We’ll return to the genre-bending Marvel’s Midnight Suns for this month’s symposium, in large part because I have to get ready to give a talk about it in the middle of March and I’d like to gauge symposiasts responses to the way I’m planning to discuss the deckbuilding mechanics. I chose Midnight Suns for the talk because I was asked to focus on a relatively current game, and because the card mechanics at least have a reasonable amount of intersection with my principal research interests at the moment, which involve cooperative adventure games (my term), in particular The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and Marvel Champions: the Card Game.

Thus, the central question I’m hoping we’ll consider on Thursday is, How does the deckbuilding in Midnight Suns intersect with the thematics of superheroism in the Marvel Universe? Corollary questions include:

• What effect does the (virtual) reification of superheroic action into the discrete moves enacted via the game’s cards have on the dialectic of power fantasy and transitory impotence familiar from comics and films?
• If we stipulate that within that familiar, usually jejune, dialectic the various creators of MU continuity have managed from time to time to embrace more complex thematics, as for example the bards of the Iliad and the Odyssey managed to evoke crushing pathos and to craft a meditation on the nature of the self within the dialectic of heroic victory and death, do the deckbuilding mechanics of Midnight Suns further that richer sort of thematics in any discernible way?
• Will we ever get a full on X-Men version of this game? If we ask very nicely?

This Thursday at 8:30 Eastern/5:30 Pacific. Conversation on Discord.