Mutability and Materiality in Star Trek - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 106

Adama, Kirk, or the Doctor. Many paratextual board games use icons or images
of characters as tokens for movement— Arkham Horror had diferent characters
with particular attributes, he Lord of the Rings used familiar characters from
the topics and novels, etc. But the HeroClix system goes one step further to
allow tactile manipulation of the igures. In this way, the characterization of
the miniatures becomes part of the pleasure of the game, not just as a way of
living within the original media text, but also as a way of living through these
characters themselves.
One way HeroClix manifests these pleasures is through its afordances of
clicking. An afordance, deined by J. J. Gibson as the actionable properties
between the world and an actor, describes the interaction an object facilitates in
its users. 21 Buttons are great for pushing. Handles are good for pulling. hat is, an
afordance is the usable relationship between some sort of object and some sort of
action upon that object—the mechanisms of that object that lead to an interaction.
Donald Norman has applied the concept of afordance to technology, describing
how the speciic properties of a technology can facilitate or hinder the use of
that technology. 22 Afordances can be deliberate or inadvertent. For example,
while one afordance of my keyboard is the way I can press down on all the keys
in diferent orders or even simultaneously, another is that it has rather pointy
edges that might make a good weapon should the zombie apocalypse break out:
while I doubt that the designers of my keyboard deliberately designed it to bash
in zombie brains, the fact that it can means that it can be used in that manner.
he afordances of an object help structure the type of interaction around the
object. For HeroClix, there are pleasures in the clicks: the pleasure of feeling the
het of the igurine in your hand, the pleasure of manipulating the game structure
by adjusting character attributes, and the simple pleasure of the afordance of the
device working well. For Robinson, the tactile pleasures of HeroClix manifest
not just in the clicking, but in the actual miniature. He describes an instance in
his board game group when a new game arrived in the mail and “the opening
[of the box] became not just a commercial purchase but also a social event
involving his friend, his brother, and his wife (who does not play the game).” 23
here are many similar online videos of people “unboxing” games. Similarly, my
own experiences with my game group mirror Robinson's—when I opened the
Fleet Captains box to reveal the 24 diferent miniature ships, all hands reached
forward to play with them (Figure 5.2). Expeditions was even more tactile; the
minute the character igurines emerged, some fantasy role-play occurred (which
mainly involved characters making out with each other).