Battlestar Galactica and Spimatic Meaning in Games - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 86

of game play. 26 his ascribing of autonomy to both physical and digital objects
augments notions of game participation.
By following a player's Spimatic journey with a paratextual board game—from
his or her introduction to Lovecrat, through his or her playing Arkham Horror ,
and inishing with his or her return (re)read “Call of Cthulhu”—one could
theoretically see the birth of a new form of creative product, one formed not
just from corporate control and organization, but also from player involvement
in the creation of narrative meaning, a hybrid system of production and
consumption. 27 For Sterling, such cyborgian opportunities develop through
time. He calls our current society “synchronic,” which places:
high value on the human engagement with time. We human beings are time-
bound entities. So are all our creations.… So we are not object, but processes.
Our names are not nouns, but verbs. Our existence does not precede time or
postdate time—we personify time. 28
For players of BSG08, as well as for the characters within the Battlestar Galactica
reboot , this focus on time and temporal structure highlights the continual
process of becoming. 29 Just as the Spime represents a technosocial structure
wherein digital machines can communicate and act autonomously, so too does
Battlestar Galactica highlight how machines can be autonomous entities. As
Geraghty notes, this “inherently American” fear of automation manifests in
science iction texts that examine cyborgs, robots, and automated technology. 30
he Spime as a mode of paratextual game play is both a representation of that
fear and a metaphor for understanding how to combat it. Particularly relevant to
Battlestar Galactica, Sue homas notes that the Spime makes us all cyborgian :
So, a spime is a phenomenon that exists at various times either virtually, as data,
or materially, as physical object, or both, depending upon its cycle? Well, we can
easily grasp that notion because today we are very accustomed to sometimes
inhabiting cyberspace with our virtual personae and manipulating virtual
materials such as emails, images, and other items; and other times inhabiting
physical space such as streets, ields, and houses and manipulating physical
materials such as bottles, books, and furniture. 31
In many respects, paratextual games themselves force players to become
cyborgian; as Berland notes, “tabletop boardgames encourage or require …
players [to] engage in computational thinking, [and] they require that players
talk about their computational thinking and engage in the social aspects of
computational literacy.” 32 Battlestar Galactica constructs diferent ways of