Volume 10, Issue 1, 2023
Articles
- Game Mechanics and Narrative as Symbolic, Co-Construcgtive Elements in Tomb of Annihilation
This essay examines a recent adventure module for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, which employs older game mechanics and who also espouse fascist or GamerGate-like rhetoric. This adventure, Tomb of Annihilation, takes mechanical, narrative, and setting inspiration from earlier D&D adventures, presenting players with an adventure that is both challenging and player driven. This essay contributes to scholarship that identifies gameplay mechanics as constructs and vital contributors to storytelling in game worlds. Contrary to popular discourse which often ascribes game mechanics a moral or political neutrality, this essay argues game mechanics are often co-constructive with games' narratives, settings, and aesthetics.
- Groping in the Dark: Intimacy in Nyctophobia
This essay argues that analog games function as platforms that mediate affect through their specific combinations of rules, material components, and the player relationships and experiences. The purpose here is to examine the way that affect is mediated through intimacy during play through a close analysis of Nyctophobia, a board game designed by Catherine Stippell and published by Pandasaurus Games. This paper will examine the way Nyctophobia, which draws on classic tropes from horror slasher films, produces a type of mediated intimacy that orients the affective experience of play in relation to the assemblages of analog play.
- Serious Fandoms—An Interview With Linda Codega
AGS Editor Evan Torner interviews Linda Codega, who writes not only journalism but long-form critique, fandom analyses, speculative fiction, and experimental tabletop role-playing games. Codega has extensively reported on Wizards of the Coast's initial abandonment in January 2023 of the Open Game License (OGL) for Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).