The Hunger Games and Fan Paratextual Participation - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 130

has, the more real the character seems. he unnamed characters in Training
Days may thus seem less “real” than District 12 's Katniss because there is less
character given in the narrative, but conversely this means that players can
imagine them with characteristics from the original text or the player's own
imagination.
To understand characters at all, we need to see past their semiotic construction
and, simultaneously, see each as a mimetic being that “represents aspects of a 'real'
person.” 47 One way to examine the mimesis of characters, as Roberta Pearson
reveals, is to identify the elements by which audiences make meaning of character.
According to Pearson, there are six of these elements: psychological traits/habitual
behaviors, physical characteristics/appearance, speech patterns, interactions with
other characters, environment, and biography. 48 From combinations of these
elements, multiple interpretations of characters can be realized. For instance,
with Star Trek: Expeditions , we get a sense of the character of Kirk from his
special attributes, the HeroClix miniature, text about him on the cards, the way
his character interacts with others in the game, his rank on the ship, and his
backstory from the ilm. In the topic he Hunger Games , Katniss becomes a more
fully mimetic, realized character because we know these psychological traits;
they are told to us by Katniss, to herself. 49 As readers we are literally in her head.
Because the ilm is told in a third-person style, viewers may feel as though they
are not part of Katniss, but are merely observing her; she is less mimetic because
she is external to viewers' minds. In the topic, Katniss has a sense of what David
Carr has called “temporal thickness,” the sense of the presence of time within
an object or character, the sense that this character has a past and a future. 50
he more strongly that sense is felt, the more thick the temporal structure. As
Samuel Zakowski conirms, “adding (past and/or present) temporal thickness to
characters or the ictional world contributes to the illusion of realism, which, in
turn, leads to increased immersion” in the narrative. 51 he Katniss in he Hunger
Games novel reveals more of her past (and dreams of her future) than does the
Katniss in he Hunger Games ilm. Literary Katniss is more temporally thick than
ilm Katniss, which translates to the paratextual board games.
According to Zakowski, writing here about video games, the more a character
within a game has the appearance of an independent life, the more the player
can become immersed within the storyworld of the game. He discusses the
video game series Mass Efect as an exemplar of how the more backstory a
character can manifest, the more closely a player can connect to it. Indeed, as
he writes: