Narratives and Databases in Game of Thrones - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 143

that Christian Petersen, the creator of he Board Game , might never have
anticipated; we made the game more narratively driven, including developing
the alliance between House Martell and House Baratheon and role-playing the
characteristics of the cold, lonely House Stark.
As I have previously described, the new media environment is rife with
instances of database/narrative structural mergers, as fans can use a “narractive”
approach to generative content in online archives like wikis. Instead of either
accessing data on vast stores of online archives, or representing a plot through
a speciic order, fans can do both, using wikis and the “inherent hypertextuality
of the web to create connections between narrative elements.” hrough the
creation of a “narrative database,” fans structure a “narrative through communal
interaction. It is not the same as taking units from a random archive, but rather of
reassembling units in a new order.” 8 Fans' work to construct narrative databases
like A Wiki of Ice and Fire hinges on the interactive potential of both serialized
and networked elements. 9 At the same time, there is an additional element of
narrative serialization within the database in other fan work online, as fans can
rewrite and reproduce cult media texts through social media sites like Tumblr.
For instance, fan-made GIFs and GIFics of A Game of hrones tell amateur
stories using the database of elements available to fans in the digital age. 10
Beyond fandom, social media harnesses this database/narrative bridge
to create other types of new texts. For example, José van Dijck describes the
transition in social network from “databases of personal information” to “tools
for (personal) storytelling and narrative self-presentation.” Facebook's 2011
introduction of its Timeline feature demonstrates this shit. When Facebook was
irst developed, it acted more like a database of elements: it collated information
about a user's life and displayed it to the user's friends. here was an attempt
to demonstrate each particular identity as “a database of users and for users.” 11
Facebook's Timeline “actively rearranged users' proiles so that events were
listed chronologically, on a seemingly endless timeline of a user's life. Everyone's
timeline starts on the day of his or her birth and, depending on his or her
overall usage of Facebook, continues to add information throughout the user's
own personal timeline.” 12 his narrative rearrangement of information brings a
serialized structure to the database—a structure that I have previously described
as a “narrative paradox”—and “requires not only adding new data to already
existing content, it also triggers a new awareness of how you want your life story
be told, to whom and for what purpose. ” 13 In other words, Timeline creates a serial
life out of a database of possibilities, turning individual events from periodic and
chronological “updates” to an ever-growing (digital) corpus.