own sacrifice, and the Ohms revive her, making tangible the bond she had hoped to establish. As the film concludes, it offers a few images of a budding future in which the natural world and the remaining humans live harmoniously. Released in 1984, Nausicaä’s themes have grown more vital as the effects of climate change manifest more vividly each year. Miyazaki’s outlook here is not hopeless, though he does not ignore the significant obstacles in our path. If there is to be a future worth living in, Miyazaki seems to believe it will not be created through efforts to command and control the climate through more sophisticated technologies; these would perpetuate a long and futile history of industrial societies’ attempts to dominate nature. These attempts may at times grant these societies temporary advantages, but in the long-term, endeavoring to bend nature entirely to humanity’s will always leads to catastrophe. While this appears to be the current trajectory for our efforts to deal with the climate crisis, with geo-engineering efforts on the horizon despite risks still barely understood, in Nausicaä Miyazaki rejects defeatism. The world of the film renews itself, even after a thousand years of apocalypse. In this, as in Mononoke and elsewhere, the director sees potential for healing and restoration even after natural devastation that seems absolute. But making something of that potential requires a radical paradigm shift. U Artist Spotlight | Seb Westcott

How did you get into illustration?

I had always kind of assumed that I’d either be a cliché starving artist pursuing a career as a painter or sell out and become a graphic designer. At about 17, I realized that illustration was the sweet spot in between. After three years at art school and a year of nobody replying to my emails, I started to gain some real traction. Now I guess here I am as a professional illustrator. Sleep deprived but not starving.

Your cover art really captures the nightmarish tangle of politics and technology laid out in the story. Can you tell us a bit about your process and how you were hoping to convey that?

I started by stripping the story down to a single sentence that would hold the bones of everything that the writer was saying. From there I sort of fleshed the sentence out bit by bit until it held enough information to describe an image. There are so many layers to the incident that seem to fold in and out of each other, the depth of the issue presented a nice conceptual base for me to then throw my own aesthetic filter on to. When I first read the article, the Winnie the Pooh meme seemed so central but the more I thought about it, the less relevant that detail began to feel. I wanted the Winnie the Pooh concept to be the first thing that the eye is drawn to but have the real story reveal itself the more you look at it.

You seem to have a focus on animals and technology – what’s the relationship for you?

It’s weird, I hadn’t actually realized how prevalent of a theme this is across my work until you asked. I think it’s the visual juxtaposition that draws me to it. Animals are so ripe for visual interpretation, everyone has their own way of drawing a bird but there’s only so many ways of drawing an iPhone (and I refuse to acknowledge the existence of anything beyond the iPhone 4). I always sort of imagine my illustrations existing in their own little microcosm and I think that introducing real world technology opens the bubble a little bit. Also it makes me laugh to imagine animals using technology and that some of them are more competent at it than others.

I love the snakes in particular. What was that for?

Originally it was just a doodle in a sketchbook that I had no intention of doing anything with. This was around Septem- ber last year and I had hit a bit of a creative block. I knew I should be spending my time productively by emailing art directors and working on my branding but after an eight hour shift at my day job making coffee that was the last thing I felt like doing, but I also was struggling to come up with ideas that excited me. The limited color pallet and the lack of negative space are ideas I love to work with when I can but rarely actually get the chance so I think the snakes piece gave an excuse to explore that while procrastinating.

What do you hope folks take away from your art?

I spent a lot of time thinking about this question. With most of my personal work, the starting point is often just a joke that makes me laugh (like my birds with phone series, which I don’t think anyone else finds nearly as funny as I do). I think my illustrations sort of present a cohesive little world when all lined up, my partner once described it as being like how the real world would look if an intelligent child had designed it which I think is a cute way of describing it. I guess I just want people to be able to spend a little bit of time in that world with each of my illustrations.

