The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 30

structure, something that both games and … stories invite.” 17 We both play
a game and play with a game. Paratextual board games like LOTR and he
Complete Trilogy relect this two-fold structure: there is the space of the game
itself (the board, the table, the pieces) and the space of the cult narrative world,
the space of Middle-earth. To watch Lord of the Rings is to be a part of a bounded
cult franchise, but to play Lord of the Rings is to push against those boundaries,
to become both a reaction to and a reiication of the rules and restrictions,
structures and shapes, of the cult world. Play is, at once, serious business and
fanciful imagination.
Playing a paratextual board game thus requires existing within an
already-extant space as well as within an imaginative space of the player's own
creation: “play enables the exploration of that tissue boundary between fantasy
and reality, between the real and the imagined.” 18 he interaction between
physical and virtual “playspaces” has led researchers Shanly Dixon and Sandra
Weber to theorize a connective tissue between the act of imaginative play and the
structured process of playing. 19 Players of the Lord of the Rings games play in the
world of Middle-earth by codifying the boundaries of Middle-earth. In LOTR ,
all ive Hobbits work together to take the Ring of Power from its hiding place in
the Shire to Mordor and Mount Doom, where they must throw it into the ire
and keep Sauron from using its power to take over the world. In he Complete
Tr ilog y , the Hobbits are joined by the other members of he Fellowship of the
Ring as well to complete this task, although in this game Sauron sends enemies
ater the group to defeat them in combat (there is no combat in LOTR , although
dice rolling oten simulates the uncertainty of encounters with game characters).
Cult media ofer this same sense of play, enacting a “philosophy of playfulness”
within the media fan. 20 Fans engage in playful behavior, and push against the
boundaries of the media text.
To remain open and “playable,” however, the paratextual board game must
address the closed nature of the narrative, begging the question of how one
plays a narrative whose ending one already knows. Paratextual board games
demand a lexible narrative structure, for knowing the ending of the game,
especially a complex one based on an already-created media narrative, may
undermine the freedom a player might have for creating a new ending. 21 In
Chapter 5's Star Trek: Expeditions, the narrative develops throughout the game
in a number of branching paths. In contrast, in Chapter 6's he Hunger Games:
District 12, there must be a strict adherence to the underlying structure of