Transmediation and the Marvel Super Heroes RPG — Daniel Lawson
Approaching Controversial Conflicts: Tabletop Simulations as Museums — Hugh O’Donnell
The Case for Chaos: Leveraging Contingency in Taskmaster and in Mental Health — Brian Jason Thomas
80 Games with 20 Students: A Review and Case Study — Keith Jones
We here at AGS have had a busy summer, coming off of our summer special issue on Queer Analog Game Studies, a successful Generation Analog 2025 conference in July, a roundtable presentation at the 2025 BIPOC Game Studies Conference at The Strong Museum of Play earlier this month, and for many of us, the start of the academic year. We look forward to continuing to find, curate, and publish innovative work, to mentor and celebrate new voices, and to ensure that AGS remains a destination journal for the study and exploration of analog games. In that spirt, then, welcome to the autumn issue of Analog Game Studies. This issue offers a range of ideas, close playings, and perspectives, addressing the adaptive, transformative, and pedagogical possibilities of analog games.
Up first is Daniel Lawson’s “Transmediation and the Marvel Super Heroes RPG,” which looks at the revisions of the Marvel Super Heroes Role-Playing Game (from the 1984 Original Set to the 1986 Advanced Set) to address the ways TTRPGs remediate and remix various media and genres as part of larger transmedia storytelling projects. Lawson argues that while most transmedia scholarship has focused on narrative and its permutation across digital platforms, analog examples—especially in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs)—are valuable for exploring how different media enable or constrain storytelling.
The second essay is “Approaching Controversial Conflicts: Tabletop Simulations as Museums” by Hugh O’Donnell. The essay investigates what it means to simulate history, to teach challenging topics with games, and the affordances and limitations of game-based learning. O’Donnell offers a careful unpacking of The Troubles (2026), a card-driven tabletop simulation that “represent the experiences of those affected by the Northern Ireland conflict.”
Third in the issue is Brian Jason Thomas’s “The Case for Chaos: Leveraging Contingency in Taskmaster and in Mental Health,” which examines contingency in games can offer a novel approach to understanding indeterminacy as a resource. Thomas draws on the show Taskmaster to identify exaggerated examples of how contingency and indeterminacy can be leveraged, particularly for use by educators and mental health clinicians.
Finally, Keith Jones rounds out the issue with “80 Games with 20 Students: A Review and Case Study,” a multi-genre essay that mixes a book review of Marcus Du Sautoy’s Around the World in Eighty Games, published Hachette in 2023, brief close readings of some useful games, and a pedagogical overview of teaching with Du Sautoy’s text in a first-year course entitled “Game On! An Exploration of Games from the Ancient to the Modern.” Framed by the structure of Du Sautoy’s book, which then frames Jones’s course, the mixed-essay considers the power and potential of games to inspire reading, writing, learning, and playing.
As always, thank you to our contributors, to our readers, and to everyone that continues to use, teach, and cite AGS. It has become more and more important in recent months to make sure the journal and its interventions continue to shine bright. If you have an idea for an essay or have an article ready to go, please consider submitting to AGS!
–The Editors, September 22, 2025
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Featured image from PickPik: https://www.pickpik.com/leaves-autumn-colorful-clamp-transience-lose-135799.