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a ical women who oppose one another along a clear moral binaty, suc~ as t~e mg.. b h " ·1" Morgan le Fay and the "good" character Nimve In opposition etween t e eVI kni htlv soci ty Malo's Morte Darthur: "Fearful recognition of a distance between ~g t:y sO~le f

~ s here of the enchantress is converted through the normative circuit ~ an~r~i e i~to a reassuring assertion of distances between encha~tresses themselves. m 46 For a description of both Medusa's many representatlon~ arg he~, ~;A logical inheritance, see Susan R. Bowers, "Medusa and the Fem e aze,

Journ~l~·~lSP~~~~i~:;Olr~~ 7!l~e;~~:~~r Nights: Shad~ws o{ ~nd~en~~e ~~O;o

Bioware Corporation, Neverwinter Nights, PC, Mac, Atan, Blac s e tu lOS, .

42 Bowers, "Medusa," 219. d d. k

43: All citations from Neoeriointer Nights: Hordes of ~he lUnkeI" larS arde. to

. ' N· h PC M c Atan B ac s e tu lOS,

Bioware Corporation, Neverwinter Ig ts, , a, ,

2003. h "0" "fallen" dark-

44 In the Dun eons and Dragons canon, t e row are '.

kinned elves who ar! evil in nature and dwell underground. In Orow society,

s haress" cc "

men are superior. The title "Vals aress means queen. ." h

wo 45 Bowers in fact directly links Medusa to the witch trials, arguing that hS e re resen~s such intense 'female erotic power and strength, and ~he shares t ese

hp .. ith millions of women executed as witches, who, like the Medusa,

c aractensucs w . d . "s B ers provided a focus for woman-hating in a male-dominate society, ee ow ,

"Medusa," 225.

Revising the Future:

The Medieval Self and the Sovereign Ethics of Empire in Star ~rs: Knights of the Old Republic

Brent Moberly and Kevin Moberly

When science-fiction computer games imagine the future, they often do so in medieval terms. Set after the fall of empire, many such games present players with dystopian, science-fictional worlds that invariably appropriate the tropes of the medieval romance. Cities, space stations, and planetary outposts stand as pockets of order and stability, centers of government, religion, culture, and trade that simultaneously represent the remnants of the lost empire and the hopes of the new. Yet, as in medieval romance, these technological Camelots are few and far between. Surrounded on all sides by the sprawling chaos and horror of an encroaching, often alien wilderness, they are constantly in jeopardy of being contaminated, overrun, and lost. Strapped into the cockpit of starships and weighed down by armor, shields, and weaponry, players must venture forth to joust against this wilderness, to push it back and, if possible, to recover the sovereign order lost with the collapse of empire. The player's most potent ally in such quests, however, is not the promise of exotic technologies of an alien future, but the chivalric ideals of an imagined medieval past in which the knightly hero fought to regain the glory of ancient times.

While purists differentiate science fiction from fantasy (the critical difference being that, in the former, technology is magic, while in the latter, magic is magic), the two genres are much less distinct in the popular imagination. Some of this blurring may be due to the fact that both genres are equally derived from the shared pedigree of medieval romance. Although Kathryn Hume cautions that the apparent derivation of science fiction from romance is much more complicated than it initially seems, she nevertheless

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admits that "there is some truth to [the] assumption" that science fiction "bear]s] a similar, if not identical, relationship to the medieval romance: run Guy o/Warwick or some Charlemagne chansons thro~g~l a transformer, and one ought to come up with space opera or space epI~. Of course, not ~l science fiction is "space opera or space epic," but this does not necessanly invalidate Hume's point, since much of what Hume obser:es concerns. the relatively recent emergence of space opera ~s the m?st widely recogmzed (and, arguably, predominant) sub-ge~re of sCIence"fictIon toda~; "

Coined as a pejorative play on horse opera, the phrase space opera originally referred to hack Westerns repackaged as science fiction for popular consumption. Today, "space opera" refers mor~ generally (and less ?egatively) to what David C. Hartwell and Cathenne Cramer charactenze as "colorful, dramatic, large scale science fiction adventure, compet~ntly a~d sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetIc, h~rolC central character, and plot action [ ... ] and usually set In the rel.atI:e~y distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically OptImIStIC in tone.'? Yet, as Hartwell and Cramer acknowledge, space opera still retains an essential nostalgia for the "guilty pleasure" of the "good old st~ff" - for the swashbuckling heroes and the epic adventures that wer~ the mau:stays of not only the so-called golden (or Campwe!lian) age of sCIenc~ fict.IOn, but also other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nee-chivalric narratives, such as the Western. 3

The resurgence of space opera was marked by the open admission (if not blatant celebration) of these tropes in the 1977 film Star Wars. There, the cynical cowboy (Han Solo) joins forc~s with :he knight-in-training (Luke Skywalker) in an epic quest to rescue Pnncess Lela and thereby save th~ galaxy from the imminent threat of the evil ernpire.f As Tom Henthorne wntes:

The popularity of George Lucas' Star mzrs can be e~plained in part by its skillful exploitation of a numb~r of medlev~ and n~omedieval texts, including stories, narratrve poems, SCIence fiction thrillers, adventure films, and Westerns. As Jay Cocks suggests, Star mzrs is "a combination of Flash Gordon, The Wizard of Oz, the Errol Flynn swashbucklers of the '30s and '40s and almost every Western ever screened, not to mention The Hardy Boys, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Faerie Queen. 5

