Branded Worlds and Contracting Galaxies

Branding Theory: Tight Versus Loose

Traditional advertising theory has long been interested in the effect of brands across a number of holding media, referred in the field as brand extensions (Aaker & Keller, 1990). Recently, scholars in this field have been preoccupied with the possible effects of moving brands between off-line and online manifestations. However, these studies are limited by the field’s predisposition to posit brands themselves as independent variables and experimental stimuli, recording only subjects’ reactions in quantifiable values of attention (Faber & Lee, 2007), fit perception of brand and derivation (Czellar, 2003), and loyalty and satisfaction (Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003). Grounded in cognitive studies and hampered by advertising theory's limited empirical mandate of tracking consumer brand recall, attitude, and purchase intention, these studies neglect to investigate the textual properties of brands or the cultural work that makes them possible. However, one recent provocative study by Hartman and Kinard (2013) complicates this trend by tracking the effectiveness of online, branded games meant to promote cable television programming. These authors tracked effect of different levels of integration for two games with respect to their parent brands and, surprisingly, found that greater integration could lead to great alienation on the part of consumers. Yet, this article’s measure of integration is an analytically weak and reductively binary one, based solely on which game included more visual and aural cues, such as photographic elements and soundtracks of the parent series, both of which are popular reality programs. A richer measure of relative tightness or looseness that takes into consideration textual links guided by character, narrative, tone, or theme as well as organizational links complicated by hierarchy and role-taking provides a better gauge for the integration of media brands. Introducing this more qualitative spectrum of loose and tight branding seems vital in discussing deep engagement brands like Star Wars and for platforms like MMO games where fan interest is not simply an affect to be transferred from one product to the next, but its principal economic driver.

A closer examination of production of SWG adds nuance to the more paradoxical nature of brands, often neglected in empirical studies. A fickle entity, a brand exists somewhere between the explicit branded thing and the implicit brand image, somewhere between a good and a service, somewhere between the calculated manipulation of cultural producers and the organic groundswell of enthusiastic consumers, and somewhere between the traditional realm of economy and culture. Sociologists Celia Lury and Scott Lash (2007) underscore this internal conflict, describing the contemporary culture industry as motivated by the cross purposes of the “thingification of the media,” as symbols and representations are made to manifest in the increasing circulation of cultural objects and the building of fully branded environments (MMO games being an ideal example) and the “mediation of things” as commodities are subsumed by images, values, and branded philosophies (Star Wars is not a movie—it is a way of life). In this confusion, the brand, as both an actual thing and a virtual image, occupies a hypothetical fulcrum point between mediation and thingification.

In the effort to better understand what precisely a brand is, who makes it, and, most importantly for business writers, how it creates value, at least one trend of business research and sociological theory overprivileges what Adam Arvidsson (2007) has called the externality of brands, that is the way in which their worth depends squarely upon promotion, production, and innovation created outside of the traditional firm among its actual users. Emboldened by cultural studies understandings of active consumers and new media’s examination of interactivity, lay business writers have celebrated concepts such as wikinomics (Tapscott & Williams, 2006), crowdsourcing (Howe, 2006), and the latent potential of the creative class (Florida, 2002) as the locus of competitive advantage of the future and have recommend cultivating relationships with self-motivated freelancers and especially unpaid brand advocates. The theorists Lash and Lury (2007) echo these claims, positioning the rise of media brands as a wholesale change from the quasi-industrial model of cultural production in the former’s ultimate embrace of multiplicity and their expansive networked shape. They argue that “our cultural objects are self-organizing systems, sometimes operationally closed at other points emergent, singularities forming connective syntheses, at many points actualizing themselves into events” (p. 15). Here brands are purely circulating objects clearly outside of any old-fashioned discursive or textual operation such as meaning or worse yet intention; it is a cybernetic theory of culture casting brands as autopoietic systems. The theorists draw upon continental theory to make their case. From Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory, the pair borrows the notion of a flattened landscape devoid of transcendent, social meaning where even causes are replaced with relationships, interactions, and translations. Similarly, Lash and Lury posit that brands function less through meaning than through circulation, assemblage, and emergence. And from Giles Deleuze, the theorists adapt the replacement of textual understandings of cultural objects for one that imagines them instead as virtual platforms for any number of intensities and affects, not transcendent in the objects, but played out in their imminent use.

Despite the productive theoretical provocation of such models, they conflict with a more practical understanding of brand management, which is often overseen by notoriously litigious media IP owners from Disney to the National Football League who do indeed cultivate and depend upon affective and emotional relationships with their consumers but aggressively attack instances of emergence when they constitute use deemed unofficial. Moreover, casting brands as emergent, self-generating phenomenon ignores the specific forms of creative work that must occur to facilitate circulation, enable emergence, and integrate externalities.

