Reconfiguring Narrative in Contemporary Board Games: Story-Making Across the Competitive-Cooperative Spectrum

simplistic notions of ‘fidelity’ to an ‘original’ text. In 1975, Geoffrey Wagner formulated three categories of filmic adaptation: ‘transposition’, a direct transfer to screen with minimum apparent interference; ‘commentary’, which retains the core structure despite some alteration or reinterpretation; and ‘analogy’, which involves a significant departure from the source text in order to create an ‘original’ work (222). Two decades later, Brian McFarlane took this further by working to replace ‘fidelity’s’ privileged status entirely with an emphasis on intertextuality, positioning the literary precursor as a “resource”’ (1996: 10). Yet, conceiving the use of different media as transmedia storytelling – heavily impacted by the ‘participatory’ nature of today’s digital media culture – replaces these processes of adaptation with more complex ways of constructing a fictional universe, indicating considerably more diverse, flexible, and interactive frameworks within which texts and textual meanings are generated. While most storyworlds arguably retain a ‘narrative core’ (Scolari 2009: 598), subsequent or concurrent texts extend, enrich, and above all provide a fundamentally different experience of that world. The transmedia (inter)textualities of board games inspired by feature films and television programs exemplify this, with many games extending the storyworld in particularly sophisticated ways. The construction of narrative(s) within board game August 2014 www.intensitiescultmedia.com