The degree to which Star mzrs appropriates such traditions beco~es sig~ificant when one recognizes that Star mzrs was part of a !arger ~eactI?n against what Lester Del Ray and other American science-fiction wnters In the late 1970s perceived as the literary elitism of the British New Wave movement. Del Ray had already begun promoting space opera as an expressly

Revising the Future

"non-literary, or even anti-literary" alternative to New Wave aesthetics in the ~ears before the release of Star Wars, but the popular success of the film an~ ItS sequels soon made it one of the core models for Del Ray's campaign against what he declared to be "the pretension and the excesses and failed exp~ri~ents of :he New Wave."6 It is important to note, however, that this explicit nostalgia for the past was not simply an innocent desire for the cult~ral productions of a bygone era, but had significant socio-political ramifications, Del Ray and others explicitly championed space operas like Star Wars as vehicles to recover values that he (and, as Tom Henthorne notes, the American public in general) perceived as having been lost."

Del !Zay'~ explicit appropriation of the tropes of the past in service of a conservatrve literary and social agenda has many precedents. As Alice Chandler ?ote~, the e~plicit ~edie:alism of the works of Sir Walter Scott appealed to Vlcto.na? audiences looking for a way out from the shoddiness and ugliness of life In general [ ... J a way to resolve the difficulties and dislocations of th; Industrial Rev?lution,"8 and William Caxton published the Morte D'Arthur for wha~, In the context of fifteenth-century England, were similar reasons: to recall the noble actes of chyvalrye, the jenryl and vertuous dedes that somme knyghtes used in tho dayes" for an audience "for whom" as Felicity Riddy puts it, "the loss of the French territories in 1453 had been a personal disaster, and who could not accommodate themselves to the dimini~hed view o~ their country and their own roles and prospects - both financial an~ SOCI.al - that that loss brought with it."? Space opera's explicit nostalgia ~or ItS ow~ reconstructe~ pa~t, then, recalls a much larger tradition ?f nostalgia for the Ideals of the imagined past - ideals that are constructed In response to perceived short-comings of the present.

As the latest incarnations of space opera, contemporary science-fiction computer games not only manifest the genre's nostalgia for .the neo-chivalric past b~t also 'p~rticipate in the cultural critiques that are implicit in such ?Ostalgla. Th~s IS not to say that science-fiction computer games are explicitly conservative (t~ough many. are), but that their predilection to imagine the ~~ture as a version of some Ideal, often medieval past, shares with more tr~dlt1onal s~ace opera, fantasy, and romance the same basic assumption that things ~ere Indeed. better !n s~me id~al, unspecified past.!" The irony, of course, IS that, as interacnve simulations of alternative realities, many of thes~ .games ar~ works of extreme technological complexity; yet in their expl~c~t nos.talgla for ~he past,. they. often represent technology as a highly SUSPICIOUS,. If n?t o~tnght hostile, threat to the individual agency celebrated by ~eo-chlvalnc discourse. In doing so, science-fiction computer games rewnt~ the ~uture as th~ past and thus provide players with a simulated world In which the me~leval n?t only embodies the promise of lost agency, but serves as a compelling antidote to the worst excesses of technological,

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third-stage capitalism - the very pre-conditions that allow for, and a_rguably inspire, the production of these games themselves. The purpose of this paper is to explore how such tensions play out in the r~cent game Star War!:

Knights of the Old Republic, and, in so doing, to provide a mean~ ~f appreclating the extent to which science-fiction computer games explicitly reconstruct the future from the tropes of medieval romance. 11

Developed by Bio Ware and released by Lucas Arts in 2003, Kni~hts of the Old Republic takes place against the backdrop of the Star "l%rs lI~t~av~,rse: an intraverse that, as the tagline of Star "l%rs Episode IV makes explicit ( A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"), famously. repres~nts the futur.e as a construction of the past. In' a promotional overview wntten to advertise the game on Microsoft's Xbox. com website, Danny Chihdo expl~ins that Knights of the Old Republic defamiliarizes many o~ t~,e te~hn~logles: cul,~ures, and conflicts popularized by the Star "l%rs rnovies. Droids, he wntes, are almost pathologically constructed to resemble the more 'modern' look ofC-?PO and R2-D2, but they have a much more primitive, gears-and-parts-showlll~ look, with sprockets and gaskets to spare."12 <?hi?do states th,~t the same choices ar~ evident in the design of other technologies III the game. Instead of Pod racers, he writes, players encounter "suped-up hovering snowmobiles (called Swoops) that run short drag races instead of Ben-Hur marathons. In plac~ of t~e Millennium Falcon, the heroes of Star "l%rs: Knights of the Old Republic hop III a sleek freighter equally worthy of love and devotion, the Ebon Hawk."13 To Chihdo, this defamiliarization results in a science-fiction role-playing game that appears novel paradoxic~ly because it presents playe~~ wit~ a chance to experience the past - to expenence what he promotes as a medieval (sort of) Star Wars galaxy torn apart by war, where an enemy is as likely to pull a

longsword on you as they are to whip out a lightsaber."14. .

