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A striking analysis of popular board games' roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it. Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism. Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire's distortion of Gyan Chaupar (an Indian game of spiritual knowledge), and early twentieth-century “trading games” that fêted French colonialism are exposed for how they conveniently sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery. These games' most explicitly abhorrent features may no longer be visible, but their legacy still lingers in the contemporary Eurogame tendency to exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. An essential addition to any player's bookshelf, Playing Oppression deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.

Women face pervasive biases in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and games may be one avenue through which biases can be reduced. We tested whether embodying a woman scientist in virtual reality (VR) leads to more positive attitudes toward women in STEM. We also examined the effect of revealing the scientist character’s gender earlier or later in the game based on previous work indicating that a later reveal may lead to greater identification with the character. Undergraduate men (N = 96) played a physicist in a VR game in which they were randomly assigned to a man or a woman avatar whose gender they saw earlier or later in the game. Compared to participants in the man scientist condition, participants in the woman scientist condition felt more positively about women and viewed the category of woman as more overlapping with the category of scientist; however, they viewed their own scientist character more negatively. Furthermore, in both avatar conditions, participants viewed the scientist character as less competent after playing. In addition, there were no effects of the early versus late reveal on attitudes toward women scientists or toward the scientist character. Finally, there were no effects of game conditions on implicit biases, perceptions of the climate for women in STEM, stereotype endorsement, or game enjoyment. Together, this study suggests that VR interventions may decrease some negative attitudes toward women in STEM but are not a panacea for the pervasive biases against women in STEM.

RRx-001 is a cysteine-directed anticancer alkylating agent with activity in a Phase II study in platinum refractory small cell lung cancer. Here, we describe the design of REPLATINUM, an open-label, Phase III trial. 120 patients with previously platinum-treated small cell lung cancer in third line will be randomized 1:1 to receive RRx-001 followed by four cycles of a platinum doublet, and then alternating cycles of RRx-001 and single agent platinum until progression versus four cycles of a platinum doublet. At radiologic progression on the platinum doublet, patients may cross over to the RRx-001 arm. Primary objective: to demonstrate superior progression-free survival in the RRx-001 population. Secondary objectives: to demonstrate superiority for overall survival and objective response rate. Clinical Trial registration: NCT03699956