Simulacra and Science Fiction

The 1960s saw the fulfillment of humankind's desire to enter outer space, in the form of both Earth orbits and Lunar landings. Later plans—for colonies on the Moon and Mars as well as huge orbital space stations housing a micropolis representing a multicultural humanity—never came to fruition. With the Russian launch in 1998 of the first part of an international space station, and its subsequent construction, some may believe that a rejuvenation of the manned space program has begun. However, the station will house less than a dozen people at a pricetag of about $20 to $40 billion. For the same price, engineer Robert Zubrin contends, the foundation for a fully realized Mars colony is achievable. NASA, for now, has not made a human mission to Mars a priority. Those who dream of a reality of humanity's moving into space must redirect this desire into the fantasy of science fiction. Babylon 5 is one such fiction that embodies this dream, depicting as it does a fairly realistic space colonization project.

Ultimately, however, fantasy becomes a simulacrum—indicating not the real but a desire to live within a representation of the unreal: the fantasy becomes the real, and, with it, reality becomes modeled on the simulation rather than vice versa, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggests in his essay entitled "Simulacra and Science Fiction": "It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real, the imaginary from the givens of the real. The process will, rather, be the opposite: it will be to put decentered situations, models of simulation in place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real, precisely because it has disappeared from our life" (1994: 124). The desire to enter imaginary environments is predicated on a desire to become what the simulacrum suggests. Such worlds as Middle-earth, and those depicted in Star Trek and Star Wars—based on words and images born of the imagination—offer simulated environments that people can enter. They evoke, for some, places of wonder—imaginary universes where fantasy is, at times, more desirable than the everyday reality of a Presidential impeachment, El Niño phenomena, school shootings, and third-world nuclear brinkmanship. Because of such events, or perhaps in spite of such events, imaginary entertainment environments beckon, giving participants a "feeling of the real, precisely because it has disappeared from" their lives, as Baudrillard suggests: a reality that lacks an ordered mapping and placement of self within a centered, predetermined social structure, which no longer offers transcendence into space as an imagined possibility.

Babylon 5, a 110-episode science fiction television series (which future cultural historians will quite possibly look back on as a masterpiece), presents an imaginary universe as visually suggestive as George Lucas' Star Wars series (1977; 1980; 1983; 1999), as politically and socially aware as the best of Gene Roddenberry's classic television show, Star Trek (1966-1969), and as historically detailed and intricately plotted as J. R. R. Tolkien's novel The Lord of tbe Rings (1954-1955; revised 1965). Using Babylon 5 as a case study, I analyze how one can participate in simulacra of science fiction through role-playing games, war games, collectible card games, CD-ROMs, fan fiction, and online fan Web pages: the various nodes comprising the imaginary entertainment environment. They are concrete places where people can perform—make real—fantasies that they have only previously watched. In this project, I essentially describe what viewers can do with a television show off-screen. Exploring the performance significance of these various sites of fantasy, I describe each in detail and reveal the potential performance qualities evinced through it.

This project is not, however, an ethnographic study of Babylon 5 fans. It is an examination of the scripts, the set pieces, the scenarios, the potential mise-en-scenes arising from these various sites. I do not examine the "actors," the participants. Instead, the work posits theories suggesting how prospective participants become immersed in this kind of fantasy play. It explicates the processes occurring if a player participates in these sites, without describing actual performances in progress. However, I do write from first-hand experience. Having played fantasy games for over twenty years, I speak with the knowledge not just of a scholar, but of a science fiction fan, avid gamer, and gamemaster.

