Mutability and Materiality in Star Trek - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 112

between locations, encounters, Clix, and command cards that mutability in
game content is assured. Fleet Captains “continues to evolve and improve” and
demonstrates that “that there is no reason to ever declare a game 'inal.'” 36 New
cards are constantly drawn and each new game brings new combinations of
locations and commands. New ships are added to the leet. New orders change the
narrative of the game. As Sharp notes, “the fact is games are not going to be good
at explaining a single position or a set of facts in the same way a documentary
ilm or a pamphlet or poster might.” 37 Indeed, games ofer a variable, multiple,
and mutable understanding of produsage within a paratextual context. Here,
this mutability allies itself within the larger framework and context of the Star
Trek franchise: the diferences between the various Star Trek outlets come to
the fore within the game's focus on multiplicity and mutability. Star Trek , the
game seems to argue, is what one makes of it—if one wants to play with just
ships from the ilms, one can. If one wants to embrace all spin-ofs, one can
do that. Fleet Captains reveals the produsage at the heart of all paratextuality,
as any paratextual product opens new narrative gaps as it performs narrative
completion.
Interestingly, there is one exception to the inclusion of the Star Trek Prime
universe in Fleet Captains , and that is the almost complete absence of Star Trek:
Enterprise in the game's content. As I mentioned earlier, Enterprise is the only
prequel in the Star Trek canon, a show that premiered in 2001 but took place
before the start of the original series. By depicting the early days of the founding
of the Federation, Enterprise , Geraghty argues, also reinscribed a “revisioning”
of the history of Star Trek itself—“it is trying to refashion Star Trek 's universal
history by making it part of a very speciic American mythic history.” 38 In a small
way, Enterprise attempted what J. J. Abrams more grandly did later—reimagining
a diferent Star Trek for a diferent era. So while the game itself represents the
Prime universe, Enterprise seems to sit uneasily in a limbo between Prime and
Alternate. he only mentions of Enterprise in the game are two Klingon Raptor-
class ships from the show and one Location card, which mentions the Enterprise
crew. hese small mentions relegate Enterprise to an inconsequential narrative
blip, a historical footnote. Even the Location card relects a historiographical
look at Enterprise within the Star Trek universe.
Expeditions uses its own type of mutability. Whereas Fleet Captains has
the entire Star Trek Prime universe with which to construct its leets and
accoutrements, Expeditions is based just on the 2009 ilm, which creates and
takes place in an emergent alternate timeline. he ilm opens with a rupture in