Ludic Interaction in Doctor Who - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 165

One can be interactive in a game without communicating with others, but this
does not mean that interactivity is a simple concept in the sphere of paratextual
board games. By deinition, paratextual board games have to it within an
already-extant story universe—one cannot play Battlestar Galactica and expect
to ind the Starship Enterprise lying around piloted by Hobbits, and ighting
Cthulhu with blasters (although this a great idea for a crossover). Similarly, a
game that invokes speciic characters or situations from a ilm, television show,
or book should not depict those characters working diferently from how they
might act in their more familiar roles. he characters in Star Trek: Expeditions
are not given abilities outside standard moral and ethical boundaries. Players
would not expect their character to turn to another character and shoot him
with a phaser in the middle of the game. Although focusing mainly on video
games, Alexander Galloway describes game play not as images or stories but as
speciic actions within the sphere of media objects. To describe games as actions
implies that they develop codes through which speciic changes can be enacted.
Games must also have a certain lexibility to enable user control over interactive
elements. Galloway argues that lexibility is both a core principle of Internet
design and a core protocol of game design: “All elements of the game are put
in quantitative, dynamic relationships with each other.” 25 To be lexible means
to support interactive elements within the game play in a way that generates
meaning in and for game players. But by dint of the relationship between the
game and the original media text, the lexibility of the game is necessarily
limited.
his lack of lexibility is revealed when playing he Time Travelling Action
Game . Although the semantics of the game mirror those from the show, the
syntactics of what those elements mean is so diferent that it seems almost
unrelated. he game has relatively simple mechanics. Just as with Katniss in he
Hunger Games: District 12, each player of he Time Travelling Action Game plays
as the Doctor using diferent colored pieces. As such, multiple instances of the
same character make narrative development diicult. However, each of these
Doctors draws four diferent alien cards from a pack of 24. hese aliens are also
featured on spaces on the rotating game board, twelve of which randomly change
as the board rotates. Players must land on the spaces for which they have a card
and pay a number of “energy tokens” equal to the number printed on the alien
card plus the roll of a spinner. If they are able to pay that many energy tokens,
they have “defeated” the alien. If not, they continue to roam the board looking
for more aliens. he only other options available on the board are energy spaces,