Branded Worlds and Contracting Galaxies

Abstract

This study examines, specifically, the production and destruction of the massively multiplayer online Star Wars Galaxies and, generally, the translation of old media brands into new media formats to demonstrate the nature of creative labor under the constraints of branded content. Using the evidence of gameplay and industrial context, the article argues that workers on Galaxies often occupied three ideal-typical roles as worldmakers, curators, and toy keepers in an effort not simply to repurpose content but to establish relationships between branded objects, to foment their circulation, and to maintain their longevity. Understanding these tasks and how they manifested themselves in both the work of Galaxies’s makers and their unfinished project, provides a vital case study to examine and develop new models to understand contemporary creative work and the intermediaries that labor within this regime as popular culture increasingly is subsumed under the organizational and textual mechanisms of branding through sequels and transmedia.