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the game focuses on just the irst book) while Training Days was released in 2012
to coincide with the ilm's release date.
he games act not only as paratexts, but also as types of professionalized,
mass-marketed simulation of participatory fandom, emulating a type of “illing
in the gaps” mentality that structures much academic writing about fandom and
cult media texts. 2 Like Star Trek: Expeditions or he Walking Dead Board Game ,
both Hunger Games games lesh out diferent aspects of the narratives. In doing
so, both games use forms of transmedia storytelling to ask the players to perform
the role of “fans” of the Hunger Games series . Training Days encourages players
to become “active fans” through the cocreation of a narrative with both the game
designers and author Suzanne Collins by ofering lexible characterizations of
unnamed, ancillary characters. As I described in Chapter 3, this type of “What
If ” transmedia encourages fan exploration of noncanonical work. hrough this
open-endedness, Training Days creates a narrative hyperdiegesis that allows fans
to ill in ludic and narrative gaps. District 12 , alternately, encourages players
to become “passive fans” by presenting a complete narrative with few gaps,
closing of interpretations of the narrative by itting the game concretely into the
cinematic narrative. his type of “What Is” transmedia, as described by Mittell,
focuses on expanding the storyworld through matching plot details. 3
In this chapter I extend my previous discussion of “produsage” in board
games to investigate the notion of media fandom as it applies to contemporary
paratextual culture. Many contemporary readings of new media invoke fan
participation as a key trait. 4 In contemporary new-media participation, fandom
becomes a recognized and emulated structure of media consumption. 5 he
two Hunger Games paratextual board games relect an industrial version of
participatory culture within media fandom, highlighting the nature of both
creative fan play and structured game play as they apply to game characters.
Paratextual board games represent the participation of fans as they help to
enlarge and perform a cult text's boundaries.
his connection between gaming and fandom highlights an eleventh principle
of paratextual board games:
Principle 11: Paratextual board games harness the afective power of fandom to
help generate player interaction within the game.
Further, I interrogate the ways paratextual board games can embody fandom
and further expand fan literature by looking at how the Hunger Games fan
culture is playfully invoked in these two games. I examine the two Hunger Games
paratextual board games as exemplars of the mainstreaming of participatory
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