While both business thinkers and high theorists have lauded a looseness of control as the hallmark of branding, competing examinations have highlighted the distinct ways through which cultural producers maintain tight controls over brands and exploit externalities. Such a theoretical tradition is implicitly endorsed in the legal struggles over digital rights management, copyright extensions, and online piracy, in which creative industries have struggled over the last 20 years to maintain a strong hold over their legacy properties. In his critical assessment of brands, Arvidsson (2005) compares the cultural form to Jurgen Habermas’s (1987) colonization of the lifeworld, in which structural media (so-called steering mechanisms such as power and money) have invaded and reconfigured people’s everyday lives in the same way that brand communities and fandoms have replaced organic, lived, gemeinschaft communities. However, Arvidsson detects tight brand controls not so much in the punitive actions taken against infringers, but in the extraordinary efforts made to absorb the value produced by “free,” external action posited by more Deleuzian theorists of brands. Specifically, a relative loosening of control is met with inversely intense mechanisms of surveillance as well as an increasing sophistication in systems of measurement that translate surveillance into usable data for both encouraging reproduction and tracking innovation.

Brand owners do not only exploit the unpaid labor of fans and advocates but also absorb the creative work of a number of temporary freelancers who participate all along the production chain, but sacrifice any form of ownership back to the center, acting as a sort of modestly paid externality for hire. Take, for example, the genesis of the Star Wars logo itself. The original marketing for the film’s 1977 initial release included the Brothers Hildebrandt and Tom Jung posters overlaid with a triangular, receding text, not the stacked, rectangular text box that has become so closely associated with the brand. There are at least three possible sources of this more familiar Star Wars logo. As early as the summer of 1976, George Lucas’s production firm, Lucasfilm, had contracted with Marvel to create a series of comic books adapting the film. Lucas himself reportedly handpicked the contributors, Howard Chaykin and Roy Thomas (Greenberg, 2005). In a 1983 interview, series letterer Jim Novak claims to have created the stacked logo for the comics’ cover and was paid a one-time fee of US$25 for his effort (Jim Novak Interview, 1983). At the same time, Suzy Rice, an employee movie poster outfit Seiniger Advertising that was hired by the film’s distributor Fox, was contracted to make promotional material for Star Wars. Specifically, she claims that she produced brochures to be distributed to exhibitors, including the iconic stacked logo, which was then used in the film’s famous opening credit crawl after it was deemed more amenable to animation (Rice, n.d.). And in 1976, the venerable advertising firm DDB produced a teaser poster in advance of the film on which a close approximation of the stacked logo appears at the bottom. Whatever version of the story is the most accurate, a larger point remains; namely, that temporary, contracted, work-for-hire employees make key contributions to brands, in this case, forging the very glyph that is recognized the world over for standing in for all the narratives, characters, and concepts of the series and is stamped on all its products. Yet none of the possible creators ever took a stake in its ownership; no one received official acknowledgment in the film’s credits. Brand owners then not only covet externalities but also a quasi-external workforce that contributes deeply, but retains nothing.

The puzzle of combining these competing theories of loose and tight branding practice is mirrored in the paradoxical features of branded content itself that, as Lash and Lury have argued, must be simultaneously more shallow and more deep than traditional cultural goods (2007, p. 182). Consumers must be able to immediately recognize brands as a surface effect at the same time that brands must allow for deep engagement through history, memory, and fantasy. This more subjective effect has been occasionally tracked in traditional advertising research as the implicit attitude held for brands in the minds of consumers (Waiguny, Nelson, & Marko, 2013).

Throughout its history, Lucasfilm’s exploitation of the Star Wars brand, work that has earned the company the position of number two global producer of entertainment products (Goudreau, 2012) and the 17th most powerful global brand according to License magazine (Lisanti, 2011), has vacillated between focusing on either extreme. During the preproduction of the original 1977 Star Wars, Lucas famously negotiated for the merchandising rights of his characters from producer–distributor 20th Century Fox, a shrewd deal considering the US$300 million gross Star Wars merchandising attained in the brand’s first year (Wyatt, 1994, p. 152). Subsequently, the producer oversaw a series of television spin-offs: the infamous Holiday Special, a number of Ewok themes movies of the week as well as a pair of Saturday morning cartoons produced by the Canadian animation studio Nelvana (Droids and Ewoks). In addition, Marvel continued to create Star Wars comic books with only occasional licensor interference, having, for example, just enough foresight to prevent in one issue the premature reconstruction of the Death Star (Greenberg, 2005). From a producer’s perspective, all these branded products evidence an aggressive, yet shallow engagement. All these objects shared the surface of Star Wars transmitted in character setting and visual design, yet they failed to build substantial attachments or networks across iterations; colloquially, they were knockoffs.

