Transmedia Pathos and Plot in The Walking Dead - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 55

of narratives involve transmedia extensions, or elements that fans collect to
increase their encyclopedic knowledge of the story. 16 As indicated in Jenkins's
original quotation, board games are complicated extensions to transmedia
franchises, as they build what Christy Dena might call a “storyworld,” neither
providing a “primary source of information about characters [or] setting,” nor
playing “a direct role in the unfolding plot.” Paratextual board games do not
necessarily develop an overarching story, but they do allow “the ictional world
to be accessed in the real world through character identiication.” 17 In short,
games generally develop worlds , not narratives .
Both the Walking Dead board games could be described as “snowball”
storytelling, as each game uses particular locales, characters, and design features
from its requisite core text. Robert Kirkman's comic he Walking Dead started in
2003 and was developed into a highly rated cable television series in 2010. he
Walking Dead television series is quite deliberately an adaptation of the graphic
novel, as evidenced by the irst season, which follows the irst few issues of the
comic relatively closely (although, as Craig Fischer describes, there are important
diferences that shape our understanding of each, including the development of
Shane's character in the television series instead of his rather abrupt death in
the graphic novel). 18 As it has progressed, the show's narrative has increasingly
diverged from that of the comic series. 19
As a corollary of transmedia storytelling, adaptation describes how one
narrative is translated from one medium to another. In the conclusion of the
book, I will talk more about ludic adaptations and the way paratextual games
like Doctor Who: he Interactive Electronic Board Game adapt the “feeling” of the
original show. “Adaptations,” as Linda Hutcheon notes, “are everywhere”: they
have a special relationship with their antecedent text, as there is always a trace
haunting the adaptation. 20 An adaptation, as ilm critic Dudley Andrews describes,
remakes and matches an original text's “sign system to prior achievement in
some other system.” 21 Adaptation is the translation and reproduction from one
system to another. But just because the story may be borrowed does not mean
the adaptation necessarily lacks originality: according to Deborah Cartmell,
adaptation will always “rewrite the story for a particular audience.” 22 Part of the
pleasure of adaptation comes, Hutcheon argues, from “repetition with variation,
from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise.” 23 In the
case of a board game adaptation of a television or graphic novel narrative, this
pleasure lies in noting speciic aesthetic similarities as well as in recognizing
moments of balance between adherence to a narrative and departure from it.