* * *

See more of Seb’s work at his official site. U

SILLY OLD BEAR By Dick Page The review bombing of Devotion shows how we ignore politics in games at our peril. ome months ago, a small, troubling That’s not surprising, since the idea that Sand sometimes hilarious scandal hit the most innocuous cartoon character ir- the Steam charts. Independent Taiwan- ritates one of the most powerful men in ese developer Red Candle, creators of the the world is hilarious. But this empha- well-received Detention, had just released sis on the childishness of taking offense their cult-themed horror game Devotion. from a meme reduces a complex political Despite a similar warm reception from reality to the lashing out of petty, thin- critics, the game’s Steam reviews took a skinned bullies. Funny, but inaccurate. sudden, massive dive and it became ap- This focus also feeds into the Western parent that gamers from China were belief that the main political issue with review-bombing the game. The insult? A China is censorship: it’s a shocking ex- hidden, perhaps unintentional, reference ample of government overreach into an to a popular meme that compares Chi- innocuous joke. How Orwellian. Such nese president Xi Jinping to a certain ro- a thing could never happen in the En- tund cartoon teddy bear. The story blew lightened West. Inside China, however, up for a week, Red Candle apologized and it wasn’t the meme that was shocking, removed the offending graphics, and the it was what surrounded the meme and Western gaming media had a good laugh what else people read into the details of about how sensitive Chinese gamers are. the game. But: the review-bombing of Devotion Chinese gamers argued this to the was never about Winnie the Pooh. Like Western game community in posts on just about everything between China and Reddit and elsewhere. First, they pointed Taiwan, it was about Taiwanese indepen- out that Chinese netizens themselves cre- dence and, ultimately, about China’s in- ated the Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh ternational soft power. meme. Despite the censorship, there is a Western journalism on the topic has robust body of people in China willing focused on the Winnie the Pooh meme. to mock their leaders. The very fact that Pooh is banned in China demonstrates possibly perceived, insults in Devotion, that the Chinese government considers like the fact that the in-game cult’s fes- the speech of its citizens a threat to its tival dates coincide with the Chinese Na- legitimacy, and therefore that the Chi- tional Day, which celebrates the found- nese are not universally blind loyalists to ing of the People’s Republic. They also party dogma and decorum. learned that some members of the dev Instead, Chinese netizens argue that team might be supporters of Taiwanese Pooh is not the most offensive part of the independence. Devotion art. It began with the fact that Many of these posts also argued that around the Pooh meme was the phrase Chinese gamers felt betrayed by Red “your mother is an idiot” – and this is key Candle. They had enjoyed the studio’s – in Taiwanese, a variety of the Chinese previous game, Detention, and saw it as languages that is not mutually intelligi- representing high-quality Chinese game ble with the standard Mandarin spoken design, written in Mandarin Chinese and in Beijing. Other publications have also starring ethnically Han people. “Your glossed over the fact that this was a “your mother is an idiot” in Taiwanese, sur- mother” insult, not just calling Xi an idi- rounding the Xi/Pooh meme can be read ot. Unlike a TV insult battle, “your mom” as rejecting that heritage, making the is one of the worst insults a person can game only Taiwanese, not Chinese. The say in family-oriented Chinese culture. real insult was the idea that the develop- Then, the phrase is written in tradi- ers of the game did not see themselves tional characters and with Taiwanese as Chinese, and that Devotion was not a pronunciation – as though the develop- Chinese game. ers sought to hide this from Mandarin- The Chinese reviews frequently argue speaking mainlanders. This interpreta- that Red Candle were forcing politics tion led Chinese gamers to find other, into what should be an innocuous horror game. By this, they are not referring to stop talking about them. Silence on Tibet, an innocent meme mocking Xi’s appear- Taiwan or Tiananmen is not apolitical; it ance, but the implication of Taiwanese- tacitly supports the current reality. Tibet language insults to mainlanders that Tai- becomes just another province; Tianan- wan is a separate country and superior to men just another square. By forcing Red mainland China. Candle to remove the meme and insult, We’ve heard this argument against the status quo was restored. Taiwan’s Red “forcing” politics into games before, in Candle can become a “Chinese” devel- the toxic reaction to themes of social oper again and Chinese players can feel justice and increasing representation in proud of its accomplishments. games. Basic acts of inclusion, like the Control over the narrative of what is option to use gender-neutral pronouns or isn’t Chinese is the same reason Tai- in Battletech, generate outsized respons- wan competes in the Olympics under es from people who are uncomfortable the name Chinese Taipei, that airlines in with “politics” entering their entertain- the US list “Taiwan, Province of China” ment, even in the mildest ways. in their dropdown menus and Taiwan- But in these cases, silence is acceptance. ese popstars have to apologize for wav- Just as ignoring the lack of diversity in ing their flag on TV. Communist Party games supports the erasure of minority mouthpiece the People’s Daily recently voices, so does ignoring Taiwan’s abil- praised “local leaders in Taiwan, China” ity to criticize China. If you go to China, for legalizing gay marriage, whereas everyone will tell you to avoid the three mainland attitudes have been at best