However, in the 1990s, with no Star Wars sequels forthcoming, attitudes at Lucasfilm underwent a sea change with regard to its relationships with licensees, resulting in the creation of the so-called Expanded Universe. ¹ Finally, allowing for the narrative investigation of the time after the original film trilogy, Lucasfilm endorsed deals with Random House’s Bantam books and Dark Horse Comics to follow the brand’s principal characters, post-Return of the Jedi. Simultaneously, Lucasarts, the producer’s in-house new media division launched a series of games (Rebel Assault, 1993; X-Wing, 1993; TIE Figther, 1994), offering a substantial, “thingified,” playable version of the original films’ events. In this period, Lucasfilm also oversaw the ambitious multimedia project Shadows of the Empire through the interlocking of novel, comic book, video game, and toy components. Shadows of the Empire was based upon an internally produced two-page treatment by Lucasfilm licensing heads Howard Ruffman and Lucy Wilson, which posited the events that had been elliptically elided between the films The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (Yaz, 1996). The concept began in-house and was workshopped with contributors, resulting in an authoritative story deeply connected with existing narratives and substantially adding to the films’ diegetic universe through a novel combination of full-time and freelanced creative labor. This textual-organizational model was the blueprint for the Expanded Universe, in which additions to the corpus of the Star Wars narratives were tolerated, but only through sacrificing ownership and subjecting oneself to possibly intense scrutiny and constant surveillance. To achieve this, Lucasfilm has employed a series of editor-archivists—Leland Chee, Allan Kausch, Sue Rostini, Howard Ruffman, and Lucy Wilson—whose main task has been to maintain Star Wars continuity through the Holocron, a massive database of everything that ever existed in the fictional Star Wars universe that currently contains at least 55,000 discrete entries (Chee, 2012, July). Here Arvidsson’s branding surveillance is literalized in one massive and secretive Filemaker document.

If Lucasfilm’s historic engagement encouraged makers of SWG to maintain a tight hold on branded properties, then the new field of research on MMO games contained the opposite influence. Briefly, MMO games can be understood as digital hybrids of databases, games, and social networking applications in which user-clients log onto centralized servers that maintain the data to perpetually create a persistent, playable world where users pass time by competing, collaborating, and establishing relationships. These durable, yet often directionless, play environments have grown among a modest but loyal fan base in the years since the dissemination of 3D graphics. Most studies of MMO games have emphasized the form’s use as a sort of benign Petri dish, a society in miniature with which to study topics ranging from microeconomics (Castronova, 2005), to community building (Steinkuehler & Williams, 2006), to individual expression (Yee, Harris, Jabon, & Bailenson, 2011). But the most common theme across all these works is clearly the celebration of users’ so-called emergent behavior, a move mimicking brand theorists’ preoccupation with externalities. For example, T. L. Taylor (2006) in her book on the MMO role-playing game EverQuest, celebrates player-born innovations in terms of cooperation—users take on discrete roles not dictated by the game to help each other achieve tasks—industry—players set up businesses to supply needs neglected or complicated by game mechanics—and programming—users backwards engineered better performing graphical client software—as well as the game owners’ ham-fisted attempts to stifle these innovations, mistaking them for unruly, disruptive play.

However, by ignoring the intermediary role of production at work in online gaming, the otherwise fascinating literature on MMO culture is ultimately limited. Like many brand theorists, these researchers have overestimated the apparent freedom of users and their abilities to marshal motivation and purpose in gaming environments. ² In his own examination of the MMO platform Second Life, Thomas Malaby (2009) found that even in that game, exemplary in its seeming formlessness, producers were racked with the paradoxical difficulty of containing open-endedness. According to Malaby, the game makers often settled in functions intermittently called precarious authority, ludic bureaucracy, or digital governance, where user activity is constrained in chokepoints such as architecture, landscape, and resources (p. 132). Focusing too closely on user agency also results in the overestimation of players’ ability to marshal motivation and purpose in gaming worlds. In her masterful essay on the construction of World of Warcraft (WoW), Krzywinska (2006) argues that it is that MMO game’s deployment of mythic, fantasy-inflected tropes, resonant in all the elements of the game from its quest structure, to the architecture of its play space, to its rhetorical style, that works to encourage, enable and reinforce what the author calls “depth engagement” (p. 384). The author implicitly draws upon Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s (2005) model for player agency, which is felt, the authors argue, when a constructed balance between what one can and what one should dramatically do is established, giving actions weight, purpose, and meaning. Collectively, these works further suggest a model for digital authorship, one that is concerned both with enabling emergence and supporting externalities.

