Mutability and Materiality in Star Trek - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 110

session. Each play session—an “episode” of Expeditions or Fleet Captains— does
not describe the whole experience. his focus on the game play as constantly
“in-progress” rather than as a stable product relates to Axel Bruns' notion of
produsage, or the “collaborative and continuous building and extending of
existing content in pursuit of further improvement.” Bruns identiies one
of produsage's key characteristics as “necessarily remain[ing] continually
uninished, and ininitely continuing.” 31 So, too, are paratextual board games in
an “ininitely continuing” process, both within the unstructure of the random
elements within the game and via their interaction with the original cult text.
Fleet Captains is not based on any one Star Trek text, but rather on the
corpus of texts that compose the entirety of the Star Trek Prime universe. As a
multiple text franchise, Star Trek has, as Johnson points out, “engaged in world-
sharing across multiple historical moments and industrial contexts.” By building
a franchise through the accumulation of hundreds of hours of televised and
ilmed material, millions of published words, and scores of ancillary products,
Star Trek , according to Johnson, is the product of a “negotiated identiication”
that can mean many things in many diferent contexts. 32 For Johnson, multiple
voices have shaped the Star Trek franchise, from producers, to fans, to creators
of licensed products. Although Gene Roddenberry is credited with creating Star
Trek, it is impossible to assign his particular authorship to the many iterations of
the franchise. Authorship in a franchised text is fractured, yet must be asserted
as a discourse to make the text coherent. 33 his shiting authorship means that
the Star Trek franchise is always in process; it is always being constructed at any
moment through any number of lenses. Even the production of an entry in the
franchise, while constrained by the rules of the cult world, strives for originality:
as Johnson notes, “In making those claims to creativity … these producers oten
pursue textual strategies of diference that make the multiplication of franchising
not a replication of sameness, but a more relexive and iterative process.” 34 In
other words, each series in the franchise is positioned as original and new but
must maintain ties to the larger structure to be relevant for the franchise itself.
Fleet Captains relies on this in-process aspect of produsage throughout the
game. First, as I noted above, the sheer number of variable game components is
staggering. Representing the original universe of Star Trek , the game compiles
ships from various eras. he original series movie Enterprise (NCC-1701-A, from
Star Trek IV, V, and VI ) can be played alongside the Deiant , from the television
series Deep Space Nine ; the Voyager , from the television series Voyager; the
Excelsior , from the ilms Star Trek III-VI and the Voyager episode “Flashback”;