am- T’s: Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen. It is in bivalent towards LGBT people. At every Beijing’s best interest that everybody just turn, Beijing uses its power to erase the merest possibility that Taiwanese people that the still-existing KMT party would can speak their own minds and choose probably prefer everyone forgot about. their own leaders. Removing a small, possibly unintentional Of course, not all Chinese people buy insult to the powers-that-be was prob- into the party line, but for the subset of ably in Red Candle’s best interest. Chinese gamers who are supporters of But we should not ignore the larger this narrative, whether it be for national context. Allowing a vocal majority to pride, simple indoctrination or even per- erase diverse voices in games can hap- haps a feeling of affection for people who pen whether the minority is a gender share parts of their language and culture, identity or an island nation. Many gam- the idea that some places that are “Chi- ers support Taiwan’s right to declare it- nese” would actually rather not be part self distinct from China, even in a hidden of the nation of China is rather offensive. Easter egg in a videogame. Hopefully That is what drove the review bomb, not those same gamers can support the in- a silly meme. clusion of other voices that challenge the Not every piece of art has to speak status quo. truth to power, or truth to every power. Taiwan’s struggle with Chinese cen- Devotion already does a good job attack- sorship shows that games, like all art, ing toxic masculinity; it doesn’t have to are always, already, political, whether we take on all of China too. Red Candle’s like it or not. It means that for gamers previous game, Detention, was unabash- in the majority, supporting Red Candle edly political, reminding players of the is about a lot more than the fact that Xi Kuomintang’s White Terror, four decades Jinping really does look a lot like Winnie of martial law and political suppression the Pooh. U SPRINGFIELD FOREVER By Noah Springer ore and more, mobile games seem coordinating the modern style buildings Mto be taking up my time. Facebook with architecture from similar periods, advertises them to me, and, when they’re or designing the Isotopes stadium and free, I’ll say, “What the hell? That looks Krustyland. entertaining for a few minutes?” But If I am correct, I have every possible that’s how long the last – a few minutes? item designed, except for those that cost The irony lies in the fact that most of actual money. That’s not to say I haven’t these short, free-to-play, fast-to-down- spent any money on the game. I dropped load games are endless, but I never spend about $60 back in 2012 on some sweet, more than a few hours playing them. The sweet donuts (the game’s premium cur- clan wars are permanent, the jewels keep rency). Even though I started playing af- dropping, and the running never ends. ter the first Halloween event in Novem- So what’s the point of playing? ber (TSTO premiered in March 2012), I’ve Normally, this endlessness bothers been able to collect all the things I missed me, except in the mobile game which in later events. has taken up innumerable hours of my Now, TSTO is a little different thanBe - time over the last few years: The Simp- jeweled or whatnot, mainly because it is sons Tapped Out (TSTO). My wife will be part of the larger Simpsons universe. I the first one to tell you how much time get little missions from Sideshow Bob I’ve wasted on TSTO. I’ve played it almost and Krusty the Clown; I have the sundial every day since 2012, sometimes for less where Mister Burns was shot on promi- than five minutes, but sometimes I spend nent display in my downtown; These lit- hours redesigning sections of my Spring- tle connections to the established Simp- field, trying to organize my downtown, sons universe keep me involved, even without an endpoint in mind. I’m still I’m not really sure why I’m still play- looking for the next thing that I’ll recog- ing at this point, other than some sort nize from the show even though they are of completionist anxiety that I need to now onto releasing people and buildings make sure I still have all the items. EA that I never knew existed in the first nine has dropped off of their constant update seasons – did you know Moe has an en- schedule recently (there has only been tire extended family? one update in the last few months), so it’s Over the years, I convinced some of my possible the game is drawing to a close, friends to play for a while, but they all but I pray that they won’t delete the app. fell off pretty quickly. I feel like some of If TSTO had fallen flat in 2013, I wouldn’t them lasted maybe six months. I friend- have cared. My Springfield would have ed a bunch of random people on Red- slipped into the nethers of my mind like dit around the same time too, and they Temple Run or Angry Birds. But instead, held on a little longer. I feel like my final they kept releasing content and I kept friend disappeared around 2016. But I tapping and, at this point, I would really still build. I still take time to sit around, miss my Springfield if something hap- look at what could be perfected, and re- pened to it. I would feel, I think, like an design, rebuild and tap. artist, when someone buys a piece and I used to think that I would feel some takes it away, but there was still work to sort of satisfaction when my Springfield be done on it. When TSTO goes offline, as looks the way it does now. I have a solid it eventually will, my Springfield will -fi downtown section, a well designed resi- nally be complete, even though it will be dential district, an airport, a zoo. I have forever incomplete. all the necessities that would qualify But, until that fateful day, I guess I’m winning the game, but I still feel like I’m just going to keep tapping away and tak- not finished. Something is still missing. ing orders from Bort. U REVVING THE ENGINE A SERIES PROFILING THE RECIPIENTS OF UNREAL DEV GRANTS

