BEFORE THE HOLODECK: TRANSLATING STAR TREK INTO DIGITAL MEDIA By Janet Murray and Henry Jenkins Over the past two decades, Star Trek has offered viewers a succession of compelling and ever more sophisticated models for the future of digital media, starting with the voice activated computer and working through the holodeck, the holosuite, and most recently, the holonovel. The various Star Trek series consistently depict how a future culture will work and play within digital space, as Picard dons a trenchcoat, Data pits his detective skills against Moriarity, Bashir saves the world as a James Bond-like superspy, and Voyager's holographic medical program does battle with Grendel. The holodeck and its descendants represent an immersive and fully interactive environment, which allows ship crewmembers the chance to enter into fantasy environments, assume fictive roles, and escape from the mundane reality of always having to go where no one has gone before. And, of course, as regular viewers can tell you, every time anyone uses the holodeck, it crashes or malfunctions. This last feature may be its strongest commonality to the digital media currently on the marketplace. Contemporary cd-rom games, as consumers regularly complain, take forever to install, are full of bugs, and offer only limited interactivity. Compared with the technological wonders of the holodeck, we are, to borrow a memorable phrase from the original series, working with "stone knifes and bearskins." We might, however, view the situation a bit more optimistically. Imagine that we are publishing this collection in 1895 and that only last year the Lumires produced their heart-stopping image of a train arriving at La Ciotat Station. Would we have been able to imagine Birth of a Nation or Children of Paradise or Pulp Fiction? Suppose we are writing this essay just a few years after the advent of broadcasting, could we imagine works with the narrative complexity of Murder One or the cultural influence of Star Trek? The emergence of electronic media tempts us in a similar way: can we, looking at the gamelike and stick-figure narratives of the 1990s video games, glimpse the emerging genres of a more expressive narrative art? Will our current moment be treated by future historians as the pre-history of the holodeck, just as film historians once published books called Before Griffith or before Mickey? (Crafton, 1993, Fell, 1983) AESTHETIC POTENTIALS In Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray (1997) identifies the defining properties of this emerging medium as encyclopedic, spatial, kaleidoscopic, participatory and procedural. That is, computers contain vast amounts of information; they can be navigated as virtual spaces; they are made up of parts that can be juxtaposed, rotated and rearranged to form varying gestalts; they call forth our actions and respond to them; and they are built out of rules of behavior that allow us to animate the worlds we model. The current computer environment is often referred to with additive term, "multi-media," but to the extent that designers exploit the intrinsic properties of the computer, they forge the component parts (including text, still images, moving images, graphic design, the drawn and the photographed) into new media-synthetic representational forms capable of capturing the world of our senses and the world of our dreams with an astonishing new immediacy. The aesthetic pleasures that emerge most immediately from the intrinsic properties of the computer medium are often referred to as immersion and interactivity. Immersion is the pleasure of being transported to another place, of losing our sense of normal reality and extending ourselves into a seemingly limitless, enclosing, other realm, where we move and act under different and often magical rules. Interactivity includes both simple participation, common to other aesthetic experiences such as call and response singing, and also the pleasure of agency, the power to act freely and to make choices and to have those actions and choices affect the narrative environment. Immersion and interactive agency reinforce each other. The more we feel we are surrounded by another enticing environment, the more we want to manipulate it. The more the environment responds to our manipulations, the stronger our involvement with it, and the more persuasive the illusion of being there. If we are to imagine the computer growing into a locus for a maturely expressive art then we would expect to see storytellers building upon these qualities: making imaginary worlds with ever more encyclopedic completeness, more navigable spaces, more capable of exploration from multiple points of view, more open to our active participation, and displaying increasingly complex behaviors which are both surprising and appropriate. If we believe that electronic media can grow in these ways, then we might begin to imagine a future art of immersive and interactive narrative worlds that would have an expressiveness comparable to that of contemporary film or television. How can we judge whether such hopes are justified? How can we gauge our distance from an art form that does not yet exist? One way is to measure existing electronic narratives against a comparable experience in the non-electronic world. At the present moment, a high percentage of the digital media on the market are second-order phenomenon, adaptations of texts that gained their popularity through film and television. In a horizontally integrated media industry, characters, plots, images move fluidly across various media, participating in what Marsha Kinder (1991) has called the entertainment supersystem. We need to develop an equally horizontally-integrated media studies which can trace the migrations of these stories and understand what is gained and lost as they move across different media. The Star Trek "franchise," as Viacom increasingly calls it, represents perhaps that premier example of a transmedia phenomenon, having developed five television series, eight feature films, a succession of best-selling original novels, comic books, toys, and various other spin-off products. FANS AS INTERACTIVE CONSUMERS Star Trek represents an important test case for digital media's "interactivity" because we already have established a complex picture of the program's varied audiences, its active fans, and their current interactions with the program materials. (Harrison, et al, 1996; Bacon-Smith, 1992; Penley, 1997; Bernardi, 1998) From its initiation, Star Trek sought to provide a richly detailed narrative universe that could