Mutability and Materiality in Star Trek - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 108

an element of play: Playing within the ludic spaces of popular media texts
provided by the “ironic imagination”; play associated with how individual fans
are able to express their own identity and fantasies through “enthrallment” with a
favourite ilm or television series; the “enduring fandom” of life-long play within
the ictional world provided by a global franchise like Star Wars or Star Trek ;
literally playing with the toy objects from childhood, making them new again; or
collecting rare and authentic Hollywood memorabilia, playfully displaying them
to distinguish accrued cultural capital.
Collecting the miniatures for a HeroClix game becomes part of the act of playful
consumption, as “objects are dynamic and their stories never fully told as history,
and collectors construct new narratives of ownership and meaning.” 25 he Star
Trek —themed pieces of the game, like the Star Wars toys described by Jonathan
Gray, “contribute to the storyworld, ofering audiences the prospect of stepping
into that world and contributing to it.” 26 he materiality of the pieces ties into
the original cult programming, as players can use the pieces to imaginatively
enter into the cult world through identiication with the character, as “part of
the attraction in these games is that gameplay is tied directly to the overarching
narrative of the original source text.” 27 In this way, the ethereal nature of the
television or ilmic text can become material through the paratextual interaction
of the players during the game.
Mutability in space
All games rely on a sense of randomness to engender continued play. As I described
in Chapter 1, randomness allows a type of unstructure to manifest in games.
Unstructure is the sense that randomness itself can be generated via structural
means, undercutting the binary between structured play and nonstructured
chance. In Arkham Horror, unstructure stems from the complicated set of rules
that govern the world and the unpredictability that occurs when those rules are
placed in concert with one another. In Battlestar Galactica: he Board Game ,
this occurs through procedural rhetoric. In contrast, both Expeditions and Fleet
Captains engender a diferent type of unstructure, one that emerges from the
variable components comprising the game play. While every game will play
diferently each time, both Fleet Captains and Expeditions highlight mechanics
and components that increase their replay value; the hundreds of thousands
of combinations of cards in Fleet Captains and the branching narratives of