The Hunger Games and Fan Paratextual Participation - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 129

for players to invest their own imaginative, afective play into the game. Each
round features gameplay mechanics that generate uncertainty, like discarding or
drawing cards, but there is little narrative structure guiding the action. Players
can travel to any of the six locations, but there is nothing to do in that space
other than drawing or discarding cards. hroughout the game, the diferent
rounds ask players to sacriice resources and to draw more resources, but players
have little choice in or opportunity for decision-making throughout the game.
One can discard cards of one's choice, but by the time of the reaping, it hardly
matters which ones—only if you were able to fulill the quota.
Although the game is billed as a “strategy” game, it relies more heavily
on which cards are drawn rather than on which ones you discard. he inal
mechanic—drawing cards from the Reaping deck to see who loses—is simply
a lesson in probability. It is entirely possible to lose even if you have played very
well. While this ties in well with the dystopian future of the original ilm, it
creates an uninteresting game. With little investment in the characters, there is
little incentive to create more narrative, and little incentive to participate in the
cocreation of meaning throughout the game. It is not that players c an' t do this,
but rather that the game does not ofer players easy opportunities to enact this
type of participation. If, as Deborah Kaplan notes about fan iction, “rewriting
characters … is an interpretive act … in which the text ofers one possible
understanding of characterization,” then District 12 limits the participation
of fans in rewriting Katniss's character: there simply isn't enough “character”
present within the game to rewrite easily. Nor is there much incentive to do so.
According to Kaplan, participating with the media through fan iction—illing
in the gaps—necessitates a deep understanding of the character. Regardless of
what participation fan-players want to engage in, District 12 does not relect
the type of “dynamic interpretive space in which a multitude of understandings
of the source texts' characters can form, grow, and change.” 46 To more fully
participate in the construction of character and narrative in a paratextual board
game, players need to feel like they can cocreate aspects of the narrative and
of the characters within the game. Although the characters may be based on
already extant media properties, for players to become invested in the game (as
opposed to the franchise as a whole), the character needs to display lexibility
and openness.
In contrast, the characters in Training Days present an enormous amount
of lexibility to players to become invested in. As I discussed in reference to
he Walking Dead: he Board Game , a deeper, more extensive past a character