The Hunger Games and Fan Paratextual Participation - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 121

media industries to shape that fannish creation into particular, industrially
acceptable molds. She gives the example of the Star Trek: New Voyages fan-
produced web series, which “are as faithful as possible to the old voyages,” as
well as citing Suzanne Scott's discussion of “authorized” Battlestar Galactica fan
videos that “might constrain even the textual work of narrative speculation.” 15
Both Star Trek games and both Battlestar Galactica paratextual games similarly
encourage players to “practice” fandom in a particular, authorized way. Just as
fans are becoming more participatory, media producers are appropriating some
speciic elements that deine fannish identity. 16 his “mainstreaming” of fandom
is a characteristic of contemporary paratextual board games that ask players
to take on the roles of fans via connections to the original media text. 17 By
invoking aspects of fandom via mechanisms like transmedia pathos, character
identiication, and role-play, paratextual board games like he Walking Dead
Board Game reveal the participatory culture at the heart of paratextuality. 18
As exemplars of an active audience, fans have served to clarify and represent
larger concerns within a “participatory culture” for fan-studies scholars. 19
By examining the emotional attachment that individuals can feel for a media
text, the creative work that fans engage in, and the communities that develop
around media texts, fan studies attempt to engage in a sociocultural critique of
audiences and to analyze the activities of fan communities. At the same time, fan
researchers need to be cautious to avoid making “fandom” and “participatory
culture” synonymous. As Leora Hadas has noted:
while the logic of participation might seem to mirror the logic of fandom …
they are not one and the same; … even an interpretive fannish community
cannot be seen apart from its own norms and ideals; and … the loose and open
nature of participatory culture as idealized in the Web 2.0 model might, in fact,
clash with these ideals as much as it might clash with the wider cultural model
of production it is threatening to replace. 20
As she goes on to show, while some fans may embrace the emancipatory model of
participation and utopian egalitarianism in Web 2.0 spaces, other fans maintain
strict hierarchical functionality, neoliberal notions of capitalism, and regulation
of fannish content.
One problem with linking fans to participatory culture is that it simpliies
both fan activity and audience participation. As I have previously noted, there
is an “over-emphasis on participatory fans in the academy.” 21 In fact, there is
a great variety of fan activity that runs the gamut from highly creative works