The Remaking of The Slum: Strategies for Adapting Aluísio Azevedo’s Novel to a Board Game

Abstract There are many ways of interacting with literary narratives: books, movies, graphic novels, games etc. In the twentieth-first century, adaptation methods have gained strength, producing several strategies of transforming stories from one genre to another, creating a series of allusions that intersect and expand. In this sense, board games also allow for intertextual dialogue, recreating and evoking classical texts from another perspective of interaction. Such is the aim of the extension project “Adamastor: Laboratório de Criação de Jogos Literários,” didactic in character, to stimulate literary reading and to go beyond a simple question-and-answer game of understanding and interpretation. As an example, this paper presents the adaptation process of Aluísio Azevedo’s naturalist novel The Slum to a board game based on Linda Hutcheon’s concepts of adaptation theory.