Ludic Interaction in Doctor Who - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 161

he miniature images of David Tennant as the Doctor in the Time Travelling
Action Game become totems of memory—linked both to the show itself (or
the character/actor), and to the experience of playing the game. Interaction
with a text, especially fan interaction, has tended to fall under three types of
activities, as deined by John Fiske: semiotic productivity (making meaning
from watching), enunciative productivity (making conversation with others),
or textual productivity (creating fan work). 6 In a digital environment, as Hills
suggests, these three merge, highlighting a “luidity of semiotic, enunciative, and
textual productivity” across audiences in the digital environment. 7 In contrast,
paratextual board games engender a diferent type of activity that I term “ludic
productivity.” In this form of paratextual activity, the boundaries of the text and
the paratext become conjoined through the interactive potentiality espoused
by the game itself. hat is, players must negotiate their own activity within the
larger boundaries encompassing the game and the original text. 8 his form of
productivity hinges on the sense of paratextuality at the heart of the franchise,
and the connectivity permeating the two.
Ludic interaction and imaginative transformation
in Doctor Who
In some crucial ways, paratextual games do not merely extend the world of the
original text, but rather, as H. Porter Abbott might suggest, adapt that world
for a new medium. 9 Such discussion requires a revisitation of contemporary
paratextual theories. he concept of ludic interaction creates a sense of grounded,
but new, meanings within the paratextual board game, rather than seeing it as a
shadow of the original text. 10
Whereas the concept of “adaptation” is a linear model of media interaction,
developed out of literary theory, ludic interaction references play with the original
text, the back-and-forth construction of meaning between paratextual game and
original text. For Dudley Andrews, adaptation can take many forms, but the
most common is a type of transformation that assumes a particular idelity to
the original. 11 Andrews calls this a “tiresome” mode, as it implicitly creates a
hierarchy between media texts. Removed from the context of ilmic adaptations
(the subject of his book), the idea of ludic interaction as a transformative
act becomes relevant to games. For Andrews, all media are adaptations of
already extant ideological and cultural meanings, and all adaptation is “the