THE KREMER MUSEUM

This series of articles is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Epic's Unreal Engine 4. Every month, we profile the recipient of an Unreal Dev Grant. While Epic puts us in touch with our subjects, they have no input or approval in the final story. Click here to learn more. here is nothing like seeing a painting in person. Reproductions Tin books are fine enough, but standing in front of a masterpiece is a magical experience. It is something about the physical presence, the patina of age that disappears in the camera lens, the evidence of the creator’s hand in the brush strokes. Also, the size. When you look at paintings in books, it is easy to forget how big they can be. “The Starry Night,” is a little over two feet by three feet – you no doubt had posters on your wall in high school that were bigger. But confronted by van Gogh’s masterpiece in person, with only small reproductions for reference, its thick swirls of paint seem vast and deep, like you could fall in. The problem with seeing paintings in person, of course, is that there are a lot of them and they are spread all over the world. Hu- man beings have been creating sublime paintings practically since we discovered fire, but even if you limit yourself to works created from the Renaissance on, you’re talking about an unbelievable body of art, created by thousands of people over seven centuries, much of which is stored in vaults or on the walls of private collectors or lost entirely thanks to war, natural disaster and misadventure. You’ll only ever bear witness to a mere fraction of humanity’s paintings in a lifetime. Except, that might be changing. The Kremer Collection, a privately held collection of old masters paintings, has, with the help of the digital experience firm Moyosa Media, recently embarked on project that could eventually form a scalable, inexpensive way to put the entire spectrum of human art right in your living room, thanks to virtual reality. The Kremer Museum allows users to see 74 Dutch and Flemish paintings, on display in a slightly surreal digital space, so long as you have a VR headset. Virtual reality is, of course a simulation, so doesn’t quite replicate the experience of standing in the room with a Rembrandt, but my goodness, it comes so close. Far closer than I ever expected to be possible, thanks to the use of a highly detailed photogrammetry technique for digital modeling. You have to experience it to believe it, and once you do, you’ll immediately see the potential for art of all kinds to be collected and shared using similar methods. We spoke to Joel Kremer, co-founder of the Kremer Museum and partner at Moyosa Media about this ground-breaking project. Let’s start with the Kremer Collection itself. I understand it is a fairly young collection. How did it come about?