Branded Creativity: Worldmaking

Taking seriously both brands and MMO games offers a great challenge to game makers but also to media studies scholars trying to understand their work with regard to scale. Understanding both cultural practices necessitates investigators to take a world itself as a unit of analysis. I argue that it is the broadly defined school of social constructivism that offers a set of conceptual tools for understanding the creative processes of worldmaking. These thinkers were relatively unconcerned with the content of a given social form (including measures such as metaphysical truth) and instead decoded the infrastructural practices that build and perpetuate social worlds. Thus, Berger and Luckmann (1966) considered how habits solidify into guiding institutions and Kuhn (1970) examined how regularized scientific experimentation establishes ruling paradigms of knowledge. Each gave the rules for forming a world and for its dismantling—the inevitable paradigm shift—yet neither made much room for a simultaneous multiplicity of worlds. The aesthetic philosopher Nelson Goodman (1978), however, entertained just such a notion. Goodman argued that worlds, as a unit, were always made up of some other world, but what set coexisting worlds apart was a set of interlocking operations—composition/decomposition, weighting, ordering, deleting, and deforming—that reconfigure worldly elements into new matrices. In sum, the social constructionists collectively suggest that we consider the importance not of the stuff, or content of a world to understand it as a collective unity, but the mechanisms that give shape in-between cultural expression, the ligature that acts as the frame. Or in Goodman’s words, a world’s “unity is not to be sought in an ambivalent or neutral ‘something’ beneath these versions, but in an overall organization embracing them” (p. 5).

It was the task of SWG’s makers similarly not to create a world ex nihilo, but to make a world through the application of ligature, a system of ordering and reordering of a brand through both the lenses of old and new media. On the most basic level, the makers of SWG were able to pick elements of preexisting Star Wars canon to include everything from places, to designs, to alien species. However, the more powerful examples of worldmaking exist on the level of game mechanics and rules, where MMO makers literally detail what can be done, how players can interact, and the relationship of everything in a given world. For example, combat and chatting systems as well as quest and mission structures can prioritize one or the other form of action. The same could be said of the game’s class system that asks users to behave in a manner consistent with predetermined careers, echoing character professions depicted in the original films.

As already suggested, the makers of SWG specifically used the large-scale narrative of the GCW to prioritize and order player action. Establishing the game’s setting during the conflict between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire was one of the few mandates directly imposed in SWG’s generative phases and was frequently addressed in the game’s many successive updates and expansions. Not simply a background or narrative color, GCW was built, in the words of lead designer Kirk Black (n.d.), “to answer the big question: why do I do … the GCW will be the thread I use to weave all the professions and game mechanics into a complete tapestry where each player feels they have a meaningful purpose in the game.” Like Kryzwinska’s mythical frame in WoW, the GCW was used to invite player investment and engagement. However, the GCW was not simply a story being told, it was a dynamic system whose outcome was determined by player performance. The game kept a running tab of the relative success of either side, the consequence of which was factional control of play spaces, easier access to resources, and so on. In one of the more inventive features, the GCW mechanic replaced NPC factional deaths with opposing members; thus, for each Stormtrooper killed, a Rebel fighter would take their place and vice versa. The state of the war then was ultimately a dynamic set of statistics and algorithms that determined the victory—when the SWG servers were shut off most, but not all, had the Rebels “winning.” The GCW was a particularly crafty instance of worldmaking that both proposed to prioritize action and to offer a set of rules for dynamic storytelling, simultaneously adapting old media, reinforcing brand identity, and encouraging emergence.

Perhaps one of the largest tasks of MMO makers involves what is commonly called balancing content (Mulligan & Patrovsky, 2003, pp. 49–50). As stated earlier, MMO games are, in a sense, large, interactive databases. These databases include numerical code meant to reflect the relative performance of each object with respect to one another—what’s more powerful, a lightsaber or a laser blaster?—constituting what Goodman called the ordering function of worldmaking. Yet the work of balancing does not end with a MMO game’s launch, that is when users begin to populate the servers. The makers must continuously monitor the game, as the complexity of the databases will necessarily yield anomalous advantages to certain combinations of actions and behaviors. Through surveilling game activity, MMO game makers isolate these emergent “mistakes” and correct them through dynamic rebalancing, a reconfiguration of either database attribute (lightsabers are too powerful) or game action (too many players are being given lightsabers). All of these examples entail significant creative work that does not imply the creation of new content in the traditional sense, but the creation of narrative ligature and game mechanics that holds SWG’s world together and allows for player meaning to emerge.