Game-designer Lukas Kristjanson also invokes the medlev~ to descr!be the challenge of developing Star "l%rs: Knights of the Old Republic. According to Kristjanson, the decision to set the game 4,000 years before the events depicted in the Star "l%rs movies allowed Bi~ Ware's de~igners "room to make the [game's] outcome suitably large, and still have things settle ~own long before they would conflict with existing canon." Kristjanson connnues:

Many have remarked that with its strong archetypal themes of good and evil, Star "l%rs is very similar to high medie:al fantasy. That may be true, but moving from one to the other lS far more complicated than simply find/replacing "long ~v:ord" with "lightsaber". Star Wars has a rich and dee~ tradltl.on, but as popular as the movies have been, much of It remains obscure outside of the most devoted fans. 15

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To Chihdo and Kristjanson, then, the medieval serves something of a double purpose. On the one hand, it defines a strategy by which otherwise canonical elements are made new - by which the lightsaber is reinvented as the longsword, etc. - and, on the other hand, it becomes a measurement of the degree to which Star "l%rs: Knights of the Old Republic conforms to larger traditions of the role-playing computer game: the dungeons, monsters, quests, a~d troubled wildernesses of conventional medieval-therned games. The medieval thus allows Star "l%rs: Knights of the Old Republic to simultaneously perpetuate and reinvigorate the canon of the Star "l%rs intraverse _ to, as Kristjanson states, introduce "players to a galaxy they may not know as well as they think."16

.The medieval also represents a safe financial choice for the game's publtsher, Lucas ~ts, and its developer, Bio Ware. As Adam Baratz explains III a column published on the Ars Technica website, the costs of developing complex games are such that game studios and publishers are often hesitant to produce games that challenge audience expectations. He writes:

In the 1980s a high-quality game could be made for $100,000. In the 1990s, these costs began to break into the millions. Extravagant productions which used many filmed video sequences cost as much as $10 million. With the complexity and costs of games, developers were more concerned about bringing their products to the marketplace at all, rather than making them original.'?

Rather than investing time and resources to develop new content and a new ~ame engine for a design that might or might not succeed, many developers simply produce new. content for existing games, which they subsequently release under a new title or as a sequel. This is very much the case with Star "l%rs: Knights of the Old Republic. Not only is the game constructed around an updated version of the game engine that Bio Ware developed for its a~ard-winning 2002 medieval-themed role-playing game, Neverwinter NIghts, but, like Neverwinter Nights, it is structured around rules derived from the Dungeons and Dragons pen-and-paper role-playing system. In this respect, Star "l%rs: Knights of the Old Republic presents players with a "new" version of the Star "l%rs intraverse that is repackaged from the tried and true elements of the Star "l%rs movies and from what are, arguably, the tried and true tropes of the medieval romance - tropes that are the bread and butter of pen-and-paper and computer-enabled role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and Neverwinter Nights.

=: "l%rs: Knights of the Old Republic not only takes place in a sort of middle penod between what Star "l%rs aficionados recognize as the "Golden Age" of

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M~ny .writers, ?ow aware of the traditional cultural arrogance, ~sslgn It to a minor character and let the hero react against it, but m general, the chivalrous hero is chivalrous only within the limits of hi~ OW? culture,. and ~hose limits include a cultural arrogance that ~s pa1~f~llr evident m the relations between the knight and paymm as It IS m those between the American spaceman and alien. The parochialism of the romances, derived as it is from medieval Christianity, has taken many subsequent colorations from the Pr?testant sense o~ election, from the industrial and technological pnde, from colonial self-assurance, from the righteousness and pride in immense wealth and success. Despite these metamorphoses and changes, the effect is much the same."

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165

. Tari~, in this sense, expresses the "traditional cultural arrogance" inherent in what Kathryn Hume describes as one of the essential relationships of space opera as medieval romance: that of the technocratic hero and his dehumanized (indeed, often alien) sidekick. AI; Hume writes:

the galactic republic and the events depicted .in t~e Star ~ars movie.s, bur, like many medieval romances, it portrays this middle penod as a time of darkness and strife, in which remnants of the established order struggle to stave off incursions from the ever-encroaching wilderness. The game thus adopts many of the narrative conventions that characterize medieval romance. For example, the game openly appropriates the topology of the medieval romance. As Erich Auerbach notes, this topology is seldom absolute: "all of the numerous castles and palaces, the battles and adventures, of the courtly romance - especially the Breton cycle - are things of fairyland: each time they appear before us as sprung from the ground; their geogra~hic location to the known world, their sociological and economic foundatlOns remain unexplained." 18 the applicability of Auerbach's observatio~s becomes immediately apparent on Taris. A city that is at once a planet, Tans is remarkably small and its relation to the planet as a whole remains indefinite at best. Players could explore its entirety in less than an hour if unhindered by the various obstacles imposed by the mechanics of the game. T aris thus contains, in Auerbach's words about romance, "nothing but the perquisites for adventure. Nothing is found in it which is not either accessory or preparatory to an adventure. It is a world specifically designed to give the

knight the opportunity to prove himself."?" .

