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

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period of time but the ongoing presence of a fictional template, instantiated in multiple textual artifacts, in the market as long as possible until exhaustion. Twenty-first century media corporations, with capital and resources exponentially greater than the largest Victorian press, produce the majority of our most popular fictions. For these corporations, an ongoing creative work – particularly one without a predetermined end – presents the best of all possible profit models: once it has established reader or viewer interest, it can capitalize on that interest indefinitely, through the sale of new, connected artifacts and spinoffs to that reader or viewer. Consider the multimedia synergy achieved over 2003 by The Matrix: When “The Matrix Reloaded,” the first of two sequels to the original “Matrix” movie, zooms into theaters on May 15, it will be more than one of the year's surefire blockbusters. It will be a movie experience that offers consumers one of the key assets of computer products: expandability. By adding exclusive plot details to a video game and an animé-style DVD project, writer-director-producers Andy and Larry Wachowski are being saluted for their digital-era vision. In the video game, for instance, one of the challenges is to complete a driving mission as one of two notable characters from the movie. The game activity then segues to footage from a movie scene, making clear that for the character it has been a continuous series of events. If you play the game, therefore, you're helping to fill in time and events that are off screen -- and unknown -- in the movie itself. (Antonucci) While 2003 was an active year for new Matrix products, it represents only a high point in a plan for product development that will extend well into the future. An online, subscription-based persistent world game, The Matrix Online, is scheduled to be released in Winter 2004, and will persist as long as it continues to profit. The audience created by the first successful Matrix film will be tapped until its interest is fully exhausted, bringing Warner Brothers new Matrix-related revenue for at least the next several years. Consequently, while discrete, singular works (e.g., a novel, a self-contained film) are certainly still popular forms in the market, a corporate goal is to either parley those 40
discrete works into a larger, ongoing structure (a franchise) or, better still, to generate a franchise from the beginning. An ending is bad for business; better to form a creative work that engenders sequels, spin-offs, and continuations, and to sustain a reader’s experience indefinitely through the periodic delivery and redelivery of the story, preferably from multiple outlets. Corporations are happy to sell discrete experiences, but are even happier to create ongoing relationships with audience members, for reasons of profit: discrete purchases are one-time revenue generators, while a subscription or a consumer relationship is a continuing revenue stream. An ongoing text that creates this ongoing relationship – the serial transformed and multiplied, without a terminus or even the intention of a terminus – is a characteristic of a fiction network. An endless story of this sort behaves in very different ways from stories with fixed boundaries, particularly when, in our present understanding of stories, we so crave causality and endings. In “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco differentiates the structures of myth, internalized by ancient cultures, from the structures of the novel, internalized by modern cultures: The mythic character embodies a law, or a universal demand, and therefore must be in part predictable and cannot hold surprises for us; the character of a novel wants, rather, to be a man like anyone else, and what could befall him is as unforeseeable as what may happen to us. (Eco, "The Myth of Superman" 108) The mythic character exists in a time clearly before or outside ours, and has a consequent predictability and constancy that retellings of the story cannot touch. This mythic structure Eco describes can likewise be applied, at least partially, to our modern myths. Media properties or icons, like mythical figures, have “immutable characteristics and an irreversible destiny” (Eco, "The Myth of Superman" 108) as branded properties; in a consumption culture, they carry stable meanings through their “object-code.” In modern capitalist culture, cultural meanings are maintained in different ways, but the cultural 41
Page 1 and 2: Copyright by Jason Todd Craft 2004
Page 3 and 4: Fiction Networks: The Emergence of
Page 5 and 6: Acknowledgements Many thanks to my
Page 7 and 8: - “comics universes” and persis
Page 9 and 10: Grant Morrison and Animal Man .....
