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.