Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic

The Star Wars franchise is one of the largest pieces of cultural imagery available today. Alongside Doctor Who and Star Trek, Star Wars has garnered its fair share of cult and mass audiences. It is interesting to see the latest development: making a (another) Star Wars Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMO) in collaboration with the Electronic Arts-owned gaming industry heavyweight Bioware, of Bioshock and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic fame. The story-intensive style of Bioware games means that the Star Wars MMO has a lot of narrative emphasis. But in a gaming genre like an MMO, where many players grind away their lives, one has to wonder whether this game will do more than stop the MMO genre from amputing plot driven storylines altogether.

MMOs have been a social media space for some time now. But with the Star Wars narrative comes a new type of challenge: audience identification and sexuality. As was made infamous by the 'Mr Bungle rape' within an Multiple User Domain (MUD) context, sexuality poses a sticky issue for Bioware and Lucas Arts (owners of the Star Wars franchise rights). As one can observe in the Star Wars films, not to mention the novels and comics and wealth of other media, the Star Wars cosmology is a heterodoxic structure that errs on the side of patriarchy's underbelly: scantily clad women are paraded around while warrior-priests called "Jedi" become effectively sexless, suggesting that taboo on sex is equivalent to an erasing of gender. These are old issues for the Star Wars franchise, and hopefully we will see some progressive thought on Bioware's part in how to deal with them.