be the platform for many different characters and situations and thus attract diverse audiences. Star Trek might one week offer us a mystery or a scientific problem to be solved, another week a combat situation or a diplomatic crisis, or still another week a political allegory. For some fans, the scientific and technological challenges of the 24th century form the central focus. For others, it is the close social bonds between the vividly-portrayed characters. For still others, it might be the program's utopian vision of a future founded on intergalactic cooperation and fellowship, on the IDIC and the Prime Directive. In Textual Poachers (1993) and Science Fiction Audiences (1995), Henry Jenkins offers detailed accounts of many different interpretive communities, each with their own interests, preferences, and expectations about the program. For example, he asked a group of male MIT students and a group of female fanzine writers to tell what came into their minds when he named each character. For the technologically-inclined males, what seemed most salient were the capabilities of the characters as autonomous problem solvers, stressing instances where one or another, primarily acting alone, saved the ship from certain destruction. For the female fanzine writers, characters could not be discussed alone but were understood within a web of character relationships, stressing the centrality of their emotional lives, desires, and motivations to the experience of the series. The stark contrast between these two ways of thinking about the characters reflect broader, gender-specific approaches, which, in turn, shape the different fan communities and their evaluations of the episodes. The program producers have become increasingly adept at balancing those various expectations, shifting the weight given A plots focused on military and technological issues and B plots focused on character and cultural relationships from week to week or from series to series. Such negotiations allow the cagey producers to hold the interests of a fan community that, according to a Harris poll, counts its membership at more than fifty percent of the American public. In turn, the multiple fan communities surrounding Star Trek have long appropriated the characters, props, story lines, and ethos of the series as a participatory narrative. Fans elaborate on the program "meta-text" to insure both consistency and complexity in their understanding of its various worlds and cultures, imagining alternative plots or different character relations. Fans have been on the cutting edge of new technologies, using the Xerox machine, desktop publishing software, and the VCR as creative tools for interacting with and reworking the aired episodes. Electronic environments offer a vital new venue for this participatory and immersive fan culture. Cyberspace already hosts numerous newsgroups, websites, and email lists facilitating exchanges between program fans. At a recent fan convention Henry Jenkins attended, a great deal of discussion centered around how fans were using on-line communications to expand their sense of participation within a larger fan community, as well as the potential disruption this has caused to face-to-face interactions, since many fans still lack net access. As Murray argues, the properties of electronic media clearly address the active fan's desire to become more directly engaged with the enticing narrative world. For instance, because computer environments are encyclopedic, they can encompass all the information the fan could wish in one enormous network: guides to all the episodes, megabytes of stills, dictionaries of alien languages, textbooks on twenty-fourth century physics and so forth. Because computer environments are intrinsically spatial, they can embody imaginary locations in navigable form. The Enterprise can be seen on the television or movie screen, but viewers can control their movements through the ship only on their computer screen. The computer can contain a more densely realized world than live action costumed role-playing because it can incorporate the Star Trek mise-en-scene. Users can assume the role of the actual Trek characters, as portrayed by the series actors, and direct their action. In short, it promises to make the imaginary world more realized and more participatory than ever. On the other hand, as Jenkins argues, this interactive technology contains the potential of controlling and regulating fan pleasures at a time when Viacom has increasingly sought to centralize and constrain grassroots fan activities. The encyclopedic nature of digital Star Trek reference works reopen the question of what information is valuable and what is marginal. Commercially available programs construct a rigid barrier between canonical information contained in the aired series and approcryphal information originating within the fan community. Interactive fictions facilitate certain fan pleasures (especially those most fully compatible with the male-centered genres of current cd-roms and video games) at the expense of excluding altogether other pleasures (especially the focus of the female fans on character relations and alien cultures.) The media exerts its own pressures on the program materials, often resulting in a decreased focus on character (which is still difficult to realize within the digital realm) and a greater emphasis on action (especially tactical combat, puzzle-solving, and navigation). While television's Star Trek must appeal to multiple demographic groups to sustain its popularity, the digital market is still predominantly young, male and technically oriented; the content of the Star Trek games reflect that orientation, using technology to facilitate interactions with fictional technologies, and emphasizing combat over conversation. Moreover, simulation games are frequently ideologically coercive, naturalizing their core assumptions about the way the universe works into procedural knowledge needed to perform well in the game; we are "programmed" to think within certain parameters, while the participatory structure of the game allows us the illusion of free choice. The ideology of the TV programs is constantly disputed among fans, but Star Trek games necessarily takes sides. The result is a strikingly militaristic conception of the Enterprise, its mission, and its relations to alien cultures. The games also display paternalism, as aliens are most often cast as subjects requiring rescue and assistance, and misogyny, as powerful women are often cast as dangerously duplicitous. No one seems to have