The Internet According to Star Wars

I am a Star Wars fan.

I saw the film in 1977 when I was only four-years-old and my family insists I didn’t move a muscle for the entire two hours and five minutes. I had all of the action figures, and the wallpaper, and the bed sheets, and the porcelain R2-D2 lamp.

In the pre-Internet world of the late 1970s, it wasn’t difficult to imagine you were the biggest fan of anything. No friend loved what you loved quite as much as you did and the world beyond your neighborhood was not just foreign—it was invisible. Other kids on my block had the Yankees on their walls or cowboys or racecars. Star Wars belonged to me.

Except, it didn’t. Star Wars was a phenomenon, and a cross-promotional marketing triumph. Though there were Superman Halloween costumes and GI Joe dolls beforehand, the Star Wars toys from Kenner and the drinking glasses at Burger King and the trading cards in Wonder Bread—and the unquenchable public thirst for them—defined a public obsession and an advertising feat that even taught The Walt Disney Company. They already slapped Mickey Mouse on everything.

Yet after Return of the Jedi finished off the initial Star Wars trilogy in 1983, and after the tie-ins and toys left the store shelves the year after, the world moved on to other blockbusters and marketing ideas. I grew up and went to film school where I learned to love all kinds of movies.

I didn’t discover how Star Wars endured and how far its popularity reached until the mid-1990s when creator George Lucas re-released his three films in new digitally-enhanced versions.

I dragged my college friends to experience what none of us had since 1977. The ticket line at Manhattan’s Ziegfeld Theater wrapped around the city block. A group of women at the front of the line were dressed in full costume. It didn’t come close to the level of global anticipation and involvement we see today, but I was still amazed.

The enthusiasm waned again after the halfhearted reaction to Lucas’ “prequel” films in the early 2000s. When I started writing my first university lectures concerning the Internet in 2010, I wasn’t sure if I should include my childhood fascination as an academic example, but it turns out I was right on the mark.

Lucas became a successful video game producer between his first and second Star Wars trilogies. During a press conference for one of the prequels, a reporter asked Lucas when video games and movies would finally merge and Lucas replied that the two mediums were incompatible. They could never unite.

That idea stayed with me. It made sense to me as a filmmaker and a storyteller. Narratives and games represent an irreconcilable difference. Movies are stories where a filmmaker controls a set of characters and, by extension, manipulates the audience members that watch and follow those characters.

Alternatively, video games are stories where the audience members control the author’s characters to a degree.

This became the central idea of my first lecture. Interactivity measures how much control or “agency” a person has in any game or story, like whether or not you decide what happens to Luke Skywalker. The Internet, mobile devices, and digital media radically changed the amount of interactivity in the world’s ideas.

This raised a lot of questions. Who participates in a story? Does an author have complete control of a story or does the audience have some agency? What happens to the concepts of an author and authority once every audience member has substantial agency? If you can make Luke Skywalker do anything, is he still the character Luke Skywalker? Don’t actions define both fictional characters and real human character?

Those are interesting theoretical questions about video games and moviemaking. But when you consider that humans share everything through storytelling—from conversations to institutions to knowledge—these questions about interactivity and agency become urgent and even unsettling.

We understand the major religions through parables and storytelling. We also understand the birth of our country or the invention of the computer through stories. Is your family like Ozzie and Harriet or more like Modern Family? Those are stories too. When an individual or group’s identity is not reflected in their culture, they will create stories that do.

In our recent past, in the typical American home filled with diverse identities and beliefs and Star Wars wallpaper, most of our stories were still authoritative. We were positive we knew our country, our identity, and our favorite films. Now all of these concepts are more interactive, and Star Wars is a primary example.

Star Wars was the first narrative designed to grow in its audience’s minds and hands, in great part through all that cross-promotion.

When I started teaching, the Internet had already gathered and sorted Star Wars fans into different camps. A majority loved the original stories and hated Lucas’ digital alterations and more recent chapters, but this wasn’t true of everyone. Others liked the new films, or the new books and comic books, and still others had their own theories and wrote their own unauthorized chapters of fan fiction.

Lucas sold the Star Wars franchise in 2012, fittingly to the Walt Disney Company, and mostly out of his exasperation over interactions with fans. Disney created a third series of Star Wars films, using all new authors and not limiting themselves to another trilogy.

These new Disney authors have been hired and fired, immolated and hailed, all while fans discuss what is official “canon” and what is unacceptable “heresy“—which is an impossible task. Groups of fans may find common ground, but every fan’s imagination has its own logic and direction. Creative worlds can’t help but become multiverses in the minds of their following.

All of this goes right back to that notable thought from Lucas, which he repeated in public again in 2013: “By its very nature there cannot be a plot in a game.” And there can’t be much game in a plot either.

You can either have a story authorized by an author or you can have interactivity—either a bag of popcorn or a joystick—but you can’t have both at the same time. Star Wars doesn’t belong to Lucas anymore, so it doesn’t belong to anyone.

Now that we have the Internet, that’s true of more than just Star Wars.