Narratives and Databases in Game of Thrones - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 145

his synthesis between the topic and the game occurs in the game as players
role-play as the great Houses. In he Board Game , each element is based on its
relationship to other elements , making the game a uniquely social experience that
relies on what Woods studies as the “game mechanics and the social interactions
which emerge from them.” 17 hese social interactions become emblematic of and
constituent to the construction of a networked understanding of the mechanics
and aesthetics of paratextual board games, and also relective of the nature of
socialization online. he relationship between sociality within paratextual board
games and the larger, macro-relationship between the paratext and the text
itself relects a type of networked collectivism that deines contemporary online
discourse. Nancy Baym, working initially with fans in the Swedish music scene,
has deined “networked collectivism” as “groups of people networking throughout
the internet and related mobile media, creating a shared but distributed group
identity.” 18 Networked collectivism looks at how diferent groups overlap in the
digital environment and is usually applied to online discourse that relects a
dispersed but cohesive group of people. Understanding the network at the heart
of this collectivism reveals an underlying database structure to (digital) human
connectivity; that is, the networked collective highlights an unordered but
structured collection of individuals. his networked collectivism appears in, for
instance, the development of wikis, using collective intelligence, or the collective
authorship of some forms of fan iction. Networked collectivism reveals a
structure connecting multiple individuals; this structure is revealed particularly
through he Board Game 's gameplay mechanics as the character interactions,
dependent on the players' socialization, determines the game play.
A Game of hrones: he Board Game illustrates a networked collectivism as
a singular database. Unlike the novel's close look at individual characters, he
Board Game focuses on larger familial concerns. hese familial histories of the
Great Houses—the larger interconnected relationships between families—has
an efect on the way the game progresses, as it plays a part in the availability of
resources, power, and order within the game. his does not mean that knowledge
of these characters' interpersonal relationships had no efect on the game itself:
my game group experienced much mirth at my expense when I played as House
Lannister, as they found plenty of opportunities to invoke the Lannister's various
acts of incest into their game play, taunting and trash-talking. But at the macro-
level, the game does not revolve around individual characters. In a sense, the
loosely grouped individuals allied with a particular House form a collection
of networked individuals who share allegiances; in the game these networked