ABSTRACT
What constitutes the “universe” of a video game? Technically, the term usually refers to the story and back-story and imaginary settings, even across different works in a consistently imagined franchise. But who gets to decide on its exact boundaries? You might think it’s the “authors” of the game, the development and design team, including especially those initial designers often known as the creators; or perhaps it’s the specialist writers in charge of the game’s story, or the novelists who license paperback fiction telling the back-story; or the scriptwriters and directors for film adaptations. In practice, the universe of any successful game (by which I mean any game with fans) is more than its scripted story: it’s the amorphous and always shifting, contested space within which the game is given meaning, and this space includes broader paratextual events as well as actual formal gameplay. By convention, fans may debate the details of the story, but they usually look to a game’s creators for rulings on what counts as “story canon.” Some development teams create and keep what they call a “story bible” or set of storyboards, at least, which contains the larger story arc of a trilogy of games, for example, including the necessary facts about the gameworld(s): timelines, histories, multiple alien races, genealogies or family trees, locations in planetary space. Nevertheless, almost any successful game exists in a system of many worlds, only some of which are strictly story-worlds but all of which, I would argue, add to the sum total of the game’s universe. Some are created by fans, some by hired comic-book artists or writers or filmmakers, and some set in motion by marketers, and not always in perfect concert with the intentions of the official creators of the game. When you think about it, the very term canon implies its opposite, implies a need for policing the universe. If there is official story canon, then there is likely to be unofficial apocrypha, sectarian dispute, Gnostic reinterpretation-and at the outer reaches, fan fiction and slash fiction, mashups and parodies-all of which may be imagined as numerous other small planets or satellites or artificial worlds orbiting along in the collectively cobbled-together universe that
contains but is not entirely coextensive with that smaller subset of orderly authorial stories and characters, designs of maps and objects, not to mention the rules and formal constraints on potential gameplay events that are sometimes naively referred to as “the game itself.”