A proper ethnographic analysis of Babylon 5 fans and gamers would require another kind of book, one that is beyond the scope of this project. Someone interested in this sort of study is advised to look at the works of Henry Jenkins, John Tulloch, Gary Alan Fine, Sherry Turkle, Janet Murray, and Constance Penley, among others. This being said, there are some generalizations that can be made about science fiction fans and gamers. Millions of people do play fantasy games and immerse themselves in the kinds of environments discussed in this project, from Dungeons & Dragons-type role-playing games to the Pokémon collectible card game. Indeed, each year over twenty thousand people attend GenCon, a game convention held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in August. Although these participants tend to be educated, white middle-class males, that statistic itself is a stereotype, for women and nonwhites do play these games, though they are in the minority. In the final chapter I give my own analysis of the social function behind these games. In any case, I refer to the spectator-participants—the players—generically, as an amalgam of inferred assumptions garnered from over twenty years of playing the types of games described in this book. The specific details arising from individual game-play can be different, but the general principles comprising the experience as a certain type of performance are universal. For this project, what specific players do to create their own unique performances isn't as important as the analysis of the specific theories explaining how the process of an immersive performance occurs. The details and specific ways people play and make the culture their own, as they express their own particular desires through these games, are unique, but how this occurs revolves around the performance theories described in this book.

Briefly, my own history and experiences of these games began when I was in middle school, when a group of people decided to play Dungeons & Dragons (1974) during lunch hour. At the beginning of high school my brother bought the game. Throughout high school I went on many quests, read Tolkien, and eventually became a gamemaster, a person who prepares adventure quests for other players. I also played war games and computer games. These were more of the "hack-and-slash" type in which players increase power by killing monsters in dungeons and taking their treasure. In college I met a group of people who participated in a more literary form of role-playing through such games as Middle-earth, Stormbringer, and Call of Cthulhu, which were based on the works of Tolkien, Moorcock, and Lovecraft. Character interaction and development were stressed over violence and action. Role-playing action-oriented games became literally role-playing experiences focusing on characters. From these game sessions—especially ones performed under the direction of gamemaster Steve Wennerberg—I remember scenes more palpable than those found in films or novels. I and my coparticipants were immersed in a shared fiction more enriching than that previously experienced in other limited-participatory so-called literary forms. Later, when I entered graduate school in theater and performance studies, much of my research dealt with participatory forms of popular entertainment, for I wanted to discover how they could be as much or more emotionally powerful than traditional forms of what is considered literature.

If role-playing sessions can be as cathartic as theater, then are they not as worthy of study and analysis as the conventional forms of culture studied by the academy—whether this be art found in museums, plays performed onstage, or works of the Western Canon ? Indeed, popular entertainment forms have their roots in the participatory forms of art found in traditional cultures, including the oral performances of the Odyssey and Beowulf and the one-month-long Indian performance-mythology called the Ramlila of Ramnagar, to name just a few.

Performance scholar Richard Schechner lays out a theory that reveals how performances—being both theatrical and ritualistic—both provide entertainment and possess efficacy (see Schechner 1988:106-52). Traditional performance forms tend to be efficacious: promulgating a ritual transformation in the spectator-participant. Popular culture performances, on the other hand, are looked at as entertainment, effecting only a temporary "transportation" to another world or state of being in the spectator. In a role-playing game, for example, one can clearly see the entertainment aspect of the game, as players, through their imaginations, transport themselves to Tolkien's world of Middle-earth or the space station Babylon 5. But below the surface lie "structures of signification," as Clifford Geertz puts it, which reveal the social significance of cultural events (1973:9). It is through such deep social and cultural structures—"which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit" (10)—that one can begin to see transformative moments within the performances comprising the imaginary entertainment environment. To the outsider, these games and Web sites may seem just as strange as would the behaviors observed by someone examining a culture they have never visited. The strength of my analysis comes from the fact that I am an insider, speaking from first-hand experience, as well as a performance studies scholar, trained in analyzing performance forms. Indeed, it as impossible for someone who has not played such games to conduct a proper analysis of a role-playing game, for example, as it would be for a scholar to analyze literature without ever having read a novel.

