The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 29

he irst part of this chapter explores the concept of media convergence as
a metaphor for understanding the diferent ways players can interact in each
game. Convergence, the spread of media content between both producers and
audiences, has been deined by Henry Jenkins as “both a top-down corporate-
driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process.” 15 Both a technological
construct and a cultural mindset, convergence is a way of thinking anew about
how producers and audiences enable content low. Both Lord of the Rings board
games deepen and extend our understanding of cross-media convergence
by relying on the complex interaction between the original text's top-down
“authority” and the game's bottom-up “play.” All paratextual board games exist in
a similar convergence between these two elements—reliance on an original text
but deviation for gameplay mechanics—and here this convergence is actualized
through the play with he Lord of the Rings . he notion of convergence relects
the fourth principle of paratextual board games:
Principle 4: Paratextual board games use play as a speciic mechanism by which
players inhabit and make media their own.
he second part of this chapter examines how both Knizia's LOTR and he
Complete Trilogy serve as key exemplars of cooperative approaches to paratextual
game play. I discuss the roles of cooperation and play within board games as they
relate speciically to convergence culture, a manifestation of the contemporary
new media environment.
Playing games/Playing media
If rules, as I described in the previous chapter, can best be understood as formal
algorithms that guide the structure of a game, play can best be understood as
the experience of the game itself . We can only understand game play through
multiple contexts of actual experiences—a “social experience, or a narrative
experience, or an experience of pleasure”—that envelop the game players. 16 Like
the Battlestar Galactica games I discuss in Chapter 4, part of the fun of the game
play lies in interacting with the other players. Play is always experiential and
always lived. Board games generate play in the moment, but the instant the game
pieces are put back in their box, the play of the game disappears.
Board games create a unique situation where the term “play” describes
both the action that happens in the game and an “engagement with any ixed