Ludic Interaction in Doctor Who - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 162

appropriation of meaning” itself from larger ideological structures. 12 Linda
Hutcheon complicates these structures, calling adaptation both a product that
has speciic ties to an original text and a process that “permits us to think about
how adaptations allow people to tell, show, or interact with stories.” 13 Processes
of adaptation reveal a more complex version of linearized, narratively based
meanings, and further complicate our understanding of storytelling
I have previously written about the need for new theoretical models to explain
the multifaceted and nonlinear interpretation of culture from contemporary
vantage points. 14 Board games, although an ancient form of play, illustrate the
need for new models, speciically in their connection with contemporary media.
When narrativized, linear media become the default. Consequently, scholars and
players ignore the important contributions that ludism brings to contemporary
cultural studies. Adaptation by itself is out-moded and functionally misunderstood
in the context of board games. Quite simply, adaptation does not describe what
paratextual board games do . While video games have been analyzed as one
way of reexamining adaptation, board games have not. Bogost uses the term
“procedural adaptation” to describe the various ways that video games “do more
than just replicate the licensed property's characters, scenes, or logos”—they
intermix “playable scenes … with rendered cinematics that ill in the scenes let
unplayable.” 15 hrough the innovative use of cut scenes, animated characters,
and gameplay mechanics, video games provide a useful way of examining ludic
adaptation . But board games cannot replicate those same afordances within the
scope of an analog system—they require a player's ludic interaction .
his interpretation of ludic interaction combines aspects of what Andrews has
called “transforming” adaptation, the “reproduction … of something essential
about an original text” 16 with a rhetorical model of ludism described by Sutton-
Smith as a rhetoric of “play as the imaginary.” 17 Indeed, I would argue, what is
transformative about board game adaptations is not just “idelity to the spirit, to
the original's tone, values, imagery, and rhythm,” but also a speciic transformation
of the meaning behind the consumption of the media text. 18 It is telling that media
scholars tend to use the word “read” to describe topics, ilms, and television
series but rarely do we talk about “reading” a game—instead, we play it. he type
of play engendered by ictional texts, at least according to Sutton-Smith, could
be considered “playful improvisation … idealiz[ing] the imagination lexibility,
and creativity of the … human play worlds.” 19 For Sutton-Smith, this type of
play is not imaginary because it is frivolous, but rather because it deliberately
manifests characteristics of both creativity and imagination—composers who