Jeremy’s Critical Review of Comix: The RPG Comix: The RPG is a tabletop game, like Dungeons & Dragons, that is played with paper, pencils, and dice. As a game, it occupies many critical intersections that are important to this class including access to games via fiction writing analysis, basic access to conceptions of identity and disidentification, tools for discourses on gamification\exploitationware, and social combat and obstacle creation. As a rule system, it is designed to run fast and loose, and the rulebook is cheap, only ten dollars. It is also not set in a specific setting but allows users to customize character type, identity, and skills in a large number of ways that do not involve having character classes or skill groups. As a table top game, Comix, is based on comic books and has a time system based on them. It measures time, from small to large, by panels, pages, comics, and series. This places it as a sort of missing link between literature, meaning comic books, and games, and, therefore, video games. This puts it ideally as a starting point for reading video games as text. In reading video games as text, the purported identities that the ideology of the game established can be read as such. Comix’s specific mechanic that highlights the collectiveness of identification, and by association, identity politics, is the distinction of “minions.” Not only do they only act as a group when in a group of the same type, they can also be used raw materials to create an “obstacle;” which also highlights a mechanic of agency, like using, as the example in the book states, using a secretary “minion” to be an obstacle to someone entering a building. In contrast, non-player characters are not minions and are distinguished by much greater abilities. They are identified by name instead of by identity. While this distinction of characters doesn’t comprise a whole concept of disidentification, it is a useful access point to begin the discussion of the importance. To further bridge the material and virtual realities, the game has a mechanic called “cool points,” a kind of general use gamer currency for in-game advantage. While this is not new to games in general, its acquisition is somewhat unique. The game master may award cool points for any activity that she wishes to encourage including buying pizza for the group and giving people rides to the game as well as doing interesting or amusing things with one’s character and powers. Cool points are a game mechanic that could be described as gamification or exploitationware, and used to spark discussion along those lines. Furthermore, the gaming system of Comix closes a critical gap in many game systems that of social combat and advantage. Where many systems rely on the game master to somehow usefully integrate social situations into the combat and gaming system, Comix makes the mechanism explicit. Each character has a fixed amount of social damage that they can take. When they hit that limit they can no longer take social actions nor receive situational advantages to their rolls and the character who inflicted the final social damage receives a cool point. Not only does this mechanize social combat, it also incentivizes the social oppression of another. This kind of vicious mechanism of social advantage in the game underscores the social realities that this class seeks to bring to light. Not only can players create their own powers, they can also use their powers to establish obstacles in game. For example, a character with the power “hegemony,” could create a permanent social obstacle called “heteronormative matrix,” which could cause a “hindrance” to social actions by queer characters in a certain social environment. This kind of skill creation and usage is beyond the rules system of any game system that I am aware of except Comix but not beyond the powers that are present in our own material reality. In this example, Comix can be used for and read as social commentary in the vein of mediating identities as a technology of the self.
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