Some people, however, may feel that such material as that described in this book does not offer much value to society and should not be examined academically. If people play fantasy games, especially if they're adults, then they may be considered escapists, unwilling to face reality. Despite humanity's desire and need to perform, there remains ingrained in mainstream society a social stigma against adult play when it comes to computer games, fantasy role-playing, and other forms of popular culture entertainment. School shootings and satanism are presented by some critics as being outcomes stemming from participation in fantasy games, which create "dangerous" subcultures. People who think that role-playing games or war games project a negative influence on society will most likely continue to hold to those beliefs. But for those who want to consider such issues, this book may help in understanding how these performances work—and perhaps in allowing new conclusions to be drawn. I have written elsewhere on the perceived psychological effects of these games (see Lancaster 1994). Like the antitheatrical prejudice found within Western society—from Plato's treatises to the Puritan ban against street performers in Shakespeare's day—there seems to be an anti-fantasy game prejudice in contemporary society.

This is one reason it is important to analyze thoroughly the performance qualities of fantasy games, and also why I use my own personal experience in explaining how these games function. It is important for people to see how these various forms of popular entertainment function structurally so that they can understand them, rather than just forming an uneducated opinion about the "evil" influence of fantasy games based on surface appearances. This book is not an analysis of science fiction or fantasy subcultures—areas previously examined by such cultural studies scholars as Jenkins (Textual Poachers, 1992), Tulloch and Jenkins (Science Fiction Audiences, 1995), and Daniel Bernardi (Star Trek and History, 1998), to name a few. These scholars tend to examine how subcultural identity relates to the larger power structures within society as fans circulate within the cultures they share and help create. Within the cultural studies paradigm, issues of gender, race, and class are examined in relationship to various cultural and social structures among fans as well as in relationship to the creators of science fiction and fantasy shows. For example, Bernardi, in his Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future (1998), presents a fascinating look at how cultural and social hegemony is institutionalized within the "mega-text" of Star Trek—as present in the assumptions of its producers, and transferred to those who imbibe these assumptions within the episodes, and even among the network of fans. These issues, however important—and despite the richness of racial, class, and gender themes within Babylon 5—require a culturally political analysis. This approach would take away from my focus on the processes of immersion in fantasy that comprise my thesis. Issues of race, gender, and class can certainly be read into this process, but it is more important for this book that the generic process be described, leaving the cultural studies analysis for a later study. This book describes the various sites of the imaginary entertainment environment and how they can be perceived as sites of performance. It is not an analysis of how race, gender, and class are situated within these sites.

Rather, I feel it is important to examine these various fantasy games— and the performance theories associated with them—in order to show how they create immersion through performance in the minds of their players. This analysis is similar to how a scholar might analyze the theoretical forces shaping the blueprint for a live performance contained within a play: how acting theories associated with bringing a character to life onstage and how the ideas contained within the text help shape a potential performance. This allows me to focus on the structure of the gaming texts and how these texts literally frame the performance. Understanding this will allow the reader to know what is involved within these games, elucidating a process oftentimes mysterious for those who have never played a fantasy game. The cultural studies texts mentioned above do not elucidate the performance structures of the imaginary entertainment environment, and they do not describe the formal performance qualities arising out of the mise-en-scenes of these various sites. This project—which is basically an attempt to examine how these sites can be conceptualized as performance—has not been carried out before on such a wide scale, and is the first book to analyze an entire imaginary entertainment environment. Taking a first step in a field permeated by cultural studies analyses of subjects focusing mainly on Star Trek, this is also the first scholarly book written by a single author on Babylon 5. Furthermore, as it maps out the performance theories revolving around the imaginary entertainment environment of Babylon 5, this is the first book to present a performance studies analysis of science fiction.

