The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 31

the ilm for the game to “it” within the text's story universe. Unlike a strict
adaptation—wherein one might have read the topic before seeing the ilm and
is thus expecting, if not a precise matching of elements, at least some kind of
idelity to the narrative—a game invites player cocreation in the unfolding of
the narrative. As French critic Roger Caillois has described, games must be a
“free and voluntary” activity; that is, one must want to play in order to become
part of the cult world. 22 In order to want to play, there must be some sort of
uncertainty in the game: as Costikyan points out, the uncertainty described
by Caillois is contained in the outcome of the game—who wins or loses should
be uncertain. But Costikyan argues that uncertainty “can be found almost
anywhere” in games, not just in the outcome. 23 Uncertainty can be less a focus
on what will happen than on how it will happen. We know that the Hobbits
should vanquish Sauron. If the game is won, we know that Sauron will be
defeated. he uncertainty in the two Lord of the Rings games isn't whether or not
they actually will, but rather how they will do so given speciic win conditions.
What speciic mechanisms take them to Mount Doom? What characters follow
them? In a way, playing a paratextual board game is like roleplaying fan iction;
the familiar characters and settings are there, but their relationships to each
other and to the plot are variable.
All ictions create alternate worlds, vast structures with variable elements.
While oten fantastical, these other worlds can be closely related to ours, as
Umberto Eco writes in an essay describing the cult world of Casablanca : the
“completely furnished world” of the ilm becomes its deining characteristic. 24
his deinition of “cult world” has been questioned by Sara Gwenllian-Jones,
however, who writes:
he existence and practices of fan cultures suggests that the opposite is true; ilms
and television series achieve cult status not because they present “completely
furnished” worlds but rather because the fracture and excess of their fantastic
imaginaries draw the audience's attention to the fact that their diegetic worlds
are invariably incompletely furnished. 25
Fans see their interactions in the cult world as ways of “playing” in an extant
universe: the “incomplete” nature of the world allows interaction in a way that
augments a fannish connection to the text. Paratextual board games like the
Lord of the Rings games present both the physical spaces of the narratives and
some imaginative gaps that players/fans can complete. hrough an examination