{"id":3882,"date":"2018-05-27T09:00:15","date_gmt":"2018-05-27T09:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/?p=3882"},"modified":"2019-05-04T13:40:17","modified_gmt":"2019-05-04T17:40:17","slug":"interactivity-according-to-star-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/interactivity-according-to-star-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Interactivity According to Star Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of last year, I wrote about how the Star Wars<\/em> films explain the complications of the Internet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Just a few decades ago, everyone was a spectator and reader of the global conversation directed by the chosen few we called authors. We are all potential authors now. We can create, and edit, and publish ideas right alongside the most prominent and esteemed artists and voices.<\/p>\n

As a child, I played with Star Wars<\/em> figures in my room. Now children and their parents write their own Star Wars<\/em> stories, produce their own Star Wars<\/em> videos<\/a>, and tell creator George Lucas exactly what they think.<\/p>\n

This has happened before. Charles Dickens first published most of his works serially in periodicals. People on the streets of London regularly told him what they thought of his latest story about Pip or Oliver Twist. So much so, their feedback had a documented effect on his work<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Star Wars<\/em> represents something unique though.<\/p>\n

I became a film student\u2014and eventually a writing major and a writing teacher\u2014in great part because of Lucas. I always said that my Star Wars<\/em> figures were my first writing, or storytelling, instruments. Then in college, reading the great film critic Pauline Kael, I discovered she made a similar observation in her thumbs-down review of Lucas\u2019 Return of the Jedi <\/em>in 1983:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026kids will be excited by Jedi<\/em>. They have lived their imaginative lives with the Star Wars<\/em> characters for six years; each three-year wait has had to be filled with imagination, and so the characters have acquired depth. (Children may not of had such pro long experiences with any other characters unless they got into, say, the Oz books.)<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Oz, Middle Earth, Neverland, Dicken\u2019s London\u2014authors have been world-building for some time, but Lucas took it a step further in a particular time. The late 1970s and early 1980s also brought us Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery\u2019s Choose Your Own Adventure<\/em> Books<\/a> and Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson\u2019s Dungeons & Dragons <\/em>Role Playing Games.<\/p>\n

Yes, nerdy, fantasies, but more importantly these were genre-based stories and familiar landscapes for audiences to enter. These expanded worlds gave readers more room to play, more skin in the game, more agency in the story. Then came the action figures and the video games and finally, the computers.<\/p>\n

We weren\u2019t readers; we were users<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We even used the new television remote controls creatively. Instead of following the linear storytelling of a Saturday afternoon at the cinema like my father did, I changed TV channels and mixed a little Gilligan with a little MTV.<\/p>\n

MTV taught me how to make video shorts too, juxtaposing diverse images rapidly against one another faster than the remote. Then I would graduate to digital, non-linear editing software, just like they used in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

Non-linear, role-playing, hyper-texting, music-sampling, these were all forms of greater interactivity for the audience.<\/p>\n

When the Gutenberg printing press put Bibles in everyone\u2019s home, it wasn\u2019t long before those Bibles were written in local languages instead of their traditional, mysterious, and intimidating Latin. Average citizens began to interpret their religion, their governments\u2019 laws, and any other authoritative text, giving birth to the modern era<\/p>\n

Yet centuries later, even in my parent\u2019s time, authors were still gods. Salinger, Ellison, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, the American public participated in the national conversation through their work. Writing the Great American Novel was everyone\u2019s secret dream\u2014it was how American imaginations managed their American Dreams, their internal monologues, and their real lives.<\/p>\n

Every single one of those authors sat on my parents\u2019 shelves upstairs. The beige shag carpet and the staircase bannister below their paperback spines became my Tatooine desert and my Death Star. My friends would wait around patiently for the final battle, X-Wing and Tie Fighter in hand, while I filled in the backstory of our latest saga.<\/p>\n

I saw Star Wars<\/em> in the theater once, and The Empire Strikes Back<\/em> in the theater once\u2014a total of four hours and twelve minutes. I spent the rest of those six years with the Kenner toys and my imagination.<\/p>\n

Kael was right. The time between the movies is what mattered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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