Transmedia Pathos and Plot in The Walking Dead - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 56

We recognize familiar characters and scenes—an image of Carl on a card or a
scene of the protagonists attacking zombies—as an aesthetic connection to the
original text, but the gameplay mechanics allow us to play with that narrative
world in ways unanticipated in the original storyworld. In the WDGN, we travel
to locations, the airport for instance, that the characters in the graphic novel
do not. A ludic adaptation can never precisely reproduce the “sign system” of
the original narrative; rather, only a limited set of signs can be adapted. Indeed,
Carlos Scolari notes that transmedia storytelling “is not just an adaptation from
one media to another. he story that the comics tell is not the same as that told
on television or in cinema.” 24 And as Robert Brookey argues, the adaptation of
ilm to a video game rarely matches the style and tone of the original, reducing
the adaptive narrative to a few key plot points. 25 Board games make adaptation
even more diicult—while a board game can include the same representations of
characters, locations, and props as the original text, it will rarely match precisely
the events as they occurred on screen or on the page, given the luidity of game
play. And the two Walking Dead games make this adaptation more diferent still,
as the WDTV is itself an adaptation of an adaptation.
Board games are rarely analyzed in terms of transmediation, although
many canonical deinitions of transmedia describe video games as one of the
main nodes in the storytelling network, perhaps because of the convergence
of technologies video games engender. 26 As I discussed in Chapter 2, many
franchises that it within a transmedia paradigm have vast environments
and worlds for the characters (and the audience) to explore. 27 Video games
model this paradigm because they “it within a much older tradition of spatial
stories.” 28 his hyperdiegetic sense of narrative—that there is a sense of more
world than can be experienced in any one text—its the spatial organization of
video games, which tend to have this type of expansive world. 29 Indeed, in 2012,
Telltale Games' video game based on the Walking Dead franchise was released
as a hyperdiegetic extension to the series: it details the irst few weeks of the
zombie infection (scenes both the television series and the graphic novel have
let deliberately vague). In contrast, the physicality of board games tends to limit
them to nonhyperdiegetic roles in narrative, as the expansive worlds of video
games (or of cult narratives generally) are diicult to replicate in physical and
tangible spaces.
If video games relect a more spatially oriented focus on transmediation,
board games complicate this narratological notion. As Markus Montola notes,
video games and other “virtual worlds have more in common with ordinary