hardwired the Prime Directive into these simulated Trek worlds. None of these limitations are intrinsic to the technology; rather, they reflect the current state of the game marketplace and the limitations of corporate understandings of the potential Star Trek audience. We both remain optimistic about the broad potential of this new medium to express many different fantasies and facilitate diverse interactions. However, there is a danger with any new medium that the codification of generic and ideological conventions at its founding moment will have a lasting impact on how the medium gets used, who it speaks for and what kinds of stories it tells. In our excitement about the potentials of the new encyclopedic medium, we need to be attentive to what it excludes as well as what it includes; in our fascination with technological interactivity, we need to be aware of the social and cultural interactions it refuses to facilitate. As you read this essay, you will find traces of the tensions between the two authors. Murray expressed greater enthusiasm for the ways these games exploit the potentials of their medium, while Jenkins was more dissatisfied with their failure to facilitate the desires of diverse fan communities. We hope that acknowledging these disagreements will make us more conscious of the competing interests and expectations shaping the emerging medium. SAMPLING DIGITAL STAR TREK Focusing on the applications surrounding the Star Trek world allows us to make a taxonomy of the narrative experiences currently available in electronic environments and to measure them by the standard of complex, immersive, participatory engagement already enjoyed by Trek fans through other means. Specifically, we will be looking at Simon and Schuster Interactive's Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual, Sega's Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Echoes from the Past" and Spectrum Holobyte's Star Trek: The Next Generation, "A Final Unity." These electronic environments allowed us to enter Captain Picard's ready room, put the Enterprise into warp drive, fire photons at Romulan warbirds, and beam down to exotic planets to face dangers, rescue the innocent, protect errant scientists and ecologically endangered alien wildlife, and struggle with whether to intervene within local political disputes. The three games represent three genres of electronic storytelling -- the navigable virtual space, the skill-and-kill videogame, and the exploratory puzzle game. We assessed how each exploits the properties of the medium and rewards diverse fan interests. All three use Star Trek's familiar theme music and visual design to establish their authenticity. They all take us to the bridge of the Enterprise as the central location and carefully detail its well known stations. The Technical Manual uses the voice of Jonathan Frakes as Commander Riker for a narrated tour of the ship and the voice of Majel Barret as the ship's computer for more impersonal information about the various spaces and technologies. Echoes offers us graphics of all the crewmembers, and Unity offers better character graphics and the voices of seven series regulars (who recorded more than a hour of dialog each). In all three, the operation of the transporter with its tingling, whooshing sound offers the delightful sense of experiencing a magical environment firsthand. When Riker's off-screen voice in the Technical Manual pooh-poohs the fears of those who hate transporter travel by calmly explaining the (ludicrous) science behind it and exclaiming, "What could be safer?," he solicits our participation in the program world and rewards our familiarity with series history. All of these games successfully recreate the familiar Enterprise environment, suggesting the central role of the computer in creating illusory worlds. The more television and films rely on computer-generated effects and sets, the more we can be offered electronic versions of those same realities. For any narrative fantasy environment, the world exists partly on the stage, page or screen and partly in our heads. It is, in the psychologist D.W. Winnicott's phrase, a transitional space, both external and internal, and therefore fraught with promise and desire. Furthermore, as Sherry Turkle makes clear in The Second Self (1995), we experience the computer itself, even without narrative content, as a similarly "evocative object" -- both an external thing and an extension of our consciousness. To load this evocative space with the powerful story material is to make it all the more compelling. All of these games build upon our existing belief and emotional investment in the Star Trek universe. They also build upon the complex metatext of program information viewers have constructed through their previous interactions. We come to the Technical Manual with knowledge of events that have happened aboard the ship. We come to the games knowing that if there is a warbird on the screen it may soon be attacking us and we had better put up our shields and get ready to fire our photons. The games spend little time explaining to us what a phaser or a tricorder are and how they work. We are primed for immersion and interaction when we hear the theme music. THE TECHNICAL MANUAL The Technical Manual is one of the most detailed and navigable virtual spaces available in the game world, and combined with its evocative content, one of the most immersive. The manual was the first commercial product to use a technical innovation in PC-based virtual reality, QuickTime VR, developed by Apple Computer. QTVR can establish spaces we move through smoothly, like a camera pan, rather than step-by-step like a sequence of stills. Unlike MYST players who can only step through separate, overlapping, but discontinuous separate drawings of the imaginary world, visitors to the Enterprise do not find themselves disoriented by missing pieces in the navigated terrain. Movement is circular in pan-like continuity or by jumps that provide either a zoomlike close view or a new positioning at another pan-able location. Some longer jumps include clips of the intervening space insuring player orientation. The effect is to create a navigable, photorealistic, continuous space. The ambient sound shifts with each change of room. The detailed environment and easy mobility offer a strong sense of the Enterprise as a realized ship that persists when no one is watching the series. The naming of the cd-rom a "technical manual" and the inclusion of the Riker narrated tour point to a metaphor confusion. A technical manual