The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 48

Convergence, as much as it demonstrates the continued and growing power of
audiences to construct their own meaning out of media texts, also reminds us
that conglomerated media corporations still hold much power in the way they
oversee franchises.
For he Lord of the Rings , the Tolkien estate and New Line Cinema seem
to have had little hand in the production of these paratextual board games. In
a discussion at Capricon 2014, a science iction convention in Chicago, game
designer Kenneth Hite noted that, beyond inding authorized images, media
corporations tended to let game designers have free rein in creating paratextual
board games. 65 Perhaps this is for the best, as each game provides diferent
insights into how paratextuality functions when translating a ilmic or novelistic
text into a ludic medium. One of the key lessons that paratextual board games
relect in this system, as demonstrated by these games, is that communities have
the power to perform their own versions of media franchises. According to Salen
and Zimmerman, the social aspects of games are oten the most important: “As
players mingle with each other inside the magic circle, their social interactions
highlight important aspects of a game's design. Meaningful play can be framed
as social phenomena .” 66 he Lord of the Rings franchise has, over its half-century
of popularity, generated entire communities of audiences, fans, and consumers.
Both the ilms and the novels continue to excite thousands of fans. hat the
paratextual board games based on these texts can represent a convergence of
community and consumerism through the metaphor of collaborative game
play reveals just one of the many important media elements contained in the
relationship between paratextual board games and their original texts.