Mter crash-landing on the planet, for example, players discover that Taris is divided into three distinct regions: the Upper City, the Lower City, and the Undercity. As the description of Taris on the game's official website makes clear, this arrangement corresponds to a rigid social hierarchy. The city's "rich and powerful" human nobles "have segregated themselves in the Upper City, dwelling in the highest reaches of the towering skyscrapers that dominate the planet's landscape," while its smugglers and aliens, who represent a sort of emerging merchant-class, "struggle to survive amidst the permacrete wasteland" of the Lower City.20 In keeping with this feudal motif the city's underclass is composed of outcasts, or peasants, who "driven into the dark and sunless world of the Undercity must band together in small villages in a wretched, never-ending struggle to survive."21 Such an arrangement has precedent, of course, in late medieval representations of the social body as the human body, with the nobles and clergy as the head and heart, the merchants and the middling estates as the torso and arms, and the peasants and other laborers as the legs and feet.22 It has perhaps more immediate precedent, though, in the neomedievallandscapes of the contemporary American city - in, as Umberto Eco puts it, "such postmodern neomedievalist Manhattan new castles as the Citicorp Center and Trump Tower, curious instances of a new feudalism, with their courts open to peasants and merchants and the well-protected high-level apartments reserved for the lords."23

~e~d in this cont~xt, ~he explicit social hierarchy of Taris, a hierarchy that msists upon the implicit superiority of its human "nobles" to the alien, downtrodden inhabitants of the city's lower levels, inspires much of the player's work in the game. Although the game scripts players to disavow or, at best, remain indifferent to the smug arrogance of Taris's human elites, it nevertheless requires that players (who themselves have no choice but to assume human avatars at the start of the game) confront the various threats ~enacing the city's elites. In keeping with representations of the medieval m the popular imagination, these threats are characterized as a pair of p!agues. On the one hand, there is the external "plague" (as one of the CIty'S more xenophobic citizens puts it) of "hideous looking aliens who walk the world of Tar is" and, arguably, of the Sith, who have blockaded the planet and patrol th~ streets between the city's gothic spires, wearing longswords and gleammg plate armor. And on the other hand, there is the actual plague of the Rakghoul disease, which originates from the ghouls and the other crea:ures pop~lating the city's periphery spaces, runs rampant among the disenfranchised masses of the Undercity, and ultimately threatens to transform the city and the city's inhabitants into monstrous caricatures. of the~se~ves. For the nobles of Tar is, however, these two plagues define their supenonty, as it is precisely their ability to refuse to confront the plagues that separates them from the inhabitants of the Lower City and Undercity (who have no choice but to suffer the plagues). These two plag~es also reinforce the apparent nobility of the players, who, in confrontmg the plagues, confirm that the cultural arrogance noted by Hume is

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justified when it takes the form of good deeds performed on behalf of the less worthy.

& the game's narrative transports players from planet to planet, ~hey are required to confront successive versions of the same external and mt~r?al "plagues" that threaten Taris. Although Lucas employed a host 0: digital artists to expand the Mos Eisley of the original Star Wttrs film I~tO. the bustling frontier outpost of the movie's 1997 re-release, there IS little evidence of similar efforts on behalf of these "worlds" in the game. Just as a fragment of the city comes to represent the planet as a whole on Taris: the deserts of Tatooine are realized as a series of enclosed sand lots; the penlous depths of Kashyyyk's treacherous forests turn out to be n?t mu~h m?re t~an a maze-like tangle of interconnected trails; and even the Imposmg Sith rums on Korriban contain little more than a few bifurcated tunnels. This lack of physical dimensions, however, allows for a narrative density reminiscent of that found in medieval romance.

On the forest planet Kashyyyk, for example, players discover that the Wookiee leader Chuundar (whom the official game's website describes as "black-furred") has consolidated the traditionally loose confederation of Wookiee tribes under a repressive feudal regime that he rules from the tree-top village of Rwookrrorro. Funded by slavery and maintained by fear and violence, Chuundar's regime is threatened not only by the external incursions of the space-faring Czerka Corporation and bands of ren~gade Mandalorians, but also by insurgent Wookiee elements that have established camp in the inhospitable wilderness on the forest floor beneath the tree-top villages. Like Taris, then, Rwookrrorro is constructed ~s a courtly refuge that is suspended between the perils of the space surroundlI~g Kashyrrk ~nd the perils of the planet's wilderness - a wilderne~s that,. m ke.epmg :VIth the wilderness of medieval romance, becomes mcreasmgly inhospitable as players descend into it: "the further you de~cend, the m~re deadly the environment becomes. Terrible creatures lurk m that chaotic realm, and even with the aid of advanced technology it is difficult to survive for any length of time. Only the bravest of hunters dare to descend, and only the luckiest of those return. "25

This sense of a siege mentality is apparent even on Dantooine, home to the Jedi Academy. Described on the game's official website as "unspoiled," Dantooine is an "olive, blue and brown-colored world, [ ... ] far removed from the bustle of the galactic trade routes."26 Yet despite the presence of the academy and the security it promises, Dantooine is not immune from the plagues that confront the other urban refuges in the game. The savanna and the farmlands that surround the Jedi Academy, for infested by packs of hostile Kath Hounds and roving bands of n.'~'HH.l"UV~ raiders. Like the Sith who menace the planet from a distance,

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Mandalorians represent the very real threat of overthrow and violent annexation from forces outside the chivalric J edi order. The Kath Hounds, however, constitute an internal threat. Normally peaceful, the animals are driven to violence by the influence of a wayward student of the J edi Academy, J uhani, who has turned to the dark side. As if to emphasize the degree of internal instability troubling the planet, players also discover that the workers and the farmers who inhabit the fields around the Jedi Academy are fighting with each other. & with Juhani and the unrest she instigates among the Kath Hounds, these conflicts constitute a threat to the academy and the values it represents, a threat that originates from animals and the workers who, in keeping with the medieval notion of the great chain of being, should be subject to the academy's rules.

