The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 38

ilms, but nevertheless were no less meaningful to our group; we became
co-constructors of convergence meaning within the game.
Convergence, as Graham Meikle and Sherman Young deine, relies on the
underlying “tensions … between contestation and continuity .” hey deine
contestation as the way in which communication practices can alter traditional
meanings, while conversely, continuity highlights the maintenance of cultural
rituals. Convergence happens when “new actors and old industries, contending
modes of distribution and visibility, [and] complex assemblages of digital media”
cohere. 41 Paratextual board games must retain some semblance of the original
text in order to be identiied with it. he sense of betrayal in Battlestar Galactica:
he Board Game and the cutthroat diplomacy of Game of hrones: he Card Game
mirror similar themes from their respective texts. For LOTR , Knizia attempted to
create continuity with the original topic; he writes that “Tolkien's Hobbits were
rarely in control of their situation. To relect this, I introduced a general tile deck
with a series of events that afected the players directly.” At the same time, he had
to relect a contestation with the original in order to make the game a game and
not just a turn-based story: “Apart from identifying the most interesting features
and the most intuitive rules, an important focus of the continual playing and
replaying was to balance the game.” 42 Similarly, he Complete Trilogy includes
continuity with the ilm series by using character photos from the ilm as icons for
the playing pieces, through the various cards with images and text from the ilms,
and through the overall narrative of the game, as players navigate through the
diferent locations just as the characters do in the ilms. But it also demonstrates
contestation through the diferent order in which events can occur, and through
the fact that characters can act completely out of character compared to their
cinematic counterparts. Indeed, although the game purports to be he Complete
Tr ilog y, the characters that one can play as are solely from the irst ilm; notably
absent are any of the female characters (Galadriel and Arwin would be obvious
characters from the irst ilm, but Éowyn plays a major role in the third ilm,
killing the Witch-King of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgûl). Also absent is Faramir, a
major character from the second ilm; and even though Boromir dies in the irst
ilm, he remains a playable character throughout the game.
Convergence culture may be deemed a product of the Internet age, and
indeed, “the advent of the Internet and online fandom has 'out-moded' the
previous nature” of cultural capital related to production practices. 43 For Elana
Shefrin, the Internet now “supplies a strong link” between artistic practice,
power relations, and class diference. But convergence goes beyond technology