The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 46

a shit in the game play, but because he can attack any character in the game,
one could theoretically have a turn every time Sauron moved at the expense of
others' turns. Such indeterminacy of breaks undermines the structuring of the
narrative in the Lord of the Rings ilm, which as Smith and Matthews assert, is
very closely aligned with that of the topic series. 59
In the static yet mobile board and the indeterminacy of the stage given Sauron's
movements, he Complete Trilogy game denies the connection to the ilm that
it is trying to generate. hat is, the game may aesthetically match characters and
situations from the ilms through the character cards and tokens, but given the
actual game play, the lack of structure forces players to imagine the game in a
diferent type of world: one determined by a diferent set of rules. his is playing
with the story. As Stöckmann and Jahnke note, this doesn't have to be the case:
“though game and literature are diferent media diverging in certain respects,
they perfectly complement one another, when it comes to telling a story. 60 But
with he Complete Trilogy , the denial of speciic narrative moments from the
ilm force a diferent reading out of the game's story, one created not just by
authorial igures, but by the convergence of players as well.
“What to do with the time that is given to us...”
As convergence manifests in multiple ways in the contemporary media
environment, it is important to recognize how paratextual board games
constantly negotiate the tension between remaining tethered to an original text
while branching out for original gameplay elements. his convergence allows for
unique methods of interacting with classic texts. Paratextual games can ofer a
playful introduction to a media text, but they can also allow players to revisit and
reimagine that media text. For example, in the next chapter I examine two games
based on he Walking Dead , each of which encourages players to encounter the
narratives afresh.
Convergence culture, while a key shit in contemporary media studies, is
not without its criticism. One of the major issues with the utopian ideals of a
convergence culture lies in the fact that human beings rarely exist in perfect
harmony with each other or within the culture they reside. Although my game
group tended to get along during the games, tensions would occasionally arise,
especially when discussing the iner points of some of the more arcane rules of