Joel Kremer: George Kremer was ten years old when he visited the Rijksmuseum, came across Rembrandt’s “Jewish Bride,” and was completely mesmerized by that painting. He remembers that feeling to this day and get’s a spark in his eyes when he thinks back to this experience. So some 35 years later, when he read an article in a newspaper about an old masters auction, he was shocked, as he assumed most of those works would be housed in museums. He asked a gallery owner from Amsterdam if he could come by next time he was in the city and, when he did, he left there with his first painting. This was in 1994. From the Kremer Website:

For me, however, it was an exciting purchase. I now had in my possession a work of art by a painter who had learned his trade from the great Rembrandt, and who in his own right was con- sidered an important artist! The thought of own- ing a painting that was created 350 years ago by someone recognized as an old master, a famous name, was wonderful – until I lay down and started stirring in my bed. I couldn’t sleep that night: I had just paid a lot of money for a little piece of wood with some paint on it. That was how I felt then . . . In retrospect, that decision was sort of a water- shed. In a way, that first purchase was the biggest step I would take toward collecting.

Why the focus on Dutch and Flemish masters?

J. K.: I think it’s a combination of the above experience as a child, the fact that this type of art is one of the highlights of the history of the Netherlands (and we are Dutch) and the appreciation for the skill. I often find myself in a discussion about the difference in contemporary art and old masters or Impressionists. The main difference is that in the 1600’s, being an artists was a craft for which you had to study, whereas today, “anyone” can call themselves an artist (the good and the bad). The last thing I would say is that is is certainly also about taste; my parents simply caught the old master bug and love that period of painting. They also have a smaller collection of about 50 Im- pressionist paintings, but the focus always has been on the masters.

One of the things that strikes me about the collection is just the fact that this amount of 300+ year old art was still available to buy so recently – I’d have thought, well, that it was all in a museum at this point. Can you speak to the challenges of collecting this particular era of art in this day and age?

J. K.: So you and my father are aligned! It is certainly getting more difficult as, in the end, the amount of art produced in that period is (probably) finite. But . . . discoveries are still being made. People are still inheriting lockers, basements and attics, and find works of art which sometimes turn out to be significant pieces. All in all, if you ask me, the collection that my parents have put together over the last 25 years is stunning and an amazing achievement. The formula has been teamwork, commitment, studying, traveling, and developing and believing in your own taste. We have incredible stories of discoveries of absolute masterpieces (i.e. a Rembrandt or an Aelbert Cuyp) which were bought not because of the name per se, but because my parents loved what they saw. And whether it was attrib- uted to a big name or doubted or “circle of” was and is always second- ary. And we are still making discoveries like that every year within the collection and with new purchases. Two of those discoveries will be revealed later this year . . . and they are significant!

Is there a way for the public to see the collection in the real world?

J. K.: Yes absolutely. Our paintings travel all over the world via our loan program. So whether it’s one piece for a show in the USA, or 30 for a show in Europe, we’re very busy operating and handling the collection with our team. The collection as a whole is only viewable via the VR Museum at the moment. Maybe we’ll do a complete show again somewhere in the future (we’ve done four in the past, in Germany, the Netherlands and Paris). How did the idea of presenting the collection to the public via virtual reality come about?

