The Hunger Games and Fan Paratextual Participation - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 134

diferent talents needed to win in the Games—for instance, swordplay, archery,
or sprinting. Players win cards by secretly betting 1, 3, and/or 6 points on a card.
Each card is associated with a particular skill, and by combining the amount of
the bet with the skill level of the player and adding to that the random roll of a
die, the player may win the card and the points from the other players. If no one
else bets on the card, the player wins the card automatically—as, if there was a
real training day but only one person participated in that event, then that one
person would earn all the approval points.
Training Days functions as a type of fan iction. Although the original Hunger
Games novel features scenes within the training center for the Hunger Games
proper, because the story is told from Katniss's irst-person point of view, readers
of the novel rarely get to experience the training from the point of view of any
of the other characters. (Even the ilm version closes of the training to mainly
Katniss's point of view.) Readers experience the other participants in training
through Katniss's interpretation, and do not learn as much about the Tributes as
their varied personalities may ofer. he presence of these textual and semiotic
gaps in the narrative—gaps of characterization and gaps in narrative—are illed
in through the game, but require the presence of the player to enact them.
In terms of illing in the gaps of characterization, Training Days also presents
a type of participatory ainity space in which individual players help each
other learn about the character development. he fact that the characters are
constructed entirely by skill sets rather than personalities allows players to
develop their own insights into the relationships between them. Furthermore,
because the players have an active role in making decisions about the characters
and how they will play the games, the development of the character may have
more meaning for the player. But unlike District 12 , in which the character of
Katniss is relatively closed because it is already given to the players as written,
the characters in Training Days present the opportunity for players to generate
much more open-ended meaning in the characters.
By illing in the gaps of narrative, the game does not ofer a clear-cut narrative
trajectory that ties into the novel. Unlike District 12 , which closes of the
narrative by deliberately linking it to the narrative of the ilm version, any one
of the Tributes could win the most approval points in Training Days . Because
Katniss is not one of the characters, nor is the game closely aligned with a speciic
plot point in the novel, there is no diegetic rationale for a narrative, paratextual
connection. It might not even be Katniss's Hunger Games. his means that the
players of the game are given an open-ended opportunity to play in the large,