by Spinoza1667
jeff0 wrote:
Do you think board game evangelism was a major motivator for John to add this scene? It's great that he chose to include this, but I wonder if less "incomprehensible board game lingo" would help to normalize the hobby in the eyes of the general public.
I would say that it was a minor motivator for John. The primary motivation is making a good show, and the scene allowed character development of Scott and Cosima and also a humorous scene to break up the dramatic action. Orphan Black has a lot of weird offbeat humor and so that fit in. The writer of this scene is not herself a board game player(Although about two decades ago we played a game of Battleship completely high on weed. I probably should not tell that story, but oh well), so her approach was to find the humor in the byzantine language.
I think another motivator, was a desire to reach out to what one might call generic "geeks". The show's been successful in reaching out to the LGBT community and have a lot of fans there by having LGBT characters, and I think that something similar was intended with the scene.
They've just produced a comic for OB that John and Graham have been involved in writing (something that is quite unusual for showrunners) and I think that is another indication of that. So reaching an existing community is probably more important than expanding that community.
A final consideration is that John, just thinks boardgames are kind of cool, and so he wanted to put them in because its cool and he wants to be looking at something cool, that no one else is. We all know boardgames have changed a lot, but that's only been barely reflected in the popular culture as the comments here show.