Transmedia Pathos and Plot in The Walking Dead - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 54

and interactivity. As Edward Branigan notes, viewer emotional response to a
narrative oten develops from interpreting multiple associations between these
dynamic elements. 12 In the Walking Dead graphic novel, the character of Jim
becomes emotionally relevant (and thus uses afect to generate pathos) because
the story of his family—killed in front of him by zombies at the start of the
outbreak—extends his past life into his present predicament. 13 As I will show,
the two Walking Dead board games use diferent mechanisms, including game
mechanics, character identiication, and aesthetic connection, to generate afect
through the game play and increased player pathos.
Both games are based in the Walking Dead universe, in which reanimated
corpses walk the Earth and (slowly) chase the protagonists. In WDGN, the
characters inhabit a geographic area surrounding Atlanta, Georgia, and can use
resources like guns to kill hordes of zombies or food to heal ater being attacked.
Players can also run away from zombies, which they end up doing most of the
time. he end goal of the game is to scout three locations—for example, the
airport, the football stadium, the motel, the campsite—and complete diferent
challenges at each location. Challenges include killing a set number of zombies
while maintaining a certain level of supplies. Oten, one player has to have more
supplies than other players do in order to complete a location. WDTV imagines a
diferent type of Walking Dead world, as the characters from the television series
walk through the streets of Atlanta encountering zombies and ighting them.
Players ight zombies using supplies they can ind, including guns, ammunition,
and melee weapons like axes. If a character succumbs to zombie attack, he or she
turns into a zombie and can attack the other players.
Both Walking Dead board games attach to their original text in multiple ways.
For Marie-Laure Ryan, two diferent types of transmedia storytelling exist. 14
“Snowball” storytelling consists of a core narrative that becomes so popular—for
example, Star Trek, Star Wars —that it inspires multiple products to be created
ater its release. hat is, the core narrative grows over time as new products are
added. Star Trek started as a single television series, but over time (and without
a deliberate game plan set in motion from the start) has developed into multiple
television series, ilms, graphic novels, toys, and other franchise elements,
including games Star Trek: Fleet Captains and Star Trek: Expeditions . Alternately,
“system” storytelling describes transmedia narratives that are deliberately
designed to use more than one medium to tell one story— he Matrix , as
described by Henry Jenkins, is a good example of system storytelling as it was
deliberately designed to tell an expansive story over multiple texts. 15 Both types