tells about an object in an abstracted sense, focusing on its design specifications and performance parameters; a tour is a visit to the object which brings with it the expectation that we are going to see it in use within a specific context. Computers are appropriate both for collecting information -- for making the mother of all technical manuals -- and for making visits to virtual objects. But this is a visit to a data bank rather than to an operating ship. What we expect but do not receive is a "fully functional" Enterprise we can take on adventures. Our Tour of the Enterprise is more like a visit to Montecello or the U.S.S. Constitution, where we can look but not touch. We can see where famous events once occurred but nothing is happening at the moment. Our tour guide keeps us moving along, not dawdling behind or taking unauthorized actions. We can retrieve information and go "behind the scenes" at a privileged and glamorous location. We can experience the ship as a space to be moved through and examined, with extraordinary attention to the consoles and monitors we pass. There is even some effort to include some personally-meaningful objects associated with each character. There's the pipe that Picard learned to play or his bound volume of Shakespeare, "items that give him much needed perspective on his duties"; there are Data's Modrian-inspired artworks and his cat's collar and dish. But we cannot manipulate any of the technical wonders, cannot fly the ship or send Riker through the Transporter. The designers have translated the technical data into a collection of text and images, rather than into a set of procedural rules that would support our interactions. The game casts us in the role of "authorized Starfleet visitors or trainees," instead of the heroic figures the series allows us to imagine ourselves to be. Riker's narration consistently points towards the important role of human agency in the ship's operation. When the tour begins, he explains, "After being aboard the Enterprise for any length of time, you quickly come to think of it as a living entity....Don't be fooled into thinking that the computer really runs the Enterprise. During command alert every critical operation is in the hands of trained Federation personal." Such passages simultaneously provoke our technophilic fascination with the advanced technologies being represented and resolve our fears about our own ability to maintain control in the digital realm. However, such re-assurances are ironic since the ship we see is so devoid of human agency. QuickTime VR is cleverly presented in the user documentation as "a subset of holodeck technology." But because QT is video-based and QTVR accomplishes its impressive illusion of continuous movement through a fixed set of video images, the space is static and depopulated. The comparison with the holodeck foregrounds the narrative impoverishment of the Technical Manual. There is no present-tense story in this world, only pointers to stories from the series in a kind of archeological layering. In fact, there would seem to be three distinct levels of narration, all evoking narrative content only in the past tense: Riker's tour of the ship offers a personal picture of what its like to live and work on the starship; the ship's computer offers a more impersonal narration, which describes the sanctioned functions and capabilities of the space, without any sense of the characters or events which occurred there; an accessible reference text may fill in aspects of public history -- the commissioning of the various versions of the Enterprise as they have unfolded across the series, brief summaries of Klingon mythology, etc. For example, the computer stresses the fact that 10-Forward was designed for "optional socialization conditions," while Riker more evocatively speaks of it as a place where crewmembers "relax and unwind from the day's cares....[or] hash things out over a drink." The printed text explains a sculpture found in Worf's quarters in terms of "the legendary struggle between Kahless the Unforgettable and His Brother, Morath, after Morath lied and brought shame to his family," while Riker speaks of Worf's internal conflict between his personal ties to the Federation and the Klingon empire. The shifting levels of narration involve a complex play between public and private experience, history and gossip, routine activity and high adventure. None of these stories are presented in a compelling or immediate fashion; rather, these objects function as a high gloss memory palace evoking our familiarity with the program history. The most personal of these levels, which includes reference to such things as Data's struggles to understand the human realm, includes more focus on the issues of character psychology than one would anticipate from a Technical Manual. Yet, if we see signs and artifacts associated with these characters, we never get to meet any of them. Riker's warm, sociable narration is the only detectable life sign. The capaciousness of computer environments raises what Murray calls the "encyclopedic expectation," the sense that everything one wants will be available. For instance, we want all the personal objects in the crew's quarters to lead to revelations that deepen our sense of the characters' presence. But emotionally suggestive props, like the painting on Crusher's wall, remain unannotated and unidentified, contrasting sharply with the elaborate diagrams and technical explanations of the transporter or the holodeck. Similarly, we want to access the complete history of Star Fleet, but the ship's computer somehow has only limited coverage ("We assume that other Federation starships have had histories as illustrious as that of the Enterprise, even though Kirk's ship seems to have become the most famous") and is similarly unable to document other alien races and cultures. Much of fan cultural creation stresses the "realism" and completeness of the program universe, filling in missing information, resolving contradictory data, contextualizing episode events within the character's lives and their culture's history. The Technical Manual has not succeeded in incorporating even the information contained in the aired episodes, let alone offering world as complex as the shared universe fans have created. The "encyclopedic expectation" aroused by digital media makes us more pressingly aware of the large gaps between what the viewers want to see and what the producers decide to give them. Who decides what to include in the Encyclopedia? The range of narrative involvement provoked