ABSTRACT
The notion that board gamers can be fans has been little interrogated in fan studies. The majority of work that draws a connection between games and fans has concentrated on video gamers as a type of fan audience (Consalvo 2003; Crawford and Rutter 2007; Jones 2006; Postigo 2007; Postigo 2008; Wirman 2009). Indeed, video game players have obvious links to media studies—for example, as “paratexts” (Gray 2010), video games often become part of transmedia franchises and other mediated sites for audience appreciation. Beyond paratexts and licensed games, however, video games are also (by their definition) seen as mediated via screens—and video gamers are posited as that most active of audiences, as they must interact in a more obvious way with their media texts (Friedman 2008).
