• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

UNWINNABLE MONTHLY Volume 4, Issue 2 - February 2017 A MORTICIAN’S TALE • DEAD STATIC DRIVE U N W I N N A B L E Monthly 88 Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath Managing Editor | James Fudge Editor | Harry Rabinowitz Design | Stu Horvath Asst. Editor | Jason McMaster Social Editor | Melissa King Copyright © 2017 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 a cryptic message from the airwaves the Cathode oraCLe | the games untouched on the shelf BaCkLog | gavin Craig must-watch streaming documentaries doCumentary Sunday | megan CondiS what’s new, undiscovered and unholy in metal BattLe JaCket | CaSey LynCh examining trends in fanfiction SeLf inSert | amanda hudginS the intersection of games and world history CheCkpoint | Corey miLne ridiculing and revering everything rookie of the year | matt marrone dissecting the world the Burnt offering | Stu horvath a monthly soapbox here’S the thing | rob riCh board games and ennui the McMaSter fiLeS | JaSon McMaSter art, and words about making it artiSt SpotLight | aLex bertram-PoweLL our monthly recommendations PlayLiSt | reading LiSt | now Playing | our monthly crossword puzzle unSoLvable | brian tayLor Longform an autopsy of dying in videogames a good death | SoPhie turner take a road trip to the dark heart of America the prettieSt nightmare | MATT SAYER it was supposed to be a simple acquisition... orphiC CruSh | L. rhodeS a developer Q&A, sponsored revving the engine: the watChmaker | ContributorS From the Desk of the Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath Welcome to a new and improved Unwinnable Monthly! You’ve already seen one of the changes: a simpler, reader friendlier table of contents. From looking at that, you might have discerned another big change: no more theme section. We might bring themes back down the line for special occasions (like Halloween), but for the time being we’ll be favoring a leaner approach to the monthly. After this letter, you have our regular columns. Gavin Craig is still working on Final Fantasy VI in Backlog. Megan Condis checks out the as relevant as ever documentary Welcome to Leith, about white supremacists trying to take over a small town. Casey Lynch gives us a heck of a lot of new metal to check out and Amanda Hudgins explains why people are fanfic-ing characters from Star Wars and Judge Dredd together. Corey Milne ponders Morse code and the game Relay while Matt Marrone takes off on a tangent about Super Mario Run. I dust off my old column, Burnt Offering, to think about how we curate the things we like and how stuff we shouldn’t like sometimes surprises us. Case in point: Rob Rich is surprised he likes Resident Evil 7 and Jason McMaster is surprised he likes Zombicide: Black Plague. Our cover artist, Alex Bertram-Powell, is in the Artist’s spotlight this month. Brian Taylor’s crossword and our monthly recommendations round out our regular contributions. Our new long form section consists of four stories. The cover story, “A Good Death,” by Sophie Turner, takes a look at the forthcoming game A Mortician’s Tale, the Order of the Good Death and the death positivity movement. Matt Sayer, in “The Prettiest Nightmare,” takes a road trip with developer Michael Blackney to discuss his forthcoming horror game Dead Static Drive. L. Rhodes brings us this month’s short fiction, a story about information, alternate reality games and corporate dirty dealing called “Orphic Crush.” Finally, in our Unreal Engine 4 sponsored series of Q&As, we talk to the folks behind the upcoming platforming puzzle game The Watchmaker. I am pretty psyched about how everything came together. If you dig it, let me know! And if you don’t, or there’s something else you’d like to see, let me know that too: [email protected]. Stu Horvath Kearny, New Jersey February 13, 2017 The Cathode Oracle | This TV is always unplugged. Backlog | Gavin Craig The Ground on Which Our Stories are Contested am not the first person to observe that it feels difficult to write about games I right now. I am still deeply unsettled; I am troubled and quieted knowing there are many who have reason to feel even more unsettled. I still believe that the stories we tell and inhabit are important, and this is why I tell stories and write about games, but in this moment, it can seem that facts themselves are so endangered as to make just about everything else irrelevant. Facts do matter, and are more than just the ground on which our stories are contested, but stories matter as well, and if there is a danger in the loss of our ability to measure our stories against each other using facts, there is as much a danger in the employment of story as an exercise in power. We do not and should not inhabit a single story. We navigate, incorporate and resist the stories around us as we create our own. Facts matter, but even in the best of cases they cannot all matter in the same way to everyone. This is not the most powerful of conclusions. I am not as good with facts as with stories, but the fact remains that if we are to survive, we must maintain our stories as sites of resistance. There is no good that comes from the annihilation of fact in the name of story. The annihilation of fact by story, however, is followed by the annihilation of story as a tool of possibility rather than subjection. There is value then in the story of a group bound by purpose rather than identity, fighting a mad tyrant interested in power alone, and not just power for its own sake but the power to shape reality. It is not an allegory for the current moment. It is not a blueprint for resistance. It is just a story, but a story is a place to begin. Final Fantasy VI begins not just with a servant of empire, like Cecil in Final Fantasy IV, but a woman controlled in body and mind. When this woman, Terra, is released from the empire’s control in an encounter with an embodiment of elemental force, she finds herself lost. Ostensibly rescued by an underground resistance movement called The Returners, Terra is asked to use her power in service to the fight against the empire. In Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life, Chris Kohler reports that when Hironobu Sakaguchi planned Final Fantasy II, “it was inspired by Star Wars — a group of young people get involved with a secret rebel alliance who are rising up against an evil empire. (Sakaguchi had just seen The Empire Strikes Back and was inspired.) They fight, aided by friends, turncoats and advisors, and eventually overthrow the emperor” (94). Sakaguchi revisits this setup in Final Fantasy VI, even signaling his debt, as in many Final Fantasy games, through cameo appearances by characters named Biggs and Wedge. (Vicks and Wedge in the original Super Nintendo localization.) Unlike Star Wars, however, when Terra is asked to fight against the empire, she faces a moment of uncertainty. Stripped of her own history, Terra can’t even be sure about whom exactly the sides are in the fight to shape her world. “How,” she asks herself, “will I know what choice is right?” Final Fantasy VI, like Star Wars, quickly makes clear which side is good and which is evil, but I find myself dwelling in that moment. Like Terra, not because the facts of the matter are unclear — Terra has just been freed from the most intense form of coercion; I don’t think she holds any illusion as to whether the Gestahlian Empire is a force for good or evil—but because the facts are a necessary but insufficient place to start. It is one thing to know what is right and wrong, what is true and what is not, and it is something else entirely to know what is best to do next. It is difficult to act rightly in the face of loss, and of likely future loss. It is an incredible challenge to try to change the ongoing story not for the sake of power but in the pursuit of justice. This is not the most powerful of conclusions. It is a breath, and then a beginning. U Documentary Sunday | Megan Condis magine waking up one morning and realizing that your government has Ibeen seized by a vile crew of white supremacists led by a narcissistic Internet troll against the will of the majority of the people. No, really. Imagine. This was the nightmare facing the residents of Leith, North Dakota, a town of just over a dozen people. Leith was chosen as the location for a proposed white nationalist utopia by neo-Nazi and all around creep Craig Cobb in 2012. Cobb’s goal: to purchase cheap plots of land, convince enough of his racist Internet followers to move to the town, and take over its government through sheer numbers. Filmmakers Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K.

Load more

  65

Copy Link