The Performance Studies Paradigm

The performance studies paradigm as a scholarly field of inquiry had its beginnings in the 1960s theatrical avant-garde. Discontented with conventional European and American drama and proscenium stages where spectators are cut off from the performers, the avant-garde incorporated traditional performances and performance training from indigenous cultures around the world. In some instances these performances even included the spectators as participants. Realizing that conventional institutions of theater in higher education were still examining mostly conventional plays and productions in courses—and were training their students accordingly (these students are still led to believe that there are enough jobs in the theater to justify their training in such numbers)—the Department of Graduate Drama at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts said ''no" to this approach in the early 1970s. Renaming their drama department the Department of Performance Studies in 1980, the professors at this university decided to train students in intercultural performance forms and unconventional production techniques—the stuff of the avant-garde— and, most important, to give them the tools to examine all performance forms—whether occurring on a conventional stage, in cyberspace, or in the wider popular culture. These scholars felt it was time to remold the intellectual ideas of theater into a form of performance analysis that could be applied not just to theater productions and theater history, but to any kind of social, cultural, and political behavior.

Under this logic, a performance on Broadway is neither more nor less important than a performance occurring online in cyberspace or a roleplaying game performed in someone's living room. (Indeed, I have been more emotionally moved in some role-playing game performances than at most Broadway plays and musicals I have attended.) Performance studies allows for the analysis of all these different kinds of performances, irrespective of their cultural and social status in society. Rather than inventing its own discipline, performance studies uses already existing methodologies in new ways. It employs theories from linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and feminism, among others, in order to further understand human behavior as, in, and through performance. My project is an example of such an approach applied to a popular form of performance-entertainment.

Chapter Overview

The chapters in this book present the various kinds of immersion available in each form of the imaginary entertainment environment. The roleplaying game allows players to perform characters other than themselves in Babylon 5-like stories; this aspect lessens in the war game and the card game, in which role-playing is more tightly structured. The CD-ROM I describe presents such a limited environment that participants do not really play any kind of role. The chapter on Web pages and fan fiction shows what fans do as they write characters in someone else's imaginary environment, but they do not perform these characters in the conventional sense. On the other hand, in the online role-playing example, participants do, in fact, perform roles as in the conventional role-playing game; I place the online example in this chapter because it is located in cyberspace, thereby thematically linked to the online fan fiction and Web pages. The analyses given in this book can be applied to other games in other imaginary entertainment environments. The environment may be different if one plays in the Star Wars universe, but the performance processes are the same, whether in Babylon 5, Star Trek, Middle-earth, or elsewhere.

In the introduction, "Performing in Babylon—Performing in Everyday Life: Joe Straczynski's Social Front and the Epic Beginning of an Imaginary Entertainment Environment," I describe how Babylon 5 came to be aired on television. This includes an examination of the producer of the show, Joe Straczynski, and of the social front (as defined by sociologist Erving Goffman) he projects when talking to fans about the effort it took to put his vision onscreen. In addition, this chapter shows how Straczynski incorporated into his five-year saga an epic form of narrative storytelling, an anti-Aristotelian drama as theorized by playwright Bertolt Brecht in 1927. In Babylon 5, the structure of the storytelling involves a montage of entire episodes. Most of them stand on their own, but when viewed in their entirety, the juxtaposition of episodes conveys a deeper understanding of the story.

Straczynski had decided to spend time answering fan email and posting comments at online bulletin boards. As a science fiction fan himself, he felt it was his duty to be held accountable for his show. The performance quality of this aspect of "behind-the-scenes" television production is also charted, and here we see his role of producer challenged by fan-critics. Last, the imaginary entertainment environment is located as an evolving historical process. This chapter reveals the fundamental fact that an emerging imaginary entertainment environment does not evolve on its own without the influence of an originating creator. Babylon 5 originated in one specific person, and was negotiated through a complicated web of social politics in Hollywood before it was presented on television. With its broadcast, a fan base gathered, members of which eventually became the participants in the capitalistic marketing of the fantasy simulacra comprising role-playing games, war games, collectible card games, Web pages, and fan fiction described in this book. Ultimately, the fans are the ones who determine the future history of the universe Straczynski created, for it is the stories they create that keep the imaginary universe of Babylon 5 alive in the minds of its participants and thus in the wider culture.

