The Hunger Games and Fan Paratextual Participation - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 136

franchise. As mainstream media industries are becoming more aware of fandom
and fan practices, they are inding ways to appropriate this fannish enthusiasm.
In 2006 Henry Jenkins noted two diferent responses from the industries to
participatory culture: the prohibitionists who “adopt … a scorched-earth
policy toward their consumers” and attempt to criminalize fan participatory
activity, and the collaborationists who “see fans as important collaborators in
the production of content.” 59 To this dichotomy, Suzanne Scott adds another
method: the appropriationalists, who use fannish tactics to appeal to a particular
fandom. According to Scott, such appropriationalists may cultivate “a parallel
fan space alongside grassroots formations of fandom.” 60 his parallel space may
ofer fans a type of ainity space for creating fan content, but they can also mold
and shape that content in particular ways: the authority over this authorized
space rests with the industry, not with the fans. Such “authorized resistance” uses
fan enthusiasm for industrial purposes.
District 12 seems to embrace this appropriationalist mentality by ofering a
slice of narrative that is underexplored in the commercial text and generating
an authorized ainity space for players to participate in co-constructing the
narrative, but stops short of giving players the freedom to explore the world
outside the bounds of the text itself. Players are Katniss and Katniss must enter
the Games—there are no other options because that is the way the authorized
narrative must go. his seems partially based on the externality of the point of
view of Katniss in the ilms: because viewers will forever be external to Katniss,
we must follow her exploits secondhand. Although fans can certainly play the
game diferently and create their own interpretations, the game itself funnels
fandom in particular ways. In contrast, Training Days seems collaborationist. It
too generates an ainity space that presents an underexplored aspect of Panem,
but by focusing on the individual decision-making of the players as well as the
open-ended nature of the narrative, it provides a space for active cocreation of
the characters and story. Although players do not have to develop a narrative
in Training Days , the opportunity to do so is clearer and more deined than in
District 12.
As new media develop, online cultural participation will only increase. As
critics like Sean Conners and Iris Shepard argue, young adult readers of he
Hunger Games can be “encouraged to engage the topics critically, reading them
from the standpoint of theory and mining them for parallels that connect the
dystopian vision Collins presents to contemporary life.” 61 Collins' critiques of the
dangers of absolute power, the brutality of totalitarian societies, and the brain-