In this respect, the game does not present players with an "Old Republic," but with a loose collection of independent city-states (planets) whose political structures are predominantly medieval. Although the Old Republic is often referenced in the game as an ideal, it only exists, as Eco observes about the relationship of classicism to medievalism, through the "utilitarian bricolage" of the game's medieval city-states. Eco writes:

In the case of the remnants of classical antiquity, we construct them, but, once we have rebuilt them, we don't dwell in them, we

only contemplate them as an ideal model and a masterpiece of faithful restoration. On the contrary, the middle ages have never been reconstructed from scratch: we have always mended or patched them up. We have cobbled up the bank as well as the cathedral, the state as well as the church. Even when we live with Aristotle or Plato, we deal with them in the same terms suggested by our medieval ancestors. When one scrapes away the medieval incrustations from Aristotle and renews him, this reread Aristotle will adorn the shelves of academic libraries but will still not connect with our everyday life.27

Explicitly constructed as "Knights" of the game's ideal, absent "Old Republic," players are required to "patch up" the medieval order by confronting the external and internal threats that plague each of the game's urban refuges. As in the medieval romance, players accomplish this through the vehicle of the quest. On Taris, for example, players are asked to help locate an antidote for the Rakghoul disease. After speaking with Doctor Zelka Forn about the plague, they learn that, though Republic scientists were close to developing a cure, the Sith appropriated the research for their own ends. Forn then asks players to retrieve a sample of the experimental serum in the hope of using it to rid Taris of the disease. & players leave

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Forn's office, however, they are accosted by his assistant, Gurney, who informs players that the crime lord Davik is also interested in the serum and is apparently willing to pay quite well for it. Constructed in this manner, the Rakghoul disease becomes a site of factional struggle and desire. A threat that is at once external and internal (it transforms those infected into monsters and cannibals, "mindless beasts that feed on the flesh of others"), the symptoms of the plague mirror the way that the various internal factions of the city consume each other as they struggle to control the serum, and the way that, in so doing, they transform the utopian goals of the republic, as embodied by the original (but now absent) research team, into a monstrous reality.

Players must ultimately determine which faction should control the serum and thereby which model of administering the cure is most appropriate for the city's ills. Like many role-playing games, Star I%rs: Knights of the Old Republic allows players a large degree of leeway in the particulars (how charitable they are, how much of a reward they demand, etc.) of how they complete this and many of the game's other quests.i" In the end, though, the game only recognizes two outcomes to the Rakghoul quest: players must either choose the "light side" and hand the serum over to Forn, or the "dark side" and sell the serum to the crime lord Davik. The mechanics of the game thus demand that players participate in an overarching ethical system that ultimately requires players to espouse one of two opposing models of chivalry: the "light side" and the "dark side," respectively.

The light side generally asks players to act altruistically, to control their emotions, to work constructively arbitrating conflicts, and to treat the game's non-player characters with civility. These imperatives are reflected in the code that Jedi Master Vandar recites:

There is no emotion; there is peace.

There is no ignorance; there is knowledge. There is no passion; there is serenity. There is no chaos; there is harmony. There is no death; there is the force.

In its emphasis on the "force" of peace, knowledge, serenity, and harmony, the code of the light side recalls what Henthorne describes as a twentiethcentury American medievalism: "Late twentieth-century American medievalism [ ... J has a far stronger social element than the medievalism of the previous century, since it calls for not only the emulation of heroes, but a return to times when heroes abounded, when honor, and selflessness were valued and when good prevailed over evil."29 In with this model, the game awards light-side points to players based on

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degree to which their actions correspond to the ideals of the code. Players, for example, can earn more light-side points if they refuse rather than accept the meager reward Forn offers for delivering the Rakghoul Serum - points that ultimately determine the effectiveness of a player's force-powers and thus serve as a tangible indicator of his or her heroic potential.

The dark side, by contrast, celebrates passion, individual agency, and ruthlessness in the pursuit of power. As the game makes explicit on Korriban, the dark side does not represent the absence, but rather the inverse of a chivalric code. There, players are required to memorize the dark-side's mantra:

Peace is a lie, there is only [ ... J passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power. Through power I gain victory.

Through victory my chains are broken.

The code for the dark side thus preserves the structure of the code for the light side, but inverts its principles so that the promised escape is not the result of submission to a larger power, but of individual agency. In this respect, players who choose to act selflessly or ruthlessly are not relieved of the essential. burden of knighthood: the obligation to act heroically in accordance with a larger ethical system of behavior. As Hume observes, chivalry becomes a matter of following the rules. Noting that there "are many internalized limits like those mentioned which guide the chivalrous hero's actions, and the rules are remarkably consistent for both medieval and modern romances," she writes, "Parts of being chivalrous are the hero's assumption that there are rules, and his making himself play by them."30 Thus, although the selfishness and the ruthlessness implicit in the mode of behavior that the dark side valorizes ostensibly contradicts the chivalric impulse as it is popularly understood, it is consistent with Auerbach's assertion that in medieval romances such as Chretien's Yvain "trial through adventure is the real meaning of the knight's ideal existence" and often supersedes ethical imperatives.P'

Despite its veneer of agency, the question of the game is not whether players will confront the various threats facing the game's urban refuges, but how they will do so. This becomes clear at the start of the game, when players are tasked with locating Bastila, the absent "commanding officer" of the Endar Spire, a republic starship that, in keeping with its medieval name, is besieged by the Sith, The name "Bastila' is also significant in that it recalls the Middle-English "bastel," which can mean, among other things, "turret" or

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"stronghold".32 Bastila thus represents one of the last bastions of hope for those aboard the doomed starship and, ultimately, for the forces of the doomed republic. Yet despite Bastila's obvious importance, the game offers players the option of refusing to search for her and "looking after [their] own skin." This option, however, leads to a dead end. The quest-giver, Trask Ulgo, tells players that "we've got to stick together if we want to make it out of this alive" and then forces players to help him rescue Bastila. Players thus cannot refuse this quest. The result is that even though the game promises players agency, they ultimately have little influence over the game's overarching narrative progression - a circumstance that jedi Master Van dar indirectly acknowledges on Dantooine when he asks that players "understand that there is little choice iJ,1 this matter for you or for us."