J. K.: The Kremer Museum was born out of a dilemma of a private col- lector: do I build a physical private museum to house my collection and build a brand for the family’s future, or are there other, more efficient ways to do this using new technologies. Besides being very ex- pensive, the thought of a brick and mortar museum triggered many questions: where, who, how? So the idea came up to explore VR, because it answers or takes away many of those questions; it’s a scalable way to show the collection in a very realistic museum experience. Plus, it’s just really cool if you do it right!

Seeing a painting in real life is a specific sort of experience, seeing it in space, in a frame, being able to view it from an angle to see the texture of the brush strokes. The VR Museum does a startling job reproducing that experience – can you walk us through the process of translating both the paintings themselves and the experience of viewing them into the virtual space?

J. K.: Well, the honest truth is that I had no idea where to begin. I posted on LinkedIn saying that I was looking for a 3D architect for a new project . . . I got the weirdest replies (in hindsight). So after asking contacts in the US, UK, China and India, I ended up at Moyosa Media in Assen, a small city in the northeast of Holland, via a mutual busi- ness friend. Those guys immediately understood my vision and suggested they build a proof of concept for me, which they came to present when we were in Dubai. And man did they get it! It’s a very powerful moment when you’re standing in a ballroom in a hotel in Dubai, looking at a very realistic reproduction of your own paintings in VR. Now mind you, this was nowhere near the final version we now have for the museum in terms of resolution or quality, but we were sold for a Version 1 and agreed to that on the spot. And then it went very quick: the same friend who introduced me to Moyosa also introduced me to Johan van Lierop from Architales, who was then working as a prin- cipal for Daniel Libeskind architects. After one lunch, one beer and only one creative “restriction,” two weeks later he presented us with his vision for a museum building in VR. And that is what you see in the design today. In terms of the quality of the works in VR, Moyosa came up with the idea of using the photogrammetry technique to capture brush strokes, craquelure and just very high definition details. So when all that came together, Version 1, which was 20 works, very quickly became the full version you see today: 74 old masters in a museum environment which can only exist in VR. By the way, the only creative restriction I had for Johan was to not go M. C. Escher, because of the traditional art audience we would also be catering to; it needed to seem familiar enough to be a museum, but unreal enough to show that it is still VR. And I think he nailed it! I think it is interesting that the virtual space of the museum is kind of magical, rather than hewing toward a more conventional museum-like environment. Does that architecture have any significance in the context of the collection?

J. K.: See above. Also, there are many elements from our paintings which come back in the museum design: the floor is black and white marble from our Pieter de Hooch interior painting, the backdrop behind the paintings has a texture and color which matches our Rem- brandt painting, and obviously the golden structures of the museum building represent the Dutch golden age.

What kind of response has the VR Museum gotten?

J. K.: We have gotten such overwhelmingly positive responses from the art, tech and educational world. Most major US, UK and Dutch news outlets covered our launch and we are an example of how to go all in, in terms of VR in the museum world. I’m extremely proud of this, and super excited when I think about our future plans!

As VR becomes more widespread, how do you see projects like the VR Museum evolving? Is this a viable way of sharing other art collec- tions and archives with the public?

J. K.: Yes I think it definitely needs to be. The first cracks in the traditional brick and mortar models are starting to show and it would be foolish for museums not to use extended reality technology as a whole to reach more people outside of their walls in meaningful, immersive ways. It is scalable technology and if you devise ways to use your core 3D assets across many different platforms and technologies, e.g. VR, but certainly also AR and mobile, cultural institutions will be able to start thinking in the 10’ or even 100’s of millions of visitors a year. All measurable traffic not only in ticket sales, but digital behavior in your online environment and interaction with your assets . . . think about the difference with your traditional offline audience! Also, and I shamelessly have to plug this, but VR is typically an amazing medium to engage the younger generations of digital na- tives. They just get it and think it’s fun. So when I bring or send headsets to school kids in India or Luxembourg through our Mighty Mas- ters program, you see the amazing reactions of eight to ten-year-olds to 350 or 400-year-old art. Through this program, we want to bring headsets to children all over the world to let them experience art they would (statistically) probably never see due to financial, geographical and political challenges. Check out the reaction of this 6-year-old girl in Bahrain!