by the Star Trek universe suggests that a truly encyclopedic presentation of the official franchise world could sustain a broad range of interpretive communities, each looking for an inhabitable sector in the program universe. But the electronic Technical Manual, like its print predecessor, focuses on the information desired by young, technically-oriented, males rather than facilitating other reading formations. ECHOES FROM THE PAST The Technical Manual offers a sense of realized space at the expense of interactive agency. It is a participatory environment, it is a persuasively detailed environment, and it is profoundly disempowering. The Sega Genesis game, Echoes From the Past, poses the opposite problems. Its graphics are crude and unconvincing but it has numerous opportunities for interactive agency. Structured as a fighting game with exploratory aspects, the player can manipulate the familiar crew members, picking Picard's dialog with alien trespassers on Federation space, navigating the ship from one planet to another at the CONN station, engaging in battles at the Tactical station, distributing resources to life support, shields and weapons at the Engineering station, choosing away teams and beaming them down in the Transporter room. There are also computer sensors to indicate if planetary atmosphere is safe and a database of technical information from the Star Trek universe, including background information that makes for a more realized game (the culture of the Romulans) and data on the immediate game world (which planets are habitable). There are many things to do and most have clear and immediate consequences. Playing the game means responding to a relentless series of red alert sirens. "This is way different from the show," complained one of our 15 year old researchers, "I'm sick of everybody fighting us all the time." The Star Trek ethos certainly includes elements of adventure, conflict, even combat and overt intervention, but it is not reducible to the conventions of a fighting game. For many fans, the primary goals of the Enterprise continue to be exploration of unfamiliar space, diplomacy with unaligned cultures, and the furtherance of scientific knowledge, not, as the Technical Manual characterizes it, "the implementation of Federation Policy throughout the Galaxy." The fighting game offers few chances for meaningful negotiation across cultural, political, or racial differences. Any player who slowed down to think through the niceties of the Prime Directive will get blasted out of orbit. The Star Trek ethos doesn't shape our actions here; its iconography simply provide set decoration and pretext, sometimes not even that, as when our activity on one away mission consists of gathering up various puzzle pieces and re-assembling them as the far from compelling means of getting a downed computer back on line. When we are preparing an away team, the transporter room offers a broad array of anonymous red shirts and crew members who might join the series regulars: we chose between racial, gender, and physical types. Of course, even this element of choice is deceptive. In practice, character matters little in this game. Most Sega characters are simply iconographically-enhanced cursers, defined not by their personalities but by their functionality, their capacity for action, though Echoes does little to differentiate between the characters in this regard. We do not enjoy being in an environment in which it makes no difference whether Data or Dr. Crusher holds the phaser. Fan culture constantly reads series actions in terms of a deeper and deeper understanding of what they mean to the characters. The Sega videogame, on the other hand, restricts the character's behavior to a narrow repertoire of actions. Characters can not learn from their actions in an environment where all choices are relatively arbitrary, unmotivated by what we already know about the characters, their motives, and their abilities. Characters become simply interchangeable parts. Even the technology is sometimes stripped of meaning. The characters gather up phasers and tricorders like so many gold coins or abstract tokens that contribute to the player's score but not towards resolving their plot predicament. The game genre, then, imposes too much on the Star Trek program materials, rendering our knowledge as regular viewers irrelevant. Star Trek becomes a brand-name rubber-stamped on the package, an inconographic gloss on the same old game functions, not integral to the pleasures of participating in this virtual environment. In its most successful example of agency and immersion, the Sega game allows us to move the ship to various warp speeds at the simulated CONN station. The series' presentation of warp speed, the rapid movement of stars outward from a central vanishing point is a computer generated effect. We are in the appropriate domain to experience space travel; setting the speed and destination gives the effect a satisfying immediacy. The CONN simulation also employs temporal duration to add a level of realism often lacking in the series itself: flying from point to point at a slower warp speed takes longer and means that the player must wait for the next phase of action, but flying at a higher warp speed carries risks and may not be feasible under certain conditions. Simulations are often most interesting in the limitations they place upon player action. On the other hand, this resistance becomes frustrating if it seems too arbitrary and mechanistic, if the restrictions on our actions do not seem plausible in terms of the fictional universe. The Technical Manual and the Sega game illustrate opposite failings. The Manual unimaginatively sticks with linear formats (the illustrated manual, the guided tour) instead of inventing a new form for the new medium (e.g. a test-drive of a functional starship.) Echoes, on the other hand, takes a narrowly conceived computer-based form and tries to shoehorn the resistantly rich Star Trek material into this format. THE FINAL UNITY The Final Unity is a puzzle game, a better fit for the Star Trek world than the hack-and-slash videogame, because much of the series involves figuring out puzzles through scientific (or pseudo-scientific) reasoning. The fit between the task and the ethos of the series increases our narrative immersion. "The Final Unity is closer than the other two texts to the narrative engagement of the television series for other reasons as well. Both the scenario design and the dialogue are comparable to the television episodes in quality. The graphics are also closer to the video images, though the characters still have a puppettoon stiffness, simplified facial features and elongated foreheads. (The realism of the story space and the abstraction of the human figures perhaps reflect the narrative priorities governing the game design process.) The characters' dialogue is spoken by the cast members, including all of the principle players. The pacing feels more like a series episode, with entrances, exits, and much discussion. