Copyright by Jason Todd Craft 2004 the Dissertation Committee for Jason Todd Craft Certifies That This Is the Approved Version of the Following Dissertation
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Copyright by Jason Todd Craft 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Jason Todd Craft Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Fiction Networks: The Emergence of Proprietary, Persistent, Large- Scale Popular Fictions Committee: Adam Z. Newton, Co-Supervisor John M. Slatin, Co-Supervisor Brian A. Bremen David J. Phillips Clay Spinuzzi Margaret A. Syverson Fiction Networks: The Emergence of Proprietary, Persistent, Large- Scale Popular Fictions by Jason Todd Craft, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2004 Dedication For my family Acknowledgements Many thanks to my dissertation supervisors, Dr. Adam Zachary Newton and Dr. John Slatin; to Dr. Margaret Syverson, who has supported this work from its earliest stages; and, to Dr. Brian Bremen, Dr. David Phillips, and Dr. Clay Spinuzzi, all of whom have actively engaged with this dissertation in progress, and have given me immensely helpful feedback. This dissertation has benefited from the attention and feedback of many generous readers, including David Barndollar, Victoria Davis, Aimee Kendall, Eric Lupfer, and Doug Norman. Thanks also to Ben Armintor, Kari Banta, Sarah Paetsch, Michael Smith, Kevin Thomas, Matthew Tucker and many others for productive conversations about branding and marketing, comics universes, popular entertainment, and persistent world gaming. Some of my most useful, and most entertaining, discussions about the subject matter in this dissertation have been with my brother, Adam Craft. I also want to thank my parents, Donna Cox and John Craft, and my partner, Michael Craigue, for their help and support. This dissertation was written, in part, with the help of teaching support from the Division of Rhetoric and Composition and the Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, and was completed with fellowship support from the Digital Media Collaboratory, an initiative of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. v Fiction Networks: The Emergence of Proprietary, Persistent, Large- Scale Popular Fictions Publication No._____________ Jason Todd Craft, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2004 Supervisors: Adam Z. Newton, John M. Slatin Under multiple pressures in contemporary media – consolidated corporate oversight, facilitated audience response and re-creation, coordinated longevity of fictions, expansion of popular artifacts into new markets – many popular fictions take on aggregate forms, and present fictional worlds that are composed of the large-scale conglomeration of disparate texts. These aggregate forms, or “fiction networks,” span very different types of medium and activity, but share key characteristics: they must negotiate the dynamics of an ongoing story with the relative stasis of branding in a market; they must maintain coherence within a system of production that accommodates many different creators; and, they must sustain a fiction that is not designed to conclude. In these fictions, one can trace the effects of contextual pressures in various textual or simulative phenomena, sometimes on the level of the individual artifact, sometimes on the level of the aggregate form, and sometimes on both levels. This work explores how proprietary, persistent, large-scale, and intertextual popular fictions have evolved and are evolving, using as guideposts some specific forms vi – “comics universes” and persistent world games – where these pressures are particularly visible and relevant. The first chapter introduces the “fiction network” as a concept and discusses the forms and phenomena at play in a network’s creation and maintenance. Chapter 2 establishes a more detailed analytical framework for these aggregate fictions, using theories of fictional worlds and Bakhtin’s work on genre and the chronotope. Chapter 3 discusses the comics universe as an aggregate form and analyzes key points in the evolution of the universe maintained by DC Comics, Inc. The fourth chapter looks at persistent world games as “fiction networks” and analyzes the game Star Wars Galaxies, both as a popular fiction in its own right and as a component of a larger multiple-media fiction. Finally, the conclusion attempts to reconcile the proprietary ontology of these popular fictions with other, non-proprietary models of production, such as Open Source; it also discusses the issues “fiction networks” present to conventional concepts of aesthetics. vii Table of Contents List of Illustrations...............................................................................................x Chapter 1: Fiction Networks.................................................................................1 Media Infrastructures and Fiction ................................................................5 What is a Fiction Network? .......................................................................12 Forms at Play ............................................................................................14 Proprietorship............................................................................................26 Persistence ................................................................................................33 Expansion..................................................................................................43 Connection ................................................................................................46 Emergence and the Importance of Scale ....................................................50 Writers, Readers and Roles........................................................................55 Chapter 2: Genres, Fictional Worlds, and Fiction Networks ..............................65 Fiction in the Fiction Network...................................................................66 Genre and the Fiction Network..................................................................72 Technological Genres, Semiotic Genres, and Media..........................76 Topical Genres..................................................................................79 Reading the Fiction Network.....................................................................90 Chapter 3: Crises in the Comics Universe........................................................100 Crossover ................................................................................................104 Comics Representing Comics ..................................................................107 Flash of Two Worlds...............................................................................111 Functional Unrealities .............................................................................116 Co-Evolution of Universes: Continuity and Causality..............................119 Watchmen and Chronotopic Change in the DC Universe .........................122 Crisis on Infinite Earths ..........................................................................129 Reaction to Crisis....................................................................................136 Consumer, Creator...................................................................................138 viii Grant Morrison and Animal Man .............................................................140 Epilogue: Post-Post-Crisis.......................................................................161 Chapter 4: Persistent Worlds ............................................................................167 Narrative, Fiction, and Ludology .............................................................169 Current Video Game Theory ...................................................................181 Persistent World Games ..........................................................................184 Persistent World Games as Fiction Networks ..........................................186 Methodology ...........................................................................................193 Star Wars Galaxies..................................................................................196 Persistent World Games Within Fiction Networks...................................202 Star Wars and Galaxies ...........................................................................208 Everybody wants to be a Jedi...................................................................213 Chapter 5: Conclusions and Complications ......................................................222 Open Source Fiction Networks................................................................223 The Aesthetics of the Bazaar ...................................................................228 Building a Better Fiction Network...........................................................233 Methods for Further Research..................................................................235 In Conclusion ..........................................................................................237 Bibliography ....................................................................................................240 Vita..................................................................................................................251 ix List of Illustrations From “Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt” (Kanigher, Infantino and Kubert 2)112 From Crisis on Infinite Earths (Wolfman et al. 18)...........................................135