The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 34

where cooperation is essential for survival, it is more likely that cooperative
games will be more important than competitive games.
One might well argue that large-scale cultural ideology has had less of a hand
in the construction of games over time: ater all, cooperative games in one form
or another have been popular at diferent times, in diferent societies, and with
diferent types of players. However, as Sutton-Smith contends, “escape from
cultural rhetoric is well nigh impossible.” Structurally, human play is always
constructed within and around a particular societal and cultural moment. Any
game “requires a gaming society, and any society has norms and hierarchies that
interpenetrate the game”; for Sutton-Smith, “players enjoy participating in social
play because it makes them a part of the collective social dreams” that undergird
contemporary culture. 32 Games relect the prevailing cultural economy. For my
board game group in particular, a gaming society of sorts, the socialization of
play is one of the most compelling elements. Whether we considered a game
“good” or not, the social interactions we experienced helped make each session
memorable (perhaps even more so when the games weren't very good and we
all could laugh about it). Whether or not the game has a competitive mechanic,
we cooperate throughout, oten ofering help and advice to players who are new
to a particular game, or talking through rules for everyone in a supportive and
encouraging environment.
In contrast, for Elias, Garield, and Gutschera, cooperative interaction in
games is “problematic” (and, in fact, they relegate its description to a footnote),
arguing that “it is not a feature exclusive to cooperative games, and indeed it is
possible in principle for a cooperative game not to have it.” Such is the diference
between cooperation as a design mechanic and cooperation as a social system.
Comparing a cooperative game to a single-player game, where “the player plays
more against 'the system' than against an imaginary opponent,” Elias, Garield,
and Gutschera seem to deny the efect that interplayer communication can
have on the outcomes of the game play. 33 But it is precisely this communication
that relects a contemporary ideological concern of paratextual board games in
general, and of the Lord of the Rings game in particular: that of convergence
culture.
A term for an emerging media ecology in which both consumers and
producers become participants in the low of media information, “convergence
culture” serves as a paradigm for participatory media culture. 34 For Henry
Jenkins, whose Convergence Culture has become a signiicant work of media
studies scholarship, convergence describes the “low of content across multiple