Drawing on Goodman, literary critics Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning (2010) recently argued that “worlds as such are never fixed once and for all, but are something that is to be made, processed and circulated time and again in different media via concomitant processes of inter and transmedial translation” (pp. 4–5). This applies to the never-ending dynamic work of MMO game writing, engaging, and reengaging users and ordering and reordering the subtext of interaction and also to the life of the Star Wars brand in the online gaming space. At the same time that Sony lost its license to run SWG, Lucasfilm in partnership with Electronic Art’s Bioware-Austin, launched Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), a MMO game that occurs 4,000 years previous to the narrative events presented in SWG. Brands, and their branded worlds, do not go away, they just get reimagined. But the case of KOTOR, the world cannibalization takes on a literal, sociological aspect, given the relatively small world, distinct specialty, and general secretiveness of MMO production. A majority of the creative leads on SWG worked together in Austin on the early MMO game, Ultima Online (UO), at an influential video game developer Origin, and after SWG, at least a one third of the former games’ leads navigated to Bioware-Austin, a production company essentially set up for SWG and UO director Richard Vogel (see Figure 1). The consistency runs even deeper if one considers creative workers in nonlead roles. This perpetual reconfiguration reflects what Deuze (2007) describes as the tendency of media creatives to team in semipermanent work groups, in an effort to reduce uncertainty, to maintain reputations, and to smooth work practices while retaining the organizational advantages of temporary labor. Here worldmaking and remaking is not just a theoretical nicety, but a fairly apt consideration of the structure of creative labor.

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Figure 1.

Working on Star Wars Galaxies (asterisk denotes previous employment at Origin).

Branded Creativity: Curation

Speaking directly to the media, George Lucas framed his October 2012 sale of Lucasfilm and its affiliated intellectual properties to Disney as an effort to ensure the longevity of the brand (Starwars, 2012). The US$4 billion sale was positioned as the best way to maintain the legacy value of Star Wars. This concern for the long life of cultural properties implies a series of new roles on the part of creative firms and workers. In the past 20 years, Disney specifically has pursued a strategy of purchasing and exploiting established brands from Jim Henson properties, to Pixar animation, to Marvel Comics, to now Lucasfilm. Disney and firms like it are acting as mass cultural assemblers, combining, collecting, and remixing popular culture. But unlike other examples of contemporary assemblage such as blog or sampled audio tracks, Disney connects its content with the hard, financial bonds of ownership. Firms as assemblers, in turn, have relied upon a certain class of entrepreneurs who have created free-standing brands that have complicated standards of production, the categorization of cultural goods, and traditional business models to create interlocking libraries of legacy content: people like Lucas, Henson, and John Lasseter, but also musicians like Frank Zappa and Prince. These cultural entrepreneurs create bodies of work that are amenable to branding. Roles of building branded content libraries and assembling them under corporate storehouses further imply one more role for cultural intermediaries, that of managing longevity, which we can call curation.

Long considered simply the business of hanging pictures, curation itself has become a visible creative act thanks to institutional critiques of museum and gallery spaces (e.g., see Clifford, 1993 and Karp & Wilson, 1996), which shattered the myth of neutral “white cubes” (O’Doherty, 1999). Art critic Paul O’Neill (2007) goes as far to suggest that the practice of event-centric, biennales, programmatic in high art circles indicate how the curator’s tasks of arrangement have eclipsed the traditional roles of both artist and critics in the creation of meaning. Following O’Neill’s lead, we then can consider curation as a visible, creative act that involves managing sameness—maintaining the integrity of the individual object—managing difference—arranging objects in an acceptable fields—and, most importantly, managing value—coordinating a relationship between display and increasing worth.

Like all licensees, the makers of SWG were under the external obligation to maintain a certain sameness in their product as well as an internal one to see the value of the brand maximized. As we have already seen, Lucasfilm has developed an unusually vigilant oversight over licensees with their Holocron project. And the preproduction of SWG was begun with a smaller series of editorial mandates including the general setting, the available player classes, the necessary rarity of Jedi Knights and Lucasfilm’s obligatory role in producing all of the game’s audio effects and soundtracks (Blackman, personal interview, December 13, 2012). However, much of the obligation of maintaining sameness fell on the SWG makers who were compelled to do research on their own. One freelance writer working on the game described this stating, “we all aimed for perfect fidelity to the published Star Wars Universe, as far as practical. We relied very heavily on the Expanded Universe material summarized in various encyclopedic reference compendia” (Varney, personal interview, November 18, 2012). Similarly, lead designer Jeff Freeman (n.d.) described the “exhausting work of absorbing material from countless comic books, dozens of novels and two RPGs, fantastic fan-sites from all over the world—to say nothing of the immeasurable volume of material at starwars.com and all the Star Wars games from Lucasarts.” The work of research was necessary to satiate an aggressive licensor and an overly scrutinizing fanbase at the same time that it facilitated accuracy and consistency in the form of backstory and visual design, both particularly important in a MMO game where traditional narrative and brand protagonists play such a minor role. Details such as the ecological temperament of Ithorians, aliens colloquially known as Hammerheads, as well as Sullustans’ uncanny sense of direction resound throughout the game, West End Publishing’s pen-and-paper role-playing game and the many Star Wars encyclopedias. Moreover, attention to detail in terms of photorealistic computer graphics rendering allowed SWG to display a high degree of visual fidelity to the on-film characters.

