Transmedia Pathos and Plot in The Walking Dead - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 65

Cory Jones, notes how the WDTV was developed to capture the narrative of the
television series: “he goal for me was to play up [character] tensions, because
it seems the drama lives in the tension.” 53 Character pathos seems less the focus
than following a series of events to structure a single narrative. It's not that afect
is completely efaced in the WDTV as opposed to the WDGN, but the emphasis
on adapting static narrative elements of the television series precludes the
transmediation of the dynamic narrative elements. he WDTV seems focused
on constructing an adaptation of the series while the WDGN seems to develop
a transmediated approach to character afect.
Video game and literacy scholar James Paul Gee has noted that this afective
relationship coheres player to character, creating a “projective identity” that
exists between game diegesis and player control. 54 As audiences feel emotional
attachment to characters, the empathy for those characters can translate as
the character moves from one medium to another. Characters are what Ryan
calls static elements, but the particular pathos engendered by characters can
be dynamic; indeed, one element that Ryan elides in her structural analysis of
transmedia narrative is the audience, and the particular afect generated by
audiences of a cult program. 55 Steven E. Jones notes the pleasure that audiences
can feel at piecing together a transmedia “puzzle”:
part of the allure of such cross-platform “intermediation” is the viewers' or
players' pleasure at following the “hacks” or media repurposing created by the
game, seeing diferent media crossed and re-crossed in order to use the network
as the platform for a larger, unstable, paratextual structure. 56
But here Jones is writing about the afect experienced nondiegetically, the
“pleasure in experiencing the media crossings in real time and physical space.”
Rarely is afect itself discussed as an element of narrative that itself can be
transmediated.
To understand games as part of a transmedia franchise, then, game characters
need to do more than just tell the story; they must illustrate relationships. In he
Walking Dead comic and television series, many characters interact diferently
when allied with others. For example, in both texts Rick tends to be more
protective and violent when near his son Carl; for example, in both the comic
and the show, when Carl is kidnapped and threatened with rape, Rick kills all of
the attackers. his characteristic is mirrored in the WDGN, as each character has
a special ability that is only tuned when a relationship is shown. For example, if