Transmedia Pathos and Plot in The Walking Dead - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 68

completely devoid of color, the game's style is a bit jarring for the average gamer.
However, for fans of the comic, it is a spot on design choice. 63
Conversely, all the artwork of the WDTV is constructed of either advertisements
for the show or still images from the show. For example, on a scrounge card,
there might be a still image of Darryl holding an ax, although Darryl is not
available to “play” as a character. he artistic elements of the game (mainly on
the cards, but on the character information boards as well) encourage players
to reconnect to the original text by relecting the original text. Each image
adapts scenes from he Walking Dead television show through replication,
not through origination. Character quotations from the series are added to
the images, further reifying that connection. Players are not creating their
own stories; they are reliving stories that already exist within the world of the
television series. In this way, the WDTV adapts the television show; it does not
transmediate.
here are similarities between the games that augment their respective textual
structures. he cover of each game mirrors that of the other, both seemingly
based on promotional material for the AMC television series (Figure 3.2). he
advertisement helps to sell the connection between the graphic novel and the
series, showing not only the similarity between them (characters share clothing,
poses, and diagrammatic relationships) but also that one “relects” the other.
Notably, however, the antagonist zombie at the center of the image is from
the television program—both groups of survivors appear to be aiming at the
televisual undead, reifying the television series as the more viscerally authentic
(as would beit an advertisement for the television series). Yet the connection
between the comic and the television show is made explicit through the direct
relection of the two images. 64
he two board games came out in 2011, a coincidence noted by Morgan,
writing on the MTV Geek! Blog. 65 he image from the television series that
Figure 3.2 Original 2010 advertisement for the Walking Dead TV series ©AMC
2010.