But brands are only partially contained in their materiality, in a hypothetical consistent form, but are always also virtual entities lurking behind and above objects, implicit attitudes, and associative cognitive threads in the parlance of more traditional branding theory. In the same way that a curator must contend with the “original meaning” of the work of art, licensees must contend with the so-called spirit of the brand, not attached specifically to objects or their backstories, but to the ineffable, yet constructed feeling or sense of a brand. Describing his preproduction work on SWG, producer Haden Blackman (n.d.) reviewed all the existent films and made a “list of everything that I felt made Star Wars unique and captivating. The list was all over the map, but included everything from ‘Jedi,’ ‘lightsabers,’ and ‘The Force,’ to ‘beat-up starships,’ ‘aliens,’ and ‘blasters’ … it also included the saga’s important themes such as ‘the struggle between good and evil,’ ‘the hero’s journey,’ and ‘redemption’.” The list is split between objects (easier to translate) and concepts that necessitate some kind of adaptation and consequent supervision. Maintaining the spirit of the brand, a brand’s more implicit associations, fuelled several controversies that occurred throughout the life of the game. For example, Sony eliminated the character class of creature handlers in the 2005 game update known as the infamous New Game Enhancements when it was decided that too many users were cultivating pets in a manner more in keeping with Pokémon than Star Wars (IADaveMark, 2012). In 2005, Sony also introduced changes in the games combat mechanic replacing a turn-based system, derived from analog pen-and-paper games, to a twitch and targeting system more familiar to console gaming. Video game writer Allen Varney (2007) attributed this switch as a part of a larger scale effort to alter the pacing of the game to allow players to “enjoy characteristically fast-paced Star Wars action.”

Adapting concepts then is a more complicated task involving translation between media and a management of difference, similar to the manner in which curators must work to put objects into new contexts for subsequent exhibitions. Nowhere was this difficulty better displayed than in the troubled adaptation of Jedi Knights as a player class in SWG (for a full discussion, see IADavemark 2012). Jedi Knights, their history and their philosophy are central to the brand identity of Star Wars, but exactly who they are, what they do, and the nature of the intentionally vague Force was left mostly blank, only filled in gradually with each additional text, but never completely resolved—there is always more about the Jedi that we do not know. Most likely realizing the generative power of this central mystery, Star Wars licensors have been unwilling to allow for definitive stories of Jedi history and their supernatural powers. Moreover, SWG was set in the time between the films The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, when ostensibly Luke Skywalker and Yoda were the only existent Jedi in the galaxy. For these reasons, Lucasfilm initially decreed that there be no Jedi in the game. In response, Sony crafted a game where players relied on each other’s interlocking specialties in a delicate, constructed ecosystem without the influence of Jedi. However, players wanted to be Jedi—the appeal of the brand is tied up with these characters. After launch, Sony developed an intricate and secret system, pejoratively dubbed the Hologrind, that would unlock Jedi abilities. However, users pursuing this goal through so-called grinding were cast as detracting from the overall game prompting producer Gary Gattis (n.d.) to respond saying, “we do not think the current Hologrind system of becoming a Jedi is healthy for the game and we want to stop it as soon as possible.” Sony replaced this mechanic with a traditional quest/mission-based achievement that resulted in a massive overpopulation of Jedi for the remainder of the game’s next 6 years. This prolonged and convoluted example indicates the difficulty of adapting the spirit of a brand, here embodied in the mysterious Jedi, pulled between the affordances of old and new media. During the first 2½ years of SWG, designers struggled to find the proper way to make these characters fit into the game, eliminating some elements, for example, the intense master–pupil bond essential to Jedi culture in the films was dropped in favor of clear level progression and the unquantifiability of their supernatural powers that were categorized into familiar power and ability trees, highly repetitive of MMO combat systems. The mystical rarity of force sensitivity, necessary to Jedi training and absolutely scarce in the film narratives of Star Wars, was made commonplace.

But perhaps the most critical role of curators is their political-economic function of increasing the value (economic or otherwise) of the object displayed. Similarly to gallery objects, branded content’s value is established and reestablished primarily through circulation. Thus, if nothing else, SWG was a sort of gallery for interested parties to become invested or reinvested with the Star Wars brand. But the context of a gallery can just as easily subtract from an object’s value; this was most likely the case with SWG. In a surprisingly candid interview, SWG producer John Smedley admitted that the game was not living up to its potential stating that, “the [population] numbers we had, while they’re ok for the MMO space, could be a lot bigger given the amount of people know about Star Wars” (Feldman, 2005). Topping out at a population of 500,000 was indeed acceptable at the beginning of the last decade, but became black mark next to WoW’s over 11 million resident population and likely helped prompt the decision to reboot and restart with KOTOR. Launching KOTOR was a particularly shrewd move, given the new game’s ability to recirculate the Star Wars brand and yet save its more sacred, canonical elements from the original film trilogy from the vicissitudes and consequent aspersions that go along with monthly membership fees and whatever they might implicate about the real world value of Star Wars in its entirety. After a very successful sales launch resulting in over 1 million registered users, KOTOR’s resident population never topped 2 million and was actively losing users before it converted to a free-to-play game in 2012 (Makruch, 2012; Yin-Poole, 2012). This hybrid business model for MMOs invites players to self-sort into users willing to pay for additional content while tasking casual free-users either to become future hardcore players or, in the very least, participating in the brand, contributing either economic capital in the case of the former or social capital in the case of the latter.