In Chapter 1, "Welcome Aboard, Ambassador: Creating a Surrogate Performance in the Babylon Project," I look at how a character is created in a role-playing game. Through rules and oral storytelling, participants become immersed in an imaginary environment where they perform roles, becoming lead characters in an ongoing adventure. Players enact their characters through the verbal utterance of dialogue and action in fulfillment of a story that they essentially improvise. Instead of examining a specific performance, I show the process of character creation in order to show how performances are scripted in this type of game. In addition, I contend that the desire for participation in various imaginary entertainment environments points toward what Joseph Roach calls surrogation. The "process of trying out various candidates in different situations," Roach theorizes, "the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins—is the most important of the many meanings that users intend when they say the word performance" (1996:3). In this sense, the imaginary environments explored in this project are surrogates, which attempt to satisfy people's desire for a return to the originating site of fiction, the television episodes of Babylon 5, as well as their desire for space exploration. I contend that as manned space exploration ceased, by 1975, cultural products and new scientific endeavors filled this vacancy with robotic probes to other planets (including the viewing of images from space probes and the Hubble telescope), written works of science fiction that depict mankind's colonization of space, the visual media of science fiction, such as Star Trek and Babylon 5, and the immersive performances comprising the imaginary entertainment environment.

In Chapter 2, "'Captain on the Bridge': Six Frames of Performance in the Game Babylon 5 Wars," I examine how war games use rules as a means of simulating military engagements. The military functions of starships are presented through a structure of rules, maps, and ship schematics that determine how participants are reconfigured as starship commanders in space combat. This kind of performance, however, is not that of a conventional drama. Players do not enact an author's text as actors do, with their bodies. Rather, through the technology of rules, players perform a high-tech fantasy where their bodies do not "end at the skin," but become a kind of cyborg, where, through "imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves" (Haraway 1991: 178). The conflict players enact—the performance of the mise-en-scene—takes place on a two-dimensional map. Characters are but cardboard counters, and the psychology and bodies of the characters are schematics on ship control sheets. The heat of the drama pulses through the thoughts and actions of players, fired in the imagination by remembrance of scenes from Straczynski's Babylon 5 viewed previously on television, but now restored through a war game. I conclude the chapter by examining a set of photographs that depict how this war game takes participants through six frames of performance. Building on Schechner's performance quadrilogue—drama, script, theater, performance—I add to it the frames of fantasy and immersion.

Chapter 3, "Performing the Haptic-Panoptic: The Babylon 5 Collectible Card Game," is an examination of the history of this kind of game (originating six years before Pokémon) and the kind of performance arising from it. The collectible card game combines the desire for collection with the opportunity for putting into play what one has collected. Pictures on the cards evoke a fantasy world. The cards are the interface through which players perform within a rules structure. In the Babylon 5 game, players perform the part of alien ambassadors who must gain a "sphere of influence" in an attempt to win. Since the script of the story is embedded within the cards, the players have less freedom to choose their own plot, character, and destiny than they find in role-playing games. The random placement of cards may suggest a story, but it is not told through a traditional verbal narrative. Instead, the goals the players attempt to achieve by playing certain cards at particular times engage bits of Babylon 5 narrative behavior, and, through association with the grand narrative comprising Babylon 5, a tale is told through the game structure. This evocation of an associational narrative arises from the pictures on the cards. They represent actual characters, places, and situations that occur on the show. This representation creates the feeling of performing fictive moments from Babylon 5. I examine how, between the verbal and the visual, lies a performance of the haptic: players touch the cards, and, by doing so, they touch the characters, locations, and objects from a television show previously viewed only from a distance. Miniature still-shots on the cards—literally cut out and reproduced from a scene—remove the images from their original context, allowing for their reconfiguration in the game. I describe how players lay the cards down scopically in front of them, restoring bits of performance behavior as they attempt to win the game.

