Fiction Networks: The Emergence of Proprietary, Persistent, Large ...

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This tension between emergent, player-defined narrative and the corporate narremes of the larger network is particularly relevant to Star Wars Galaxies, a game emerging from a fiction network that has historically manifested debates about continuity, control, and the relationship between its creators and its reception community. As it extends to Galaxies, these threads of debate currently coalesce around the debate over the role of Jedi Knights in Star Wars Galaxies, a debate we will look at in more detail. STAR WARS AND GALAXIES Again, Star Wars Galaxies occupies a problematic position as a network within a network; it is a large-scale simulation with clear allegiance to a established fiction system, and, in its marketing, attempts to elide the inevitable gaps and discontinuities that arise from the same narremes being deployed across radically different representational or ergodic forms. In addition, Star Wars as a corporate system has its own history of complex and contested communal dynamics. In his ethnography of Star Wars’ fan community, Using the Force, Will Brooker investigates the evolution of Star Wars as a phenomenon with a widespread reception community and locates some key debates and tensions within that community, as well as between it and Lucasfilm, the corporate producer of Star Wars as a multimedia entertainment property (Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans). Two themes within Brooker’s text are relevant to this argument. The first is the relationship between George Lucas and Lucasfilm and the various communities that have coalesced around the intellectual property of Star Wars. Brooker’s study details the mechanisms of control Lucasfilm has employed over the past several years to police the distribution and recombination of its intellectual property; it also studies Star Wars 208
Episode 1: The Phantom Menace as a controversial film through which, and in reaction to which, Lucasfilm and long-time fans of the universe communicated what shape Star Wars has or should have, and what their respective roles are within the fiction network as a system that maintains a mythos. The second theme Brooker analyzes involves “canon” in the Star Wars universe and the continuum from which it is constructed and expanded. The Star Wars canon consists of multiple groups of texts that occupy a hierarchy of validity; the original movie trilogy, in their Special Edition formats, and the two extant “prequels” constitute core canon or the “most true” texts, while the “Expanded Universe” of books, comics, animations, games and other ancillary products occupy a position of secondary canon, true unless found to be in conflict with the primary canon of the films. Crucial to this process of canonicity, however, is Lucasfilm’s own proactive maintenance of a canon. In contrast to their Hollywood counterparts, the people who run Star Wars don't consider novels, toys, comic books, and videogames to be promotional vehicles that exist merely to stoke the box office and pad the bottom line. They consider these products to be shards of an alternate reality; each must be rigorously checked against all the others, lest it break continuity. As a result, the licensing division of Lucasfilm has become a sort of secular clergy, whose principal function is to interpret the Star Wars oeuvre (more commonly called "the canon" by Lucas employees, without a trace of irony) whenever someone wants to add onto it. Licensing maintains a 25,000-entry FileMaker Pro database, distilled from every scrap of media the company has produced, plus an archive of imagery, all of which is made available to employees and licensees on a corporate intranet. This database is, for all intents and purposes, the Star Wars bible, to which all functional, aesthetic, and metaphysical queries are referred. (Herz) Unlike the DC Universe, where the discrepancies and fissures in the corpus of aggregate artifacts are so significant that “continuity” is implicitly understood as a contingent reading or, more accurately, misreading of the system for the sake of forward serial 209
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Copyright by Jason Todd Craft 2004
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Fiction Networks: The Emergence of
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Acknowledgements Many thanks to my
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- “comics universes” and persis
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Grant Morrison and Animal Man .....
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Chapter 1: Fiction Networks This wo
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independent from its manifestation
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espects the prosaics of the phenome
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simple, self-contained and episodic
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America (RIAA) and an American cult
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as a media technology. Even as the
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Beyond that analysis of popular ico
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participation. From the broadest vi
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of reproduction,” to use Andre Ma
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art, and cinema. Comics can be seen
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Everquest on a Midi-tower Windows m
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experience through the interaction
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hire, readers, reception communitie
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conceptual frame,” and that Grams
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inherent in clothing or, by McCrack
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exactly concretized “objects” t
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state of dialectic that does not re
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We tend to think of this serial del
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These “revived romances” and th
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I argue in the fourth chapter of th
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discrete works into a larger, ongoi
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audience; the narrative of Superman
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ecognizable fictional space, that r
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for adolescence, social change, and
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These fiction networks, I would arg
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oaming across the desert floor will
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The Matrix, on the other hand, clea
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illustration of the characteristics
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ideas of intellectual property. Eve
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perspective, they cannot stand alon
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complex, large-scale designed syste
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Again, this argument may present a
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Chapter 2: Genres, Fictional Worlds
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salience or independence that can e
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occur on multiple levels, and can g
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Though Pavel deals with the mythica
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network. The network is both a repr
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While genre in the Bakhtinian frame
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performs a function of representati
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Topical Genres In reading a fiction
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the reader will not only understand
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you can do all your pop-culture hom
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incorporates others into its own pe
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attendant to the novel is extensive
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dynamic is actually a simulation wh
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inform a persistent world game’s
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The story recounts the wars between
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sonnet has fourteen lines, the poss
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(Motte). The Centre Pompidou experi
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methods, including close reading,
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Inc. DC Comics, originally known as
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Continuity manifests itself both wi
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juxtaposition became less a novelty
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COMICS REPRESENTING COMICS Why does
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such an example of mise en abyme or
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intertextual and metatextual argume
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the top of the Flash Comics issue s
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eader as somewhat fluid. It encoura
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Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvet
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poor or mediocre artifacts. However
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cross-company “crossover” artif
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works represent the first “extens
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the process of their formation, the
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privileges the metanarrative as the
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Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman - ha
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whole, communicate a progression of
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dystopias and talking chimpanzees a
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From Crisis on Infinite Earths (Wol
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“dream girl” was his wife, who
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This nexus of productive categories
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figure in “The Coyote Gospel”:
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conventional realism with the evolv
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engages directly with the network i
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displayed in a bounded screen. In t
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inging forth difficult truths from
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the emergent and persistent system.
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From “Fox on the Run” (Morrison
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and then he - and the reader - is s
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Page 233 and 234: These arguments, like any, rest on
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Page 239 and 240: understandings of the literary. The
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Page 247 and 248: IN CONCLUSION In this dissertation
Page 249 and 250: correspondence have not yet account
Page 251 and 252: ---. "Forms of Time and of the Chro
Page 253 and 254: Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Cult
Page 255 and 256: Kosak, Dave "Fargo". The Branded Wo
Page 257 and 258: Ness, Alexander. Grant Morrison Int
Page 259 and 260: Suler, John, and W. Phillips. The B
Page 261: Vita Jason Todd Craft, the son of J
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