If rules, as I described in the previous chapter, can best be understood as formal algorithms that guide the structure of a game, play can best be understood as the experience of the game itself. We can only understand game play through multiple contexts of actual experiences—a “social experience, or a narrative experience, or an experience of pleasure”—that envelop the game players.16 Like the Battlestar Galactica games I discuss in Chapter 4, part of the fun of the game play lies in interacting with the other players. Play is always experiential and always lived. Board games generate play in the moment, but the instant the game pieces are put back in their box, the play of the game disappears.
Board games create a unique situation where the term “play” describes both the action that happens in the game and an “engagement with any fixed
structure, something that both games and … stories invite.”17 We both play a game and play with a game. Paratextual board games like LOTR and The Complete Trilogy reflect this two-fold structure: there is the space of the game itself (the board, the table, the pieces) and the space of the cult narrative world, the space of Middle-earth. To watch Lord of the Rings is to be a part of a bounded cult franchise, but to play Lord of the Rings is to push against those boundaries, to become both a reaction to and a reification of the rules and restrictions, structures and shapes, of the cult world. Play is, at once, serious business and fanciful imagination.
Playing a paratextual board game thus requires existing within an already-extant space as well as within an imaginative space of the player’s own creation: “play enables the exploration of that tissue boundary between fantasy and reality, between the real and the imagined.”18 The interaction between physical and virtual “playspaces” has led researchers Shanly Dixon and Sandra Weber to theorize a connective tissue between the act of imaginative play and the structured process of playing.19 Players of the Lord of the Rings games play in the world of Middle-earth by codifying the boundaries of Middle-earth. In LOTR, all five Hobbits work together to take the Ring of Power from its hiding place in the Shire to Mordor and Mount Doom, where they must throw it into the fire and keep Sauron from using its power to take over the world. In The Complete Trilogy, the Hobbits are joined by the other members of The Fellowship of the Ring as well to complete this task, although in this game Sauron sends enemies after the group to defeat them in combat (there is no combat in LOTR, although dice rolling often simulates the uncertainty of encounters with game characters).
Cult media offer this same sense of play, enacting a “philosophy of playfulness”
within the media fan.20 Fans engage in playful behavior, and push against the boundaries of the media text.
To remain open and “playable,” however, the paratextual board game must address the closed nature of the narrative, begging the question of how one plays a narrative whose ending one already knows. Paratextual board games demand a flexible narrative structure, for knowing the ending of the game, especially a complex one based on an already-created media narrative, may undermine the freedom a player might have for creating a new ending.21 In Chapter 5’s Star Trek: Expeditions, the narrative develops throughout the game in a number of branching paths. In contrast, in Chapter 6’s The Hunger Games:
District 12, there must be a strict adherence to the underlying structure of
the film for the game to “fit” within the text’s story universe. Unlike a strict adaptation—wherein one might have read the book before seeing the film and is thus expecting, if not a precise matching of elements, at least some kind of fidelity to the narrative—a game invites player cocreation in the unfolding of the narrative. As French critic Roger Caillois has described, games must be a
“free and voluntary” activity; that is, one must want to play in order to become part of the cult world.22 In order to want to play, there must be some sort of uncertainty in the game: as Costikyan points out, the uncertainty described by Caillois is contained in the outcome of the game—who wins or loses should be uncertain. But Costikyan argues that uncertainty “can be found almost anywhere” in games, not just in the outcome.23 Uncertainty can be less a focus on what will happen than on how it will happen. We know that the Hobbits should vanquish Sauron. If the game is won, we know that Sauron will be defeated. The uncertainty in the two Lord of the Rings games isn’t whether or not they actually will, but rather how they will do so given specific win conditions.
What specific mechanisms take them to Mount Doom? What characters follow them? In a way, playing a paratextual board game is like roleplaying fan fiction;
the familiar characters and settings are there, but their relationships to each other and to the plot are variable.
All fictions create alternate worlds, vast structures with variable elements.
While often fantastical, these other worlds can be closely related to ours, as Umberto Eco writes in an essay describing the cult world of Casablanca: the
“completely furnished world” of the film becomes its defining characteristic.24 This definition of “cult world” has been questioned by Sara Gwenllian-Jones, however, who writes:
The existence and practices of fan cultures suggests that the opposite is true; films and television series achieve cult status not because they present “completely furnished” worlds but rather because the fracture and excess of their fantastic imaginaries draw the audience’s attention to the fact that their diegetic worlds are invariably incompletely furnished.25
Fans see their interactions in the cult world as ways of “playing” in an extant universe: the “incomplete” nature of the world allows interaction in a way that augments a fannish connection to the text. Paratextual board games like the Lord of the Rings games present both the physical spaces of the narratives and some imaginative gaps that players/fans can complete. Through an examination
of the play mechanics of the two Lord of the Rings games, a tie between the cult narrative and paratextual game becomes clear, revealing a convergence of author, player, and game as a constituent of paratextual game play.