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It makes the story more compelling and vivid, but it slows down the pace and often reduces the interaction to stepping through a scene, clicking the mouse as each character speaks. There is a long expository period without much opportunity for significant choice. Character interaction is minimal, and completely related to plot development. The game runs us through a succession of problem-solving adventures with few consequences for the characters. Dialogue is reduced to the uncovering of salient information. The effect is like watching a whole season of A-plots, back-to-back. Worse yet, plot demands force characters to behave contrary to their psychology, as when the independent Worf repeatedly advises to check with Starfleet before taking actions. The Final Unity uses its superior memory and computing power to present better graphics, lots of audio and a more extensive set of player actions. Patrolling the Neutral Zone on alert for Romulan transgressions, the Enterprise rescues a scout from attack by a Garidian warbird. The player came delegate the fighting to Worf (who will win of course) and thereby bypass the battle game in favor of more plot. This design decision fosters immersion and interactive agency. The player feels accompanied in the adventure, as if playing alongside the actual crew, and can also adapt the game to the individual tastes in activities. One player may work through complex engineering problems another relegates to the Geordi surrogate or may choose to maintain control over astronavigation or medical equipment. The game can be as technical as its MIT student fans prefer or may short-cut much, though not all, of the technological questions. After the battle's successful completion, the Captain interviews the three people beamed aboard. Depending upon whom Picard asks, the crew was engaged in an archeological expedition to reclaim a lost scroll of deep spiritual significance for their people or are looking for an ancient text which will spark political reform on their planet. During this phase, the player has limited control over the activity, choosing only the order of people interviewed. The player does not even determine what questions to ask or lines to deliver, since it is necessary to ask all of the questions in order to gather the information needed to effectively play the game. Player control comes only in sequencing dialogue, not in shaping the tone and nature of the interaction. This participatory design offers no true sense of agency. Strikingly, this elaborate exposition is immediately dismissed. We are repeatedly hailed and lured to alternative (and seemingly unrelated) rescue missions. We move through space in the helter-skelter manner of a picaresque adventurer. The first hail is from survivors of what seems to have been a Romulan attack on a scientific station. An away team is chosen for us and beamed to the surface. A maze and puzzle game replaces the bridge interface that by now has become irritatingly monotonous. The puzzle game involves an icon-based command structure, which keeps us actively engaged. In the main window, the away team is on the doomed scientific station. Below it are a series of iconized controls: a set of faces to toggle through in order to choose the active character; a set of icons that can replace the cursor to initiate commands: a foot for moving, a hand for using, an eye for viewing, a balloon for speaking. We also have a tricorder, medical tricorder, communicator, medkit, and phaser at our disposal; we can pick up other useful objects (with the hand) as we walk through the multi-room world. The commands are explained by a text display linked to an active cursor; as you pass a foot over an area, if it is a place you can walk, the words "walk to conduit" will appear. This is a smooth way of allowing diverse activities, while letting the player know which ones are legal and which are not. More irritating are the repeated spoken messages when you make an illegal move, as when Riker paternalistically lectures us, "I don't think that would be a wise course of action" or Geordi whines, "It doesn't work." Having seen Geordi perform engineering miracles on the series, it is particularly satisfying to operate his character, sending him to a table full of gizmos or to a control panel or to talk to an engineer. The other characters are given large enough audio parts and distinctive enough characterizations to make the dramatic world persuasive. Significantly, most problems we encounter require the expertise of Geordi, who functions as a surrogate for more technological viewers, while Crusher's skills as a doctor are largely disposable. At one point in the game, an alien spacecraft repeatedly phasers various crewmembers and they are knocked unconscious by the blasts. No one races to their rescue, they receive no medical attention, but they pop back up with no sustained injuries after only a few moments. On the other hand, a failed power conduit requires a complex process of locating and applying a succession of high-tech tools. One key pleasure of this world is using the familiar Star Trek paraphernalia. For instance, we can save a woman pinned under a large pipe by giving its coordinates to the transporter. It is fun to see the object slowly appear in the transporter, accompanied by the familiar transporter chimes. The tricorder is also usable and can be consulted to discover important information that contributes constructively to the mission. But after awhile the pleasure of using this paraphernalia pales. Dedicated players can tolerate tremendous repetition in fighting games and can climb and fight their way through maze after maze as long as the spaces display small variations between progressive levels. But in a puzzle game we want the worlds to look truly different from one another and for the people we meet to have the particularity and interests of dramatic characters. Yet, despite the trappings of more interesting plots, involving diplomatic disputes, missing naturalists, matriarchal cultures, planets deciding to