Theory review #42

• Book Review: How Pac-Man Eats by Raine Koskimaa, http://gamestudies.org/2104/articles/koskimaa_review, briefly explains the concepts of operational logics and playable models. The book attempts to answer how (mostly digital) games can be about something while leaving the subject matter communicated by art and text to the wayside.
• A remedy for oppression: issues 1-3 by James_Nostack, https://adeptplay.com/actual-play/remedy-oppression-issues-1-3, gives an example of taking very actual political issues as the centerpiece of (superhero) play.
• Kokemuspisteiden merkityksestä by Sami Koponen, https://efemeros.wordpress.com/2022/01/04/kokemuspisteiden-merkityksesta/, compares the role and function of experience point rules of old D&D, original edition of Usagi Yojimbo and his house rules for the latter.
• Game-Assisted Social Activism: Game Literacy in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Movement by Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15554120211061852, discusses how the Hong Kong protesters, many of them young students, used video gaming jargon and concepts to self-organize and obfuscate their organizing.
• The Killing Roll: The Prevalence of Violence in Dungeons & Dragons by Sarah Albom, http://ijrp.subcultures.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IJRP-11-The-Killing-Roll-The-Prevalence-of-Violence-in-Dungeons-Dragons-Sarah-Albom.pdf, observes that there is much violence, implicit and explicit, in D&D 5 Player’s handbook, and that it is justified by appealing to heroism, often a racist conceit.
• Online freeform role-playing games by Jessica Hammer, a chapter of the book Role-playing game studies: transmedia foundations, preprint https://nitessine.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/free-stuff-chapters-from-role-playing-game-studies-transmedia-foundations/, introduces the subject matter in the title with some terminology and traits common to it.
• Playing to Experience Marginalization: Benefits and Drawbacks of “Dark Tourism” in Larp by Diana J. Leonard, Jovo Janjetovic and Maximilian Usman, http://ijrp.subcultures.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IJRP-11-Playing-to-Experience-Marginalization-Benefits-and-Drawbacks-of-Dark-Tourism-in-Larp-Diana-J.-Leonard-Jovo-Janjetovic-Maximilian-Usman.pdf, compares larping as someone in a disadvantaged position to dark tourism and discusses the ethics of this. The authors also draw a tenous connection to the threefold model (GDS).