In Chapter 4, "Performing at the Interface of the High-Tech and the Bureaucratic: Taking a Tour of the Official Guide to J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5," I look at an interactive CD-ROM. In this product, participants are supposed to play the part of a visitor touring the Babylon 5 space station. They engage the environment, exploring where they want to go and activating archived material through an interface. Advertisements for this product state that it is supposed to give consumers the illusion of being on the space station. Through this kind of participation they should be performing as tourists. I examine how this project ultimately fails, for it does not provide the interface for a touristlike performance, but rather a booklike interface by which they experience the CD-ROM as a kind of encyclopedia. In order to mask this failure, the producers of the product engage in the "language games" of bureaucratic and high-tech performances. The bureaucratic branches of advertising, press reviews, and packaging disguise the performance of the actual product (a hightech book). A bureaucratic performance, Jon McKenzie posits, is related to a high-tech performance, where the bureaucratic qualities of "profitability, flexibility, and optimization" are used to "design and then evaluate and market technologies" as well as to manage bureaucratic workers (1997:39). I also examine this project through Janet Murray's theory of immersive digital environments as given in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997).

Chapter 5, "Webs of Babylon: Textual Poaching Online," ofFers an examination of fan-created Web pages and fan fiction and how it contrasts with producer-created "sanctioned" material, whether the official Web sites or the originating narrative. Fans participate and perform within the universe of Babylon 5 by taking their favorite characters and placing them in new stories, in narratives that reflect the fanst own desires. Sometimes these stories go beyond the "canon" of Straczynski's saga. A character who died may be reborn in new stories. Alternate stories allow fans to shape another's characters into their own image. "Fandom here," media scholar Henry Jenkins tells us, "becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, indeed of a new culture and a new community" (1992:46). Fans both create new fiction, posting it on the World Wide Web, and form online fan clubs, which usually revolve around particular characters and the actors who perform them. Entire Web sites with multiple pages and links may be devoted to one character or theme. ("The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5" lists over 200 Web pages dedicated to Babylon 5.) I show how Web pages and fan fiction allow fans to explore the universe of Babylon 5 on their own terms outside the original creator's authorial presence. I also take a look at an online role-playing adventure called a MUSH (MultiUser Shared Hallucination).

Chapter 6, "The End of Babylon: From Prelapsarian Fantasies to Postlapsarian Science Fiction," is a somewhat philosophical examination of the imaginary entertainment environment. I contend that one of the reasons fans see the same film dozens of times, perform in role-playing games, dress up in costumes, play video games, and read novels based on films is to try to recapture—through participation and immersion— the original cathartic moment experienced during the first viewing of the originating material. Rather than seeing these immersive creations as the "toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization," as Baudrillard believes (1994:13), fans desire to recapture an emotional moment in these other forms in an attempt to relive the emotion experienced in the originating text. These types of performances offer a new kind of mythology, and because of this popular culture has the potential to bring an efficacious experience to its participants (the essential function of myth). The desire to recapture a cathartic moment speaks also to a failed project of the 1960s: transcendence of humanity through space travel. The policy of expansion into space became sublimated into a nostalgia for space exploration evidenced in science fiction stories and games. Whether the subjectivity of the participants is subsumed into the fantasy project as "conditioned" citizens who vivify the ontological project of another's science fiction and fantasy is open to debate. Like race and gender, the postcolonial project found in Babylon 5 requires another work, but I do touch upon some of these concerns in this final chapter.

The appendix contains a fan fiction short story and an excerpt from a MUSH. As a side note, this project is not a first-person description, but since I have played these games, I do refer to some of my examples directly in the first person. What follows is an examination of the performance qualities arising out of the imaginary entertainment environment of Babylon 5.