Mutability and Materiality in Star Trek - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 105

token; it is harder when he controls many. Few people feel much sadness at the
loss of a knight in Chess or an infantry division in a wargame.” 19 For Expeditions ,
it might be relatively easy for a player to identify with Spock or Uhura; for
Fleet Captains , because the ships are mutable and replaceable, there may be
less identiication with the speciic model and more with the general idea of
the Star Trek universe. At the same time, there may be more opportunity to
imagine yourself as an admiral of an actual leet. More open identiication loses
speciicity, but gains imaginative play. Other types of material identiication may
take diferent directions; in Doctor Who: he Interactive Electronic Board Game ,
players move both their own piece and a number of plastic Dalek pieces, forcing
identiication with both protagonist and antagonist.
Indeed, for Fleet Captains , the multi-series identiication might be the major
paratextual connection. As Matt Hills describes about Doctor Who , one of the
foremost ways that a media franchise celebrates an anniversary is through uniting
multiple iterations of the franchise at once. 20 For Doctor Who , this usually means
“multi-Doctor” stories like the 20th anniversary “he Five Doctors” or the 50th
anniversary “Day of the Doctor,” which featured all fourteen actors to have
played the part on television. For Hills, the “spectacle of seeing many Doctors
on screen—an unusual special efect, to be sure—apparently works against
narrative,” becoming a celebration of the longevity of the series instead. I would
argue that in the case of Fleet Captains , the spectacle of seeing many ships at the
same time, each from diferent iterations of the show, takes on new signiicance
in the board game realm. Rather than subsuming narrative at the expense of
spectacle, the game paratextually references narrative within the framework of
the play, turning narrative itself into a spectacle (of igurines and models). hat
is, the game itself is already a spectacle, and the narrative exists paratextually
within the media franchise. Each ship manifests diferent meanings within the
larger franchise: perhaps seeing the USS Reliant from Star Trek II: he Wrath
of Khan ight against the Klingon IKS Korinar from Deep Space Nine takes on
new signiicance because of the relationship the individual player has between
these two texts. here are pleasures beyond narrative and beyond spectacle
within paratextual board games: pleasures of play, pleasures of connection, and
pleasures of performed materiality.
In this sense, HeroClix is both a game system and a system of representational
fandom for a particular media text. he igurines represent not just the
characters, but also the experiential pleasure of role-playing as the character
within the game system and the diegesis of the narrative. We can “be” Frodo,