Yet as Star ~rs: Knights of the Old Republic continues, it becomes increasingly apparent that players also have little choice in how they accomplish the game's quests. This becomes clear when one realizes that the threats confronting the urban refuges are all, to one degree or another, rooted in the absence of the sovereign. Here, the game's concern with the a priori absence of the sovereign constitutes a significant revision of the traditions of medieval romance. As Patricia Ingham writes, late Middle English Arthurian romance frequently situates King Arthur at the center of "fantas[ies] of insular union, 'an imagined community' of British sovereignty," while simultaneously exploring the conflicts and tensions that render such fantasies impossible. Ingham writes, "tales of Arthur encode utopian hopes for communitarian wholeness; yet they also poignantly narrate the impossibilities, the aggressions, and the traumas, of British insular community."33 Accordingly, late Middle English romance often fixates upon the death of Arthur, the impossibility of Camelot, and the inevitable dissolution of the precarious unity that both represent. Yet these events always occur at the end of narrative and thus allude, in Ingham's words, "to a contested history of Briton" while at the same time "calibrat[ing] desire for a sovereign future."34 In many science-fiction computer games (and arguably in many fantasybased computer games as well), however, the absent sovereign is an essential pre-condition to narrative that allows for the development of the player's character into a sovereign in his or her own right. Science-fiction computer games, then, are (to use Ingham's term) "sovereign fantasies," but instead of proposing a larger communal unity as legible from the vicissitudes of history, they propose an intensely personal unity of the self, allowing the player to imagine his or her own agency as relatively untroubled by exterior limitations.

After fighting their way to the Endar Spire's bridge in the hope of finding Bastila (and thereby rescuing the ship), for instance, players learn that she has fled to Taris in an escape pod. Unable to restore Bastila to her

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proper position as the sovereign of the besieged Endar Spire, players escape the ship just as its defenses falter and it is destroyed. Players encounter much of the same situation upon crash-landing on Taris. Once again assigned to locate Bastila, they discover that without a unifYing sovereign figure to give meaning to its explicit feudal social hierarchy, the city has degenerated into racial and factional conflicts. In the Upper City, angry nobles decry the influx of aliens, while the Sith (themselves identified as aliens) struggle to control the population of the city by maintaining a planet-wide quarantine. Similarly, the Lower City is divided between two rival swoop gangs, the Hidden Beks and the Black Vulkars, who struggle with each other and with the crime lord Davik for control of the city's underworld. Even the outcasts in the Undercity, who are by far the most sympathetic faction that players encounter, are divided by factional differences. Gendar, their nominal leader, is unwilling to dedicate the resources either to lead his people to the "promised land," the path advocated by the elder Rukil, or to adopt the mercenary plan proposed by the young merchant, Igear. As with the factional conflicts that rage in the Upper City and the Lower City, the result is an impasse. Unable to see beyond the immediate concerns of their portion of the city, and unable to turn to the now-absent galactic republic for aid, the city's disparate factions only reinforce, rather than remedy, the social divisions that trouble the planet.

As on. the Endar Spire, however, the quest to locate Bastila and restore her to her rightful place in command of the expedition does not save Taris, but instead leads to its destruction. In part this is because Taris is beyond redemption by the time players discover it. Although the factional struggles that divide the Undercity and the Lower City are centered on specific individuals who, for good or bad, embody different approaches to sovereignty, the Upper City does not advance a champion to challenge Darth Malak, the Sith lord who supervises the invasion and quarantine of Taris from his orbiting star destroyer. Thus, while players are able to restore sovereignty and therefore restore order to the lower tiers of the city's explicit social hierarchy (as represented by the Undercity and the Lower City), they are unable to contest Malak's control of the highest tier of the city's hierarchy. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that locating and restoring Bastila to her position as commander of the expedition (and hence as the most suitable candidate to challenge Malak) does not restore order to the player's party, but occasions a crisis of leadership. In fact, the player's second-in-command, Carth Onasi, explicitly questions Bastila's qualifications to reassume the leadership of the party. "Your talents might win us a few battles," says Onasi, "but that doesn't make you a good leader! A good leader would at least listen to someone who has seen more combat than she ever will!" Coming as it does, at the moment in the game when players have reestablished order in

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the Undercity and the Lower City and are poised to confront the Sith in their headquarters in the Upper City, this exchange is telling in that, rather than confirming Bastila's fitness to lead the mission (a fitness that had heretofore been beyond question), it reveals that, even though Bastila possesses the rare Battle Meditation ability, she is ultimately unfit to take command of the party, much less to challenge Darth Malak for control of the planet.

