Transmedia Pathos and Plot in The Walking Dead - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 50

food and guns, to relect their antecedent text. But both games use their zombies
in diferent ways, creating distinctive approaches to paratextuality.
As I have been discussing in previous chapters, paratextual board games
ofer unique perspectives on contemporary media theories. he paratextual
relationship developed between board games and media products augments
contemporary notions of media complexity and cohesiveness. In this chapter,
I want to examine more speciically the narrative complexity that a paratextual
relationship engenders—as Adam Brown and Deb Waterhouse-Watson ask,
“how do the more 'conventional' narrative perspectives of ilm and television
source texts translate into board games?” 1 Or, rather, more generally, if board
games ofer moments of “playful” escape, then how can they “it” into larger
paradigms of narrative storytelling?
In 2011, both Z-Man Games and Cryptozoic Games released these board
games based on he Walking Dead , one for the graphic novel series and one
for its television adaptation, respectively. Both games reference their core text
in the artwork and both develop from an explicit association with the requisite
text of each medium. he game based on the graphic novel, he Walking Dead:
he Board Game is a complex game using multiple dice, cards, and character
options to develop a play experience that, I argue, transmediates the emotional
pathos experienced by the characters in the graphic novel. I am using the term
“pathos” to refer to the emotional appeal that a text can make to its reader.
Pathos is generated by afective actions happening to a character in a media
text, the feeling of connection between character and player. In its attempts to
transmediate pathos , the graphic novel board game (here abbreviated as WDGN)
develops gameplay afect . I am deining “afect” as the way that emotions are
generated through the game. In this sense, the WDGN generates unique player
pathos, opening up the deinition of transmedia storytelling to include player
afect as a constituent element. In contrast, he Walking Dead Board Game is a
relatively simple board game played to mirror the narrative experience of the
show. he fact that the television board game (here abbreviated as WDTV)
relects the narrative trajectory of the television show presents an adaptation of
the narrative rather than a transmediation of pathos. In other words, each game
based on the Walking Dead franchise approaches the source material diferently,
WDGN taking a character-centric approach, and the WDTV taking a narrative-
centric approach. his seemingly minor shit heralds a major change in studies
of transmediation and paratextuality.
he existence of these two board games, each based on the same larger narrative
structure but developed for two diferent media, ofers a relevant opportunity