Transmedia Pathos and Plot in The Walking Dead - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 53

this chapter, I examine culture . Salen and Zimmerman consider these three
overarching schemas as “not merely a model for game design,” but also as a
representation of “a way of understanding any sort of design.” 6 As we have seen,
rules govern the algorithmic functionality of games ( Arkham Horror ), and play
structures the way the players interpret the narrative ( he Lord of the Rings ).
Culture is, in turn, a way of understanding the larger context in which the
games sit. For contemporary paratextual board games, Salen and Zimmerman's
discussion of culture as “in a context, a surrounding cultural milieu” highlights the
contemporary media environment as conducive to this paratextual relationship. 7
More speciically, a contemporary focus on transmediation as it appears across
both scholarship and creative practices highlights how paratextual board games
it into today's media culture.
Transmediation describes the spread of narrative information across multiple
media outlets. While board games most overtly problematize narrative coherence,
they also expand, deepen, and augment the narrative world through individual
player associations with the core text. Chapter 5's Star Trek: Expeditions is a great
example of this. he game does not mimic the plot of the 2009 ilm, the text
upon which it is based. Rather, it introduces a new narrative that deepens the
players' understandings of the Star Trek universe. In traditional interpretations
of transmediation, media scholars have tended to examine these outlets'
relationships as being based in narrative storytelling. Although oten associated
with digital media, 8 transmediation can also be traced to Greek myths and
Biblical stories as well as literature like Cervantes' Don Quixote and Lovecrat's
mythos (see Chapter 1). 9 he term “transmedia storytelling” was posited by
Henry Jenkins to describe a narrative network where “integral elements of a
iction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the
purpose of creating a uniied and coordinated entertainment experience.” 10 As
he later writes:
In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does
best—so that a story might be introduced in a ilm, expanded through television,
novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through
game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable
autonomous consumption. hat is, you don't need to have seen the ilm to enjoy
the game and vice-versa. 11
But narrative is itself composed of many attributes, and a detailed investigation
of those attributes reveals the many and varied ways that texts can cohere in a
transmediated fashion—for example, through audience participation, emotion,