The Hunger Games and Fan Paratextual Participation - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 120

fannish participation outside the novels and ilms: a plethora of fan-made texts
exists online, and as Jen Scott Curwood notes, these fans are not just producing
art, they are also “critically engaging with the text-based story in ainity spaces.” 9
An ainity space, a term borrowed from James Paul Gee, is where individuals
can interact and learn using common activities. Ainity spaces engender
community participation through mutual interest. 10 As Dean Schneider
demonstrates, he Hunger Games as a cult text attracts young readers to online
ainity spaces through peer involvement: not wanting to be let out of the loop,
teenagers create their own spaces online to discuss, comment, and focus on the
book series. 11 hese online ainity spaces are “more participatory, collaborative,
and distributed” than traditional print-based practices. And, as participatory
fandom becomes more common, “media paratexts” like board games “extend
and enhance young adults' experience with literature” like he Hunger Games . 12
he Hunger Games is not particularly unique in this respect: Harry Potter has
found numerous online spaces as have other young adult series like Tw ilig ht or
Divergent. 13 hese online ainity spaces relect a similar play within and around
the media that the Hunger Games paratextual board games engender.
In Training Days , players play as Tributes from each of the Districts in Panem,
each with diferent abilities, including strength, charm, agility, and cunning. By
allying themselves with other Tributes, characters can develop their abilities,
which aids them in winning challenges. Players use tokens to bet on challenges.
Each win brings more approval from the judges, and the player with the most
approval at the end of the game wins. In contrast, District 12 tells a story of
the deprivation within Katniss's District in Panem. Characters wander around
the board collecting resources like food, clothes, medicine, and fuel. At various
times, however, the rulers of Panem demand that players give up their resources;
if they cannot, they have to put a token in a pile in the center of the board for
each resource they lack. At the end of the game, a token is randomly drawn from
the pile and this player loses the game.
As fandom has migrated to online ainity spaces for the distribution of fan
iction, fan videos, and other fan-made texts in the social media like animated
GIFs and digital cosplay, it has become more visible and more mainstream. 14
his means not only that fans are inding more avenues to connect with each
other and that more niche communities can lourish, but also that mainstream
media corporations are able to appropriate fannish attitudes and characteristics
for commercial gain. As Roberta Pearson notes, digital media have provided
not only more freedom for fans to create but also more opportunities for the