Page 11 and 12: Chapter 1: Fiction Networks This wo
Page 13 and 14: independent from its manifestation
Page 15 and 16: espects the prosaics of the phenome
Page 17 and 18: simple, self-contained and episodic
Page 19 and 20: America (RIAA) and an American cult
Page 21 and 22: as a media technology. Even as the
Page 23 and 24: Beyond that analysis of popular ico
Page 25 and 26: participation. From the broadest vi
Page 27 and 28: of reproduction,” to use Andre Ma
Page 29 and 30: art, and cinema. Comics can be seen
Page 31 and 32: Everquest on a Midi-tower Windows m
Page 33 and 34: experience through the interaction
Page 35 and 36: hire, readers, reception communitie
Page 37 and 38: conceptual frame,” and that Grams
Page 39 and 40: inherent in clothing or, by McCrack
Page 41 and 42: exactly concretized “objects” t
Page 43 and 44: state of dialectic that does not re
Page 45 and 46: We tend to think of this serial del
Page 47 and 48: These “revived romances” and th
Page 49: I argue in the fourth chapter of th
Page 53 and 54: audience; the narrative of Superman
Page 55 and 56: ecognizable fictional space, that r
Page 57 and 58: for adolescence, social change, and
Page 59 and 60: These fiction networks, I would arg
Page 61 and 62: oaming across the desert floor will
Page 63 and 64: The Matrix, on the other hand, clea
Page 65 and 66: illustration of the characteristics
Page 67 and 68: ideas of intellectual property. Eve
Page 69 and 70: perspective, they cannot stand alon
Page 71 and 72: complex, large-scale designed syste
Page 73 and 74: Again, this argument may present a
Page 75 and 76: Chapter 2: Genres, Fictional Worlds
Page 77 and 78: salience or independence that can e
Page 79 and 80: occur on multiple levels, and can g
Page 81 and 82: Though Pavel deals with the mythica
Page 83 and 84: network. The network is both a repr
Page 85 and 86: While genre in the Bakhtinian frame
Page 87 and 88: performs a function of representati
Page 89 and 90: Topical Genres In reading a fiction
Page 91 and 92: the reader will not only understand
Page 93 and 94: you can do all your pop-culture hom
Page 95 and 96: incorporates others into its own pe
Page 97 and 98: attendant to the novel is extensive
Page 99 and 100: dynamic is actually a simulation wh
Page 101 and 102:
inform a persistent world game’s
Page 103 and 104:
The story recounts the wars between
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sonnet has fourteen lines, the poss
Page 107 and 108:
(Motte). The Centre Pompidou experi
Page 109 and 110:
methods, including close reading,
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Inc. DC Comics, originally known as
Page 113 and 114:
Continuity manifests itself both wi
Page 115 and 116:
juxtaposition became less a novelty
Page 117 and 118:
COMICS REPRESENTING COMICS Why does
Page 119 and 120:
such an example of mise en abyme or
Page 121 and 122:
intertextual and metatextual argume
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the top of the Flash Comics issue s
Page 125 and 126:
eader as somewhat fluid. It encoura
Page 127 and 128:
Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvet
Page 129 and 130:
poor or mediocre artifacts. However
Page 131 and 132:
cross-company “crossover” artif
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works represent the first “extens
Page 135 and 136:
the process of their formation, the
Page 137 and 138:
privileges the metanarrative as the
Page 139 and 140:
Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman - ha
Page 141 and 142:
whole, communicate a progression of
Page 143 and 144:
dystopias and talking chimpanzees a
Page 145 and 146:
From Crisis on Infinite Earths (Wol
Page 147 and 148:
“dream girl” was his wife, who
Page 149 and 150:
This nexus of productive categories
Page 151 and 152:
figure in “The Coyote Gospel”:
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conventional realism with the evolv
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engages directly with the network i
Page 157 and 158:
displayed in a bounded screen. In t
Page 159 and 160:
inging forth difficult truths from
Page 161 and 162:
the emergent and persistent system.
Page 163 and 164:
From “Fox on the Run” (Morrison
Page 165 and 166:
and then he - and the reader - is s
Page 167 and 168:
ights of animals with the ethical r
Page 169 and 170:
Superman’s iterations: created by
Page 171 and 172:
act of kindness, and not only a mom
Page 173 and 174:
evolution of those systems, and, in
Page 175 and 176:
assignment of Marvel’s main narra
Page 177 and 178:
Chapter 4: Persistent Worlds Immers
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universe that most people experienc
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oundaries on this activity; it is n
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accepted as such and that govern th
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Caillois’ answer to this question
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mechanically linear or “unicursal
Page 189 and 190:
inherently contradictory notion. Th
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MUD subsumes these other structures
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of the mirror stage as well as curr
Page 195 and 196:
It also challenges current ludologi
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contest seems inadequate to describ
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making manifested in a fiction. Lik
Page 201 and 202:
experience of persistent world game
Page 203 and 204:
Still, such social structures, howe
Page 205 and 206:
itself: many mythologies of persist
Page 207 and 208:
fictional space consisting currentl
Page 209 and 210:
and creating a new one. That new av
Page 211 and 212:
Fiction networks generate a diversi
Page 213 and 214:
fiction networks, such as Star Wars
Page 215 and 216:
membership in a subset of the commu
Page 217 and 218:
company of both, was that The Sims
Page 219 and 220:
Episode 1: The Phantom Menace as a
Page 221 and 222:
fiction; the space of the persisten
Page 223 and 224:
oth as a canon and as a fictional t
Page 225 and 226:
one’s FSCS is not fully documente
Page 227 and 228:
“Continuity” here not only spea
Page 229 and 230:
fundamental divergences of the pers
Page 231 and 232:
this writer frames the argument out
Page 233 and 234:
These arguments, like any, rest on
Page 235 and 236:
having an infinite number of advent
Page 237 and 238:
they create and share in the value
Page 239 and 240:
understandings of the literary. The
Page 241 and 242:
And we should not be too quick to d
Page 243 and 244:
network is often considered abject,
Page 245 and 246:
emergent: traceable, in retrospect,
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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