Volume 12, Issue 3, 2025
Articles
- Transmediation and the Marvel Super Heroes RPG
While most transmedia scholarship has focused on narrative and its permutation across digital platforms, earlier analog examples—especially in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs)—remain valuable for exploring how different media enable or constrain storytelling. This essay examines how transmedia adaptation in TTRPGs can produce ludonarrative dissonance, a conflict between a game’s narrative and ludic (gameplay) elements. Through a rhetorical analysis of the "Original" and "Advanced" editions of the Marvel Super Heroes Role-Playing Game (MSHRPG), I show how dissonance can emerge when designers attempt to reconcile the fantastical conventions of the genre of superhero comics with rule systems drawn from TTRPG genres that prioritize realism and mechanical granularity. These tensions illuminate the stakes of adapting across media and genres in the TTRPG space.
- Approaching Controversial Conflicts: Tabletop Simulations as Museums
There are a multitude of digital and analogue games and simulations that place players in historical situations. However, there is a dearth of such mediums that foreground the human cost to both the historical actors being studied and players themselves. This paper suggests that approaches to recent controversial conflicts should be undertaken through the medium of narrative-based games and simulations. It focuses on how game design can lead both designers and players to gain emotionally and cognitively in the same way that visitors do when they visit a museum and engage with the physical artefacts on display.
- The Case for Chaos: Leveraging Contingency in Taskmaster and in Mental Health
This essay seeks to examine how tactics wrought in contingency can offer a novel approach to understanding indeterminacy as a resource, rather than a burden. It uses the show Taskmaster to identify exaggerated examples of these instances that are explicitly contended with during the show to better understand how contingency can be leveraged. From there, this paper applies the mechanisms through which contingency is leveraged and identifies analogs where mental health clinicians utilize these tactics in their treatment of clients. Clinical data was collected in completion of a master’s degree disquisition through ethnographic interviews with 15 clinicians that utilize table-top role-playing games in their practices.
- 80 Games with 20 Students: A Review and Case Study
The book Around the World in 80 Games, by Marcus Du Sautoy, is a collection of essays about board, card, and other games based on Du Sautoy’s experiences traveling the world as a research mathematician. This article is a review of the book and a retrospective on its use as a foundation for a first-year general education seminar course on topics in gaming, targeting competency in critical thinking, information literacy, and global literacy.