Transmedia Pathos and Plot in The Walking Dead - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 63

Shane. Although some of the narrative involves killing zombies, the majority
of the graphic novels' violence depicts characters ighting against each other, as
character Negan demonstrates with his barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat. Other
melodramatic scenes depict characters, like Rick and Andrea, falling in love;
others, like Tyreese and Carol, having intense sexual relationships; and families,
like Rick and Carl, trying to remain together. 49 For example, the characters of
Glenn and Maggie provide a lot of melodramatic story to follow, as they meet
and fall in love, and eventually must deal with Maggie's depression and Glenn's
death. As Bonansinga notes, he Walking Dead graphic novels tell the story “from
inside the characters, and the power comes from an accumulation of detail.” 50
he nature of comics as a medium invites audience connection. 51 his feeling of
being connected to the characters and situations, of having an emotional stake
in their survival, is what is transmediated in the board game. As a component of
narrative, this describes a participatory and interactive element of pathos, rather
than a speciically formalistic element of plot.
he game board for the WDTV is quite diferent from the WDGN, and
illustrates how the WDTV attempts adaptation rather than transmediation. In
contrast to the hexagonal spaces of the WDGN, the WDTV has a linear board—
squares connected in a particular path. Players can move forward or backward,
but must progress in one direction or its reverse. he objectives of the game are
also static—at each corner of the square board are four locations that must be
traversed. At each objective, characters must defeat zombies, a task that relies
on the “supply” cards one has drawn in the past. Supply cards have numbers on
them, and players must play a higher number than the number of zombies that
are attacking, itself generated via drawing an “encounter” card. A player wins if
he or she moves to each of the four corner locations and survives the zombie
attacks.
he WDTV encourages players to follow situations that exist in the television
show. For example, encounter cards have speciic scenes described from the
show written on them, and so each encounter references a speciic event from
the show. he “Out of Reach” card features a still image of Merle from the
television series stretching to grab a gun, just out of his grasp. his card alludes
to a scene in the irst season of the show when Merle is handcufed to a pipe
and attacked by zombies. In this, the WDTV does not present the game as “new
narrative”; rather, it adapts narratives that already exist on the show. he static
nature of the game and the relative inlexibility of player choice in how the game
progresses means that players are not particularly emotionally connected to the