Branded Creativity: Toy Keepers

Prior to the launch of SWG, Sony released a series of updates, letters to the so-called community, addressed from the makers of the game to potential future users. Much of the business of these messages was to communicate the fannish bonafides of the workers who took turns reminiscing about the first time that they saw the original films and explaining how much Star Wars influenced their respective lives. Again and again, digital workers take the opportunity to compare their current work with their adolescent hobby of playing with Star Wars-branded toys. And many connect their past habits with their current work like artist Chris Douglas (n.d.) who states that he has “come full circle, transitioning from a kid playing with models of Star Wars stuff to an adult building models of Star Wars stuff.”

The toy analogy provides an apt metaphor for the leeway given to creators of branded content. In his work on ancillary media paratexts, Gray (2010) argued that Star Wars toys specifically provided mechanisms with which one could reconfigure the official films’ narrative, much in the manner of fan fiction or against-the-grain reading practices. Moreover, these toys, as evidenced in the developers’ often personal letters, provide a memory space to relive and redo not only the films’ stories but the very context of their original consumption. ³ However, I argue that branded toys only operate in this fashion as a secondary effect. Marc Steinberg (2012), in his exemplary work on Astro Boy, has proposed that branded toys always communicate first with one another, through networks and relations, and only then offer a surface upon which human communication can take place. Similarly, we have examined ordering meaning and curating concepts as the unique tasks of SWGs makers, all designed, first, to put the game platform in communication with the Star Wars brand and, second, to allow users to engage with this brand. Makers of SWG do not use their “toys” to fancifully rework the stories of Star Wars, but attend to this thing-communication by being polite toy keepers: recognizing that the models were always built by someone else, someone more authoritative; observing that these toys always belonged to someone else; and respecting the toy owner by putting the objects away nicely when finished. Even in the chaotic end of days of SWG, game makers introduced events based around the Megawok, an abnormally large Ewok creature stalking the streets of Mos Eisley, and a Super Star Destroyer, an unusually large space-faring vessel hovering above the planet Coruscant. In these instances, approved models/toys are maintained and left uncompromised by alternative creatures/vehicles—the license was concluding, therefore hypothetically anything could have happened—instead, existing objects were simply scaled up (an easy enough digital operation).

Identifying with toy keepers creates a way for creatives to rationalize and understand circumscribed creativity. The rhetorical move gives purpose to deference that is expected when dealing with branded content. Like all licensed content SWG was built upon a fairly elaborate division of labor where creative leeway diminishes as you move away from the organizational center of Lucasfilm (and often technical expertise, though inversely). Lucasfilm contracted with and oversaw work from SOE to create SWG. And this firm, in turn, relied both upon permanent, project length and temporary labor, the latter who produced things such as dialogue strings for in-game NPCs. And the chains of freelancers extend even further, as Sony contracted for the use of proprietary digital tools (“Sony uses Dynamic PVS in new games” 2001) in the assembly of digital assets and contracted with AT&T’s Core Gaming Team to provide the hardware infrastructure of servers and their maintenance (Miller, 2011). And even further, AT&T used the database management software Apache for Sony’s servers; we know this because it was Apache’s security flaws that permitted the massive hacking of Sony accounts on May 2, 2011, that resulted in the potential theft of 24.6 million accounts (Poulsen, 2011).

These elaborate, contracted chains are managed with a handful of mechanisms. More central creatives can mandate work, set limitations, and necessitate a formal process of evaluating content. However, how much these active forms of oversight occur is an open question; one freelance writer working on SWG described producer in his output as “cursory” (Varney, personal interview, November 18, 2012). Instead, freelance chains also allow for more passive forms of management such as relying on submanagers and hiring within a trusted small world of collaborators. Equally strong as these mechanisms is the internalized incentive of freelancers who just as frequently keep their own work in check through self-censorship. For example, the same freelance writer referred to his above described job stating, “we weren’t instructed to follow anything specific, but we operated with the implicit understanding that we had to be consistent with published materials” (Varney, personal interview, November 18, 2012). Deference then is coded both in organizational hierarchies and internalized by successive layers of temporary creative laborers. ⁴

