Transmedia Pathos and Plot in The Walking Dead - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 67

he WDTV forces a change in characterizations, reducing the empathy a player
has for a character. A zombie loses all the cards, abilities, and powers gained
throughout the game—to play as a zombie means giving up the character one
has worked for. If you are playing as Rick and you change into a zombie, you no
longer care if the character Rick wins because he no longer exists in the game.
he disappearance of identity may be a good philosophical debate for zombie-
themed media, 60 but it reduces the level of investment one might have in their
character. If all the attributes disappear, there is no incentive to develop. In other
words, although both games have you playing as a character, the time spent
in becoming emotionally invested in the WDGN character reveals closer ties
to winning the game while the WDTV reduces the incentive for viewing the
character in a more complex way.
As zombie scholar Brendan Riley suggests, the work of any zombie text lies in
deining what it means to be a person; a key component of media-based board
games is the way that character and player interact in a form of avatarism. 61 hat
is, zombies themselves always straddle the line between “human” and “inhuman.”
he horror of the tale isn't just that hordes are attacking, but that such zombie
hordes represent the intimate loss of humanity. In the WDGN, the players are
people, the living, the survivors. In the WDTV, in contrast, the endgame loss
of humanity is adapted literally—the players are zombies, blindly following the
formulated rules and randomly generated cards. For all intents and purposes,
each character is the same in the WDTV, making the game a narrative and
philosophical adaptation rather than transmediation.
Art work
Within both of the games, artwork functions to connect the games to the core
text. For example, in the WDGN, all the art is original—and was commissioned
and created by Charlie Adlard, the same artist for the majority of the comic
topics. 62 All the art draws on the same aesthetics as that in the comic. he
presence of new artwork within the game builds player afect, encouraging a
greater consumption of the elements (cards, game board, inserts) of the game
as an addition to the storyworld of the comic, not a replication of it. As Morgan
notes, all the artwork:
stays true to the look and feel of the comic book. he irst and most obvious way
it goes about this is by embracing the black and white color scheme. While not