The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 27

( LOTR )—use similar strategies to represent the paratextual connections to
the Peter Jackson-directed ilm series and the original J. R. R. Tolkien novels,
respectively. In both games, cooperation is used as a play mechanic to advance
the narrative. his cooperative mechanic lies in contrast to both a more
traditional competitive style of game play and a more collaborative style of
multiplayer game play in video games and MMORPGs. 1 For these two Lord of
the Rings games, cooperation becomes a way of advancing through an already-
determined narrative structure.
LOTR is based on the Tolkien book series, and has won numerous awards,
including the Spiel des Jahres special award for best use of literature in a game
and the Games Magazine Games 100 honor. 2 Such awards may help explain the
popularity of LOTR, for as of 2007, Knizia's game had sold over a million copies. 3
Game awards like these oten help spur sales, especially of paratextual games:
“winning titles are almost guaranteed to see sales rise by 200,000 or 250,000.” 4 As
described by José P. Zagal, Jochen Rick, and Idris Hsi, LOTR is “extraordinary”
and “the most popular collaborative board game ever.” 5 Designer Reiner Knizia
described the game as not so much a direct adaptation of the novels, but rather
as a text that stayed “within the spirit of the topic so that the players would
experience something similar to the readers of the topic.” 6 In contrast, he
Complete Trilogy is based on the ilm series directed by Peter Jackson. It has won
no awards, and no scholarly work has been written on its game mechanics, rules,
play, or intertextual relationship with the original text. On boardgamegeek, he
Complete Trilogy has an abysmal rating of 3.32 out of 10 (with 19 votes counted);
in contrast, LOTR ranks on boardgamegeek as one of the top 500 board games of
all time, with almost 10,000 people voting. he Complete Trilogy is, despite its low
rating, still reasonably popular, having sold over 120,000 units. 7 In the pantheon
of board game literature, LOTR is a classic, while he Complete Trilogy seems
destined to be forgotten, a game echoing Parlett's assessment of licensed board
games as “essentially trivial.” 8 A critical comparison between the two games,
however, reveals useful nuances in understanding paratextuality and play.
Whereas in the irst chapter of Game Play I focused on game rules, in this
chapter I turn my attention to game play. For Salen and Zimmerman, the
concept of play foregrounds “the player's participation with the game and with
other players.” 9 Diferent games create play in diferent ways, and the deinition
of play is so inherently ambiguous that it deies normative application: despite
the fact (or perhaps, because of it) that we “all play occasionally, and we all know
what playing feels like,” we have little common deinition of the term. 10 But we