Battlestar Galactica and Spimatic Meaning in Games - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 96

Examining paratextual board games through the lens of the Spime allows us to
see them not as separate entities, but rather as one continuous correlation: here,
the idea of Battlestar Galactica . BSG08 , in this vein, is just one node within the
larger, but individual, understanding of what Battlestar Galactica can be. If, as
in the previous chapter, the transmediated aspects of paratextual board games
manifest through player afect, then it is this afect that coheres the multiple
parts together. As Sterling notes of the development of the Spime:
technocultures do not abolish one another in clean or comprehensive ways.
Instead, new capacities are layered onto older ones. he older technosocial order
gradually loses its clarity, crumbles, and melts away under the accumulating
weight of the new. 51
In this case, the Spime of Battlestar Galactica as a whole is built by not just
our experiences with one aspect of the text/game, but rather with all of them
together.
For Kurt Lancaster, the Babylon 5 role-playing game allows players to
“immerse themselves in this same kind of wonder as found in Babylon 5 …
[it] conigures players” within the game space to act and participate in certain
ways. 52 As the paratextual board game illustrates, the generative potential of
player performance within the game does not just happen at speciic moments of
reception, but rather becomes emblematic of the entire process of interpretation.
Players are always-already imbricated within the game/text system, from start to
inish. New concepts in technological development, including the Spime, can be
usefully applied to noncorporeal procedures, like media creation and game play.
Applying the theories of the Spime to paratextual game play portends a more
emotive, afective process of interpretation. Just as the Spime exists through both
space and time, so too do these Battlestar Galactica games parallel the spatial
and temporal situations of their requisite texts, and in doing so, they draw their
players into that world.