As on the Endar Spire, then, players fight their way through the periphery of Taris's Lower City and Undercity to the Upper City only to find that the position of the commander is, to all intents and purposes, vacant. Unable to locate a sovereign figure and therefore to restore the sovereign order to Taris, players are forced to flee the planet just as they fled the Endar Spire. In this respect, the events that transpire on Taris and the Endar Spire serve a double purpose: on the one hand, they function as a sort of cautionary tale, illustrating the fate that awaits the galaxy if, in the absence of the republic, sovereignty cannot be restored; and, on the other hand, they establish a pattern of deference in which players are asked to locate a missing sovereign only to find that they are increasingly asked to function as that sovereign. This pattern culminates near the middle of the game, when players learn that the character they have been playing is actually the Sith Lord, Darth Revan, who was betrayed by his apprentice, Darth Malak, and who lost his memory as a result of that confrontation. In this respect, the goal of Star '-%rs: Knights of the Old Republic is not simply to defeat the Sith, but to restore the sovereign order of the universe, an order that was usurped when the apprentice Malak (in a move that predicts many of the game's local conflicts) first seized control from his master.

The primary quest in Star '-%rs: Knights of the Old Republic, then, is not to restore the galactic republic - a republic fragmented beyond repair as a result of the Mandalor War and the subsequent Sith betrayal- but to recover the memory and therefore the figure of the sovereign. In the most immediate sense, this memory is the literal memory of Darth Revan, which was lost when his sovereignty was usurped by his apprentice. On a larger scale, however, this memory is that of a collective socio-political system, which requires a history that makes the loss of the republic and the ensuing chaos legible in light of its overriding ethical system - an ethical system that embodies the dark-side/light-side order of the universe.

In this respect, it is not surprising that the game is explicitly nostalgic for the medieval, as it is the medieval that allows the game to imagine a universe centered around a sovereign, chivalric order. Nor is it surprising that game consistently asks players to confront the rampant technology and rampant commercialism that, in the context of the game, is with an attempt to usurp or otherwise compensate for the

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sovereign. This technological threat is embodied by the numerous droids that players encounter in the course of the game. For the majority of the game's droids, the universe of the game is that of work: maintenance droids clean the game's various passageways; sentry and surveillance droids maintain order; protocol droids facilitate communication; and medical droids heal the sick. The droids, in short, are the peasants of the game. They constitute (to borrow Paul Freedman's characterization of medieval peasants) a "persuasive and familiar presence." Yet, at the same time they are clearly "other" both in physical appearance (the most extreme look like spiders, while the most humanoid nevertheless walk with shambling, zombie-like gaits) and in their essential relation to the adventures that structure the game's narrative world.F' In this sense, the droids of the game recall the villain in Yvain, who, as Auerbach notes, knows "the material circumstances of t.he advent~re" but does not know "what 'adventure' is."36 The salvage droids on Tans, for example, hover over the remains of a crashed escape pod without knowing (or caring) about the wider implications of the pod's presence, and the "ancient droid" on Dantooine dutifully guards the temple a~d the secrets it contains, yet knows only the limits of its own programmmg.

While many droids are explicitly subservient to the demands of players and characters in the game, others have rebelled against their would-be masters and thus constitute a threat to a sovereign order in which droids, as a representative underclass, are expected to be nameless, faceless servitors of their organic betters. On Dantooine, for example, players encounter Elise M?ntagne, who owns one of the farms to the north of the Jedi compound. Elise asks players to help her find her missing "companion," which turns out to be a "personal assistance droid" created by her late husband to care for her after his death. According to Elise, the droid is "the last piece of my poor, passed-away husband that I have left." ''As the last legacy of my husband," Elise tells players, "I need him back! His absence gnaws at me like a gaping wound." As the ambiguous pronouns "him" and "his" in this passage suggest, Elise conflates the droid with her husband, a move that is represented as highly problematic in the context of the game. The three responses that the game affords players to Elise's admission that her missing companion is a droid all reflect some degree of incredulity:

1. Your missing companion is a droid??

2. A droid?!?

3. You expect me to run off to find some stupid droid??

This sense of incredulity is also reflected in the player's quest log, which states that Elise "misses [the droid] VERY much." When players locate the

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droid hiding in the Dantooine wilderness, he confirms the problematic nature of his relationship with Elise, telling players that "she is obsessed. She rarely sees other people, and appears to be fixated on me as her husband." At this point, players can either destroy the droid or force it to return to Elise. Destroying the droid is the preferred solution, as doing so yields light- or dark-side points, whereas returning the droid to Elise yields no light- or dark-side points. Yet no matter what players do, the outcome of the quest serves to restore the proper sovereign order. Destroying the droid destroys the unnatural relationship and, if players choose the light side, frees Elise to find more appropriate, human companionship. Forcing the droid to return restores Elise's authority over the droid, confirming the droid's status as (in the droid's own words) "asecond-class being with no rights at all."37 In either case, players must reaffirm the preeminence of the human over the technological at the conclusion of the quest, which is akin to defending the preeminence of the apparently natural sovereign from the monsters, peasants, droids, and other unnatural pretenders to the throne.t"