The deference of toy keepers emerges also in freelancers’ willingness to attribute everything back to the center; no matter how crafty or original the innovation, it always belongs to the brand owner. In this sense, branded MMO game makers have much in common with users who sign away many digital ownership rights in terms of service contracts. ⁵ The deep irony is that Lucas’s core concepts of Star Wars itself borrow heavily preexisting material (see Fievel, 1996). Particularly, Lucas cribbed generously from comic illustrator Jack Kirby’s Fourth World science fiction stories that concern an intergalactic tyrant (Darkseid becomes Darth Vader, who channels the Dark Side) destined to do battle with his long lost son (Orion becomes Luke Skywalker) who is frequently accompanied by a robot who communicates with pings and blips (mother box becomes R2D2) in an universe rules by a vague metaphysical substance (The Source becomes The Force). I do not include this list to defame the original Lucas films but only to demonstrate how they reconfigured existent familiar elements; however, when this is done in the context of branded creativity, recombinations and innovations can only ever be attributed back to the source, here in the form of Expanded Universe. Indeed, the successor to SWG, KOTOR is set in a time period only ever investigated and fleshed out by Expanded Universe texts, through freelanced labor, constituting a clear example of exploiting the innovation of quasi-externality. The economic implication of this transition from branding through “original” works to “freelanced” ones looms large, especially in light of the sale of Lucas’s private firm for US$4 billion, a sum in which none of the polite freelancers quietly making contributions—including the elaboration of the Old Republic—to the brand throughout the past 20 years have a stake in. Moreover, this imbalance should also give pause to political economic initiatives enshrining innovation, IP, and patent production as central to future wealth creation, essentially exposing who exactly is positioned to best take advantage of such decisions. This state of affairs introduces alternative hypotheses to freelance deference and the fetishization of externalities. If one is only ever creating content for someone else’s bottom line, then perhaps there is no real incentive to go that far from the source material. And if no ownership stake is forthcoming, perhaps externalities, workers outside of the firm, are increasingly the only reliable place to find participants willing to creatively contribute to brands with no expectation of due recompensation.

And finally, because licensing deals and their freelance chains are terminable, creators of branded content must always be comfortable putting their toys back away. It is the inevitable conclusion of all such collaborations. However, users are under no such contractual obligation. Practicing a rather extreme form of brand loyalty, a group of gifted fans reverse engineered the entire system of SWG; reassembled its code and graphic elements from scratch; and relaunched the game independently as SWG emulation (SWGemu). This eschatological project exemplifies the enthusiastic innovation and reproduction coveted by branding gurus but does so in a way problematic to brand value as it, one, channels enthusiasm in a decidedly noneconomic outlet and, two, it contains a not-so-veiled criticism of what is seen as the botched treatment and foreclosed potential of the original SWG. SWGemu also acts as a rare instance of a bootleg made not for pecuniary gain, but in rectifying the perceived mistakes of traditional cultural producers. ⁶ I would argue, however, that it is this contrast between putting away toys and refusing to do so that creates a gap of desire and nostalgia that is probably the best engine for a brand’s longevity. The same cycle of death and rebirth recurs through the brand biographies of not only Star Wars but also other canonical science fiction properties such as Doctor Who and Star Trek.

Understanding creative labor from the perspective of branded workers and new media laborers necessitates that we reconsidered traditional standards of creativity itself. The work behind tasks such as worldmaking and curation are easily rendered invisible, especially when occluded by mirrored, celebrated practices of fans who likewise conduct similar labor of listing, monitoring, and recirculating branded content in so-called externalities. However, it is only by closely examining the actual work of production, specifically in the case of evolving and often neglected cultural forms that analysts can disrupt traditional notions of creation and the political economic standards of ownership that depend upon them.

The negative lessons of both SWG and KOTOR loom large not only for digital creatives but also for managers of the Star Wars brand and, more generally, for the managers of all media brands interested in the digital gaming space. As we have seen SWG was constructed with a particular combination of tight and loose branding controls that, on one hand, struggled for fidelity and accuracy with respect look, feel, and narrative; but on the other, allowed for great latitude with respect to player initiative and motivation. Organizational controls, which mandated that canonical brand signifiers comprising the narrative scope of the game be more directly adapted, while interactive elements, like dialogue strings that impact an individual’s gameplay, were under lax supervision, largely predetermined the adaptation and its specific textual compromises. Two more recent Star Wars cross-branded products and games, Lego Star Wars (2005–present) and Star Wars Angry Birds (2012–present), seem to have taken an inverse tact. Specifically, these newer games have taken great liberties with canonical aspects of the brand, changing drastically the text’s visual design and tone, but have combined these elements in a system of more traditional gameplay that lacks the player freedom and customization of SWG. Controlling for such differences as audience demographic as well as relative platform and format popularity, the comparative success of the latter games suggests that a brand manager’s approach toward the relative organizational and textual links of brand extensions may have a significant influence on that extension’s chances for success.