Battlestar Galactica and Spimatic Meaning in Games - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 85

about the loyalty and allegiance of the others. 23 At the same time, individual
players may be aware that their own allegiance can shit: the second dealing
of the loyalty cards can change the state of the player. Just as the Spime is an
unstable entity, and can be seen to develop through multiple instantiations, so
too are the players' roles within BSG08 mutable within the game's structure.
his Spimatic cycle, deined by and inclusive of the physical object at its
heart, can be applied to the development of the play of a paratextual board
game. Starting from the position of pre-knowledge going into the game, based
on the players' variable experiences with the original text, the paratextual
board game develops and adds to the cult text depending on both the previous
knowledge of the player and the ongoing play during the game. For instance,
in Chapter 8's Doctor Who: he Interactive Electronic Interactive Board Game,
players' knowledge of the irst series of Doctor Who may help structure their
play. Playing BSG08 with no working knowledge of Battlestar Galactica (as in
the case of one of the players in my board game group) created a diferent player
journey through the game than it did for me (having spent years watching and
writing about the show). 24 Applying the concept of the Spime to paratextual
board games thus allows us to note and augment the saliency of player activity
and knowledge within the game play, and the perception of consumption and
play as separate practices shits to see them as one cogent and chronological
process instead. Paratextual board games are uniquely positioned nodes in a
network of player activity.
As a concept, the Spime expands on the technological infrastructure of
human discourse; yet, it has traditionally been associated with technological
developments. To that end, the concept of the Spime has been usefully applied
in the past to multiple aspects of technology. 25 But the Spime could also usefully
be applied to issues of culture as well as to issues of technology—culture and
technology not being opposed so much as complementary. As James Allen-
Robertson and David Beer note, focusing solely on technological infrastructure
ignores much value in “resonance between [the Spime] and the range of debates
that are occurring in sociology and across the social sciences with regard to possible
viable future directions” of cultural research. hey take a meta-approach to the
Spime in their study, viewing the Spime as an idea that can be traced throughout
space and time, efectively giving a Spimatic trace to a nonphysical object. In
the same way as Allen-Robertson and Beer treat ideas as “objects that can be
followed and visualised along their lifecourse,” a Spimatic reading illuminates
the patterns of process and progress of nonphysical entities, like the experience