The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 33

ight enemies across the expanse of Middle-earth, as Frodo carries the Ring to
Mount Doom.
Reiner Knizia describes having written and designed LOTR as a way of
understanding not just the literature of Tolkien, but also the half-century of
popular culture surrounding it:
for the Lord of the Rings Board Game I needed to develop a deep understanding
of Tolkien's world, the underlying themes, and the motivations of the characters.
his was not achievable by merely reading the topic itself. I also needed to know
what excited the fans, and what was at the center of their discussions. 29
It is not that all fans of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings want cooperation and
collaboration in their fandom or in their lives (far from it; fandom is oten fraught
with tensions and hierarchies), but rather that Tolkien's narrative is deliberately
focused on the elements of communication and collaboration between diferent
beings. 30
While competition seems to be the focus of many games today, cooperative
board games have a long and signiicant cultural history. Other paratextual
games I discuss in this topic are cooperative— Arkham Horror and Star Trek:
Expeditions, for instance—and some use aspects of both cooperation and
competition in the game play— he Walking Dead: he Board Game and
Battlestar Galactica , for example. In a contemporary neoliberal context valuing
individual self-interests over communal well-being, the play of contemporary
games seems to be focused intensely on hierarchical values of winning and
achievement. 31 Brian Sutton-Smith, however, describes how some of the earliest
forms of play in human history were social and cooperative, and focused on
inclusivity instead of one exclusive victor. his inclusive rhetoric foregrounds
the experience of play as both feminist and communal, with an emphasis on the
social context of cooperation instead of competition. For instance, sports games
oten value cooperative play instead of individual achievement (but a neoliberal
sports mentality oten tends to reward the individual player for the deeds of a
group efort). Historically and culturally, cooperative play is common, especially
when considering unstructured play like children's games. Indeed, Sutton-Smith
points out that:
empirical support for this [cooperative play], and therefore for the importance of
distinguishing the rhetorics of community from those of power, comes from the
anthropological record of the great dominance of cooperative forms of play over
competitive forms in most earlier tribal societies. In smaller human groupings