Battlestar Galactica and Spimatic Meaning in Games - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 84

in the larger paratextual connection between the games and the cult worlds.
Players in either game have to integrate their own decision-making into the
rules of the game—as they do with Arkham Horror or A Game of hrones: he
Board Game —turning themselves from players into active co-participants in the
development of each game's game play.
To this end, the players' relationship with the game can be said to be Spime-
like. As mentioned above, the Spime is a technosocial construct irst developed
by futurist and science iction author Bruce Sterling. A portmanteau of space
and time , the concept of the Spime deines a trackable entity, a “protagonist
of a documented process. It is an historical entity with an accessible, precise
trajectory.” 22 A Spime is both the digital and the tangible moments of an object's
life. In an age when we can follow the history of an object from its very (digital)
conception to its inal (physical) destruction, the tangibility of an object describes
only one portion of a much longer cycle. For example, when I purchased the
1978 Battlestar Galactica board game from eBay, my copy of that game did not
begin and end with the physical object. Instead, from the publisher's irst design
notes, to the seller inputting data into eBay's servers, to the (eventual) barcode
associated with the game when I donate it to my school, that game becomes part
of a process that integrates digital and physical into one—a Spime. And it is a
personal Spime—it deines just that copy of the game, that digital imprint. In
addition, any meta-information recorded about the production of the game—
the type of paper used, the fonts, marketing, or even the publisher's website—
becomes part of the topic's Spimatic identity. hat game's existence as I play it
is just one part—oten the shortest part—of its Spimatic life cycle. A Spimatic
examination of game play would see the interactive participation of the player
at multiple times in the temporal process as generative of production. Spimatic
game play doesn't describe just one way of experiencing this relationship: as
every Spime is unique, so too is every player's interaction in this cycle. Applied
to the mechanics of paratextual board games, players' journeys throughout a
game, their narrative and gameplay trajectories, become Spimatic as they must
begin and end their experiences of the game as moments both immaterial and
material. he paratextual board game becomes just one node on the player's
individual journal through the franchise.
In BSG78 players are both comrades (all are from Galactica ) and competitors.
But in BSG08 , cooperation between players is predicated on suspicion and fear.
he “traitor mechanic,” as Linderoth describes it, means that “the motives of
anyone suggesting a speciic strategy can be questioned”—players are uncertain