The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 47

these complex paratextual games. As Gary Alan Fine writes in Shared Fantasy ,
his discussion of role-playing games as social worlds, the social structures
inherent within game systems reveal that:
not only does a social structure exist that incorporates players' natural
interactions with each other, but a social structure also exists in the [game]
world, as characters form adventure parties, and these parties must negotiate a
social order. 61
In terms of LOTR and he Complete Trilogy , although the players may not
have the type of freedom Fine describes in relation to RPGs to develop
character attributes (thus becoming interpolated into their characters' social
and ideological situation), there is still a sense of character hierarchy. 62 his
hierarchy may stem from the topic series (the player using the Fatty Bolger piece
in our group was ridiculed because the character is relatively minor in the topics
compared with the other Hobbits, he doesn't actually go on the quests, and his
name is Fatty) or from the diferent attributes each character has in the game (in
he Complete Trilogy , the Merry character is substantially more powerful than
the Pippin character, even though the two Hobbits are actually quite similar in
the ilm series; thus, playing Pippin may come with inherent value and hierarchy
judgments). It could also stem from the diferent levels of Tolkien knowledge
each of the players in my group brought to the table. But at the same time, as Jane
Chance writes, each character necessarily has diferent characteristics within
the topic series as well, so perhaps the convergence here is a way of enveloping
diferent elements of the topic with the game. 63
A common criticism of licensed board games regards the way that individual
media corporations make use of convergence for inancial reasons, seemingly
taking advantage of fan audiences. Shefrin's analysis of the participatory fandom
surrounding Jackson's Lord of the Rings franchise, and its contrast with George
Lucas's Star Wars franchise, relects a signiicant shit in the way fan cultures are
alternately courted and placated by studios:
Lord of the Rings fans have been actively courted by Jackson and New Line
Cinema throughout all aspects of authoring, casting, ilming, and marketing the
trilogy. Star Wars fans, however, have been doubly ofended by the actions of
Lucas and Lucasilm: on the one hand, their desires to be “consumer ailiates”
in the cinematic production process have been generally ignored; on the other
hand, their roles as “illegal pirates” of corporately-owned intellectual property
have been overtly emphasized. 64