What do you hope folks will take away from the virtual museum experience?

J. K.: 1. A world class collection of old masters, put together by inspir- ing people, housed in an amazing digital environment. 2. A fun new cool way to experience art and a glimpse into the future of art consumption. 3. The tip of the iceberg for the way the Kremer Collection will be presented to a global audience. Why did you choose Unreal Engine 4? Are there any unexpected ben- efits or challenges working with it?

J. K.: When we started developing in early 2017, the VIVE was our pre- ferred head-mounted display and it just made so much more sense to go with UE4 because of the enormously graphical nature of our captures and plans, and the fact that our environment is rendered in real-time. We’ve always gotten a ton of support from UE, so a big shout out to Marc Petit and his team!

Did the Dev Grant allow you to do anything you otherwise would not have been able to?

J. K.: The dev grant was put to researching how to optimize our photogrammetry efforts even further and we were able to get an even higher resolution and level of detail out of the experience, as well as laying the foundation for a road map filled with exciting new content, games in the museum and much, much more. So yes, it certainly cata- pulted us in those areas!

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Learn more about the Kremer Collection and the Mighty Masters program or visit the Kremer Museum now. U Contributors

SEB WESTCOTT grew up in Brighton, went JUSTIN REEVE is an archaeologist special- to art school in Falmouth (Cornwall) and then izing in architecture, urbanism and spatial ultimately ended up living in Cornwall after theory, but he can frequently be found writing graduating because the rent is cheap. His fa- about videogames, too. You can follow him on vorite things to draw are birds, fish and house- Twitter @JustinAndyReeve plants. He has a podcast called Why Don’t You Like This? with Seb and Molly ROB RICH has loved videogames since the 80s and has the good fortune to be able to STU HORVATH is the editor in chief of Un- write about them. Catch his rants on Twitter at winnable. He also runs @VintageRPG on Insta- @RobsteinOne gram. Follow him on Twitter @StuHorvath ADAM BOFFA is a writer and musician from GAVIN CRAIG is a writer and critic who lives New Jersey. You can follow him on Twitter outside of Washington, D.C. Follow him on @ambinate Twitter @CraigGav JASON MCMASTER is a writer and editor MEGAN CONDIS is an Assistant Professor with a lifelong passion for games. When he isn’t of Communication Studies at Texas Tech Uni- working on Unwinnable, he’s either on his PC versity. Her book project, Gaming Masculinity: or playing a board game. Follow him on Twitter Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for @mcmaster Online Culture is out now from the University of Iowa Press. DICK PAGE , PhD, is an anthropologist of Chi- nese gaming culture. He lives in Taiwan with NOAH SPRINGER is a writer and editor his family. based in Boston. You can follow him @noahjspringer

ALYSE STANLEY is a trash can disguised as a journalist. She’s constantly knee-deep in fandoms when she’s not writing about videogames. It’s been nearly a decade, and she’s yet to shut up about Fallout: New Vegas. Find her on Twitter @pithyalyse

BEN SAILER is a writer based out of Fargo, ND, where he survives the cold with his wife and dog. His writing also regularly appears in New Noise Magazine.

COREY MILNE is an Irish freelance writer who likes to poke at that strange intersection where games meet history. A roundup of his writing can be found at coreymilne.com. You can join his Rad-Lands motorcycle bandit gang on Twitter @Corey_Milne Illustrations MATT MARRONE is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning All screenshots, film stills and promo- Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow tional images courtesy of their copyright him on Twitter @thebigm. holders. All photography is in the public domain unless otherwise noted. Original YUSSEF COLE is a writer and visual artist works and Creative Commons licenses from the Bronx, NY. His specialty is graphic de- below. sign for television but he also enjoys thinking and writing about games. Cover: Seb Westcott