Battlestar Galactica and Spimatic Meaning in Games - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 90

growing incomes and expanding leisure time, encouraged children to play games
to develop thinking skills and for moral instruction.” 38 he original Battlestar
Galactica did not attempt to create ambiguity in the binaries established: Cylons
were bad, humans were good. Battlestar Galactica (1978) has been discussed
as a show heavily inluenced both by classic Westerns and the Mormon faith,
both of which are equally binaristic in their depiction of good versus evil. 39 For
Geraghty, the show “relies on familiar themes of the Puritan Errand and the
belief in a divine mission.” He goes on to note that:
his space opera role-play replicated the American colonial experience as played
out between Puritan settlers and Indian inhabitants, yet it also alluded to the
Mormon faith's particular belief in … God. Similarities between the twelve
colonies' search for Kobol and the journey of Joseph Smith to re-establish Eden
in America recounted in the Book of Mormon may not have been coincidental,
as Glen A. Larson … was a Mormon. 40
For Marshall and Potter, the newer Battlestar Galactica “explicitly engages current
American culture,” but does so “using devices that draw upon a wide range
of mythic tropes and religious traditions.” 41 In this way, the show is a hybrid
form of literary allusion, destabilized narrative, and participatory audiences. 42
Rather than coming down on one side of a political debate or the other, the 2003
Battlestar Galactica series tends to resist “strict antitheses” and instead embraces
multiplicity and other views. 43
he BSG08 game works in a similar algorithmic fashion as does Arkham
Horror , but instead of unstructure, the players' focus on rules allows a strict
adherence to the “procedural rhetoric” of the game. 44 his procedural rhetoric
creates an argument within the game's structure, and by following the rules,
players follow that argumentative structure. One consequence of this procedural
rhetoric, then, is that in order to follow the rules, players must subscribe to the
automated processes that rules allow. While playing as a Cylon, no matter how
much one may be tempted to help the human characters and save Galactica and
humanity, the game functions best (and as planned) if the Cylon works against
the group. his performative aspect of the game, as Kurt Lancaster argues,
cannot happen without rules: “rules … situate players in prescribed rules and
demarcate what kind of fantasy they will play.” 45 he game prescribes meaning to
players' actions: the player, despite having the freedom to choose what cards to
play and what moves to make, must ultimately subsume his or her own actions