enter the Federation and so forth, this puzzle game still reduces the plot to a series of interactions with the mocked-up Star Trek gadgets. In fact, many of the more character-based elements actively retard the game structure and frustrate more action-oriented players. The webpage we used as a crib sheet for the game dismissed the character-driven conversations as "talk, talk, talk." Such hostility to character interaction runs through netgroup responses to the aired episodes, often directed against female characters. This perspective gets re-enforced by the severe limitations in the game's ability to construct and communicate character relations. Often, we can see the same exact lines emerging from two or more characters in response to the same situation, as if it really made no difference who was communicating the information or issuing our instructions. Often, the same lines are repeated throughout the game in a variety of situations as the characters seem unable to respond to their changing environment. If the game designers decide that the character has nothing to contribute to a given problem, they provide them with no dialogue. Multiple times, Picard urgently asked his second-in-command for advice and was told, "I have no thoughts on that matter at this time," a response which amounts either to insubordination or malperformance of duties. Responding to our impatience with such "talk, talk, talk," game players can display dialogue in text and click through it more rapidly. The range of choices of actions (walking, looking, speaking, and using) and objects in the various game worlds create a frame of mind more suitable to free play than to the constrained domain of the game. Brenda Laurel (1993) would argue that computer-based narrative environments should always be more like children's make believe than like constrained games. This is particularly hard to do with franchised characters. In the Final Unity game, when we tried to use the command system in a constructivist way, we came up against two sets of restrictions: the limitations on story conventions within the Star Trek universe and the limitations on moves within this particular world. When our young research assistant tried to phaser Riker, the response was only a bland "That would not be the wisest thing to do." A more interesting response would have been to kill or injure the character and force the player to make do without his skills and input. When you try to disobey a Star Fleet order or refuse a Starfleet request, the game stalls. Worf rolls his head and glares; Riker pats his foot impatiently, until we do as we are told. Yet, the creation of a fictional universe as a play space, rather than as a board game, invites these subversive and aggressive impulses. Allowed into the story world, we want to rearrange it, test its limits. We want the increasingly deranged Riker to take the mole carcass we found on one planet and leave it in the captain's chair as a practical joke, anticipating how Jean-Luc might respond to his mischief. That the plot remains inflexible, no matter what subversive actions we may contemplate, makes it more like the professional novels (which are restricted from changing anything which might impact on the story-options available to the television and movie producers) than like the participatory fan culture. One wonders whether we will soon see a group of fan programmers who rescript the cd-rom games in order to make them more perfectly satisfy fan interests, just as we have seen fan writers expand the stories and fan video makers appropriate and re-edit the footage. Already the same ingenuity that produced the composite videotapes that created love affairs between Kirk and Spock is being applied to editing digitized images of Trek characters. Will it be long before alternate episodes start appearing in cyberspace, or before fans themselves start compiling operable versions of the Enterprise and hijacking it for their own adventures? MUDS AS PARTICIPATORY MEDIA When Jenkins spoke to women at a recent convention of fan writers and editors, most of them showed no interest in these computer games, even though many of them were active in on-line chatgroups or in MUDS. These women were not hostile to the digital realm, but they preferred greater creative license and more networked communication with other fans rather than following the games' pre-programmed structure. In the Star Trek MUD, TrekMuse, founded in 1990, there over 4000 players have created their own characters. Five hundred people were enrolled in the Star Fleet Academy in this MUD in 1995. Using typed commands and real-time typed communication among players, TrekMuse members can build their own virtual environments, talk to one another both in character (IN: Please reconsider your ultimatum) and out of Character (OOC: Just because you're a Klingon, you don't have to be a jerk!) They can engage in explorations, battles and diplomacy, apprentice to more experienced officers, and generally collaborate on a detailed, collectively imagined Star Trek universe. Much of the MUD's activity involves treaty negotiation and diplomatic maneuvering. This is a common pleasure of live action role playing, and in Star Trek worlds, it is deepened by the concept of the Federation as a utopian organization. Of course, players are free to be greedy Ferengi or warlike Cardassians, but the world's ethos promotes justice and compassion for victims of oppression. One player, for instance, likens her identifications with the Bjorns (victims of brutal Cardassian oppression) to her sympathy, as a concerned Jew, for the fate of the Palestians. TrekMuse permits an appropriation and reworking of the general conventions of the Star Trek world. MUDS are an enticing narrative playground rather than an amusement park ride. Closest to fan culture in origins and philosophy, MUDS are perhaps the most promising environment for providing immersive and interactive experiences which combine the representational power of the computer with the free creativity of the fan culture. The limitations of MUD narratives are related to their strengths. The stories that are made there are not as shapely or as satisfying narratively as the aired episodes. Because the world is improvised by a diverse and diffuse group, it is hard to create plots that require centralized planning. There are a limited number of workable formulas for collective action: the negotiation of treaties, the making of battles, the observation of protocol, the awarding of promotion, the arrangement of marriages. The pleasure of this kind of fiction is tied to the lack of closure in the environment. It is an open-ended world in which roles can be played until they lose their interest. Many players spend more time fleshing out their characters, imagining their backstory and their motivations, than in planning plots or solving technical problems. For many female fans of the series, the appeal is precisely in conversations, exploring similarities and differences with other players, and enacting roles that may be radically different from those they play in everyday life. MUDS and other on-line role-playing games create a sense of a populated world, distanced from one's physical self and obeying rules that are known and shared among the players. Like larger fan culture, on-line Trek worlds extend the possibilities of the narrative without being bound by canonical events. MUDS facilitate the diverse interests of alternative reading formations, providing a space both for more character-intensive play and for more combat-centered action. They bring to life things that are only referenced by the series. That 500 people are enrolled in Starfleet Academy, which has courses, a faculty, and a system of graduation is an impressive feat of collective imagination. It exemplifies a degree of immersive belief and an exercise of interactive agency that no top-down game could duplicate because it was conceived and executed by the players. Similarly, the creation of characters in a RPG has a satisfaction that goes beyond the mechanical control of a character taken from the series; the characters players choose reflect something of their own personal interests and fantasies. Each player brings to the game something of their own Star Trek. CONCLUSIONS Although the two authors agree about the pleasures and limitations of the games we examined, we came away from our limited survey with somewhat different perspectives. For Jenkins, it is crucially important to note that most commercially released Star Trek digital artifacts target technologically-inclined males. The focusing of media product on the interests of specific demographic groups is a logical outgrowth of contemporary capitalism even if it runs counter to the more polysemic strategy Star Trek adopted on television. As such consumers continue to dominate the market for games and other cd-rom products, Viacom licenses only digital products which reward characteristically male reading competencies and interpretive interests, ignoring a more diverse fan demographic. A succession of such marketing choices will have a long-term impact on the development of digital media. The interplay of different audience demands push and stretch the media to accommodate a broader range of narratives and in turn, enhance and enlarge its formal possibilities. A narrower audience threatens not only the commercial interests of the media-producer (closing off potential consumers) but also stifles the medium's maturation. In the case of the Star Trek games, market strategies, ideological norms, genre conventions, and technological limitations interact to marginalize characters and their relationships and with them, the female fans who have regarded characters, rather than technology, plot or mise-en-scene, as their primary entry into Star Trek. On the other hand, Murray (who, though female, enjoys the technology, the combat, the characters, and, perhaps most of all, the richly imagined and hopeful futurism of the series) argues that we should resist the tendency to judge the potential of computer-based narrative by its current instantiations. We need to imagine alternative uses of the technology, alternative genres which might evolve, alternative solutions to its apparent limitations. Some subgenres, like fighting games, may remain frozen at a low level of narrative development, with satisfaction coming from other sources. But if we are seeing the birth of a powerful new representational medium, then we can expect the more successful elements of these diverse genres will coalesce and grow stronger. The immersive space of the Technical Manual, the feeling of interactive agency from taking the Echoes craft to warp speed, the integration of complex story structure and satisfying puzzle-based game interactions in The Final Unity are all encouraging indications of the possibilities of story-driven gaming. Most of all the energy that active audiences are bringing to the world of MUDs holds the promise of greater participation not just in the machinery of the story world, but in the shaping of character and event. As we go to press with this article, a new area of conflict is emerging in the on-going tug-of-war between Trek fans and Trek producers. More than fifty internet sites run by fans were closed in 1997 when Viacom threatened legal copyright infringement sanctions, claiming Viacom offers its own official site, claiming cyberspace as an above-ground medium, like television, rather than an underground medium, like Xeroxed zines. Fans have responded by organizing a resistance campaign. Meanwhile, television and the internet are rapidly converging, as digital TV and rapid networking make their way into American homes. The tensions we witnessed in these early games will be magnified as television struggles to open itself to the participatory story forms of the digital environment. As we confront the rapidly emerging new digital narrative, we need to balance our optimism about its formal possibilities with a cautious concern for the commercial and ideological imperatives that are shaping it. As critics, we need to be alert to what is possible, and also to what is possibilities are neglected. Though we may imagine a mature electronic narrative world with visual immediacy, high interactive agency, strong story-lines, and open-ended constructivist architectures, a market-driven, male-controlled, and too often cynical industry may not be able to deliver it. The storytellers of the coming century may or may not be able to generate a medium with the generic diversity and broad range of pleasures embodied by the holodeck, which can fulfill Janeway's or Riker's needs for romance, Picard's hunger for mystery, and Worf's desires for combat; they may not even be able to match the satisfactions fans currently enjoy simply by trading linear stories with one another. Only time will tell. However, we can say with some confidence that the inventive energy and participatory momentum behind the Star Trek world will continue to push electronic narrative forms as far as they can go. 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