Elise's problematic substitution of the technological for the patriarchal is echoed on a larger scale in the game by the Sith. In the game's title crawl, for example, players learn that the Siths armada of technologically superior starships has dealt the republic several major defeats and that Sith foot soldiers have invaded and occupied several planets on the outer rim of the republic. Although the Sith initially appear to players as aliens - an inhuman force of dark, faceless medieval knights - players discover that the Sith are actually composed of disaffected elements of the republic that, led by Darth Revan and Darth Malak, stumbled upon the "Star Forge" (a cache of alien technology) while fighting the Mandalorian wat'? "A machine of invincible might, a tool of unstoppable conquest," the Star Forge is the source of the Sith's seemingly endless supply of starships and weapons and is accordingly represented as an abomination. Only accessible through a fragmented series of Star Maps secreted in the most remote wilderness areas of Dantooine, Kashyyyk, Tatooine, Manahan, and Korriban, the Star Forge is an artifact of an ancient, violent empire that not only enslaved much of the galaxy but was also responsible for the large-scale environmental destruction of worlds like Tatooine. The Star Forge thus embodies the threat of a future-as-past that is organized around the imperatives of a fractured technological, rather than sovereign ethical, order. This is underscored by the fact that the Star continues to function autonomously millennia after having caused downfall of its creators, the Rakata, whom it subsequently imprisons their home world in a state of near primitivism.

Like Elise and her droid, then, the Sith represent an unnatural ~u.uU'.~ of the human and the technological, an alliance in which the tecnnoiogica dominates rather than serves the human. As the leader of the Sith,

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epitomizes this problematic blurring of otherwise sovereign divisions berween the organic master and the technological servant. Involved in the betrayal that led to the fragmentation of the republic and in the betrayal that dissolved the master-apprentice relationship he shared with Darth Revan, Malak is represented as half-mechanical. The lower portion of Malak's face is obscured by a cybernetic mask, and he speaks with a synthesized voice. When this mask is removed in one of the game's cut-scene movies, players learn that Malak's mouth and voice box are missing and have been replaced by machinery, a glowing technological apparatus that has been grafted over a dark rift in Malak's lower jaw. Malak's sovereign voice, then, has quite literally been supplanted by the voice of the technological. In this respect, Malak comes to represent the ultimate perversion of the medieval idea that the king's ideal body was paradoxically separate yet intrinsically linked to his imperfect physical body. Summarizing this concept as it was first described by Ernst Kantorowicz, Kellie Robertson writes that the king was held to have "one body transitory, corruptible and subject to the laws which he himself enunciates, and at the same time, a body timeless, corporate, and touched by the divine."40 Rather than express the inherent corporeal unity of these two bodies, Malak's technological voice-box emphasizes the conspicuous fissure between his physical body and the technological source of his authority. The implications here are two-fold: that Malak's authority is not essential to his person and (worst yet) that authority itself is a technology, and, as such, is able to be indefinitely reproduced and deferred.

The game thus requires that players destroy Malak regardless of whether they espouse the light or dark side. The embodiment of an inverted social order in which the underclass, augmented by technology, is able to overthrow the nobility, Malak's version of sovereignty is fatally flawed in its dependence upon technology as the ultimate source of its power. This becomes clear when players confront Malak in the game's final level, appropriately entitled "The Factory." Surrounded by the technology of the Star Forge, players discover that the key to defeating Malak is to destroy a series of stasis tanks that line the edges of the chamber. Each tank holds an incapacitated Jedi knight, from which Malak periodically recharges his powers. This arrangement represents the ultimate horror of the technological. Rather than serving the human, the technological, as embodied by Malak and his array of stasis tanks, sustains itself at the expense of the human, and, in particular, the chivalric. As Malak says, "The Star Forge is more than just a space station. In some ways, it is like a living creature. It hungers. And it can feed on the dark side that is within all of us!"

The threat of the technological to the sovereign order of the game's universe is paralleled by the equally expansive commercial threat of the Czerka Corporation. Unlike many of the other merchants whom players

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encounter in the game, the Czerka Corporation is not content with the status quo of buying and selling items from small shops but, as Crattis Yurkal, proprietor of the general store on Dantooine, relates, aspires to its 0v;n emp~re. The company's interests in the game thus represent those of a third faction. One of the company's representatives on Korriban admits as muc~ ,:,hen he tells players that "the company has to survive regardless of who 1S III charge. The Republic, the Sith, eh [ ... J the economy has to keep ?oing." Here, "the economy" equals the interests of the Czerka Corporation, mterests that are clearly separate from those of the Republic or the Sith, with whom the Czerka Corporation openly acknowledges collaborating. Althoug~ Y urkal and other independent merchants in the game attribute the dep~edatIOns by the Cz~rka Corporation to an excessive concern for profitability at whatever cost, it soon becomes clear to players that "the economy" represents a sovereign interest in and of its own right.

. On Tatooin~, for ex~mple, the mining ventures of the Czerka Corpora-

~10~ are on the brink of faIlure ~ue to the relatively low quality of the planet's Illd1genous ore. The company s protocol officer, however, is not concerned with extracting the corporation from its unprofitable commitment to the planet's mining industry, but with eradicating the indigenous Sand People. Players learn that the protocol officer has exaggerated the threat of the Sand People and has understated the corporation's role in the conflict. Local miners claim that "the raids on the crawlers hardly make a dent," and a sandcrawler mechanic tells players that the vehicles "get pretty banged up even without the attacks." Likewise, a local conservationist informs players that the Czerka Corporation "deployed numerous giant sandcrawlers and started tearing up the desert with ion shovels and whatever else" without first attempting to negotiate with the Sand People for "territory or resources." "To the Sand People," he continues, "it must have seemed like an invasion." As the rhetoric of "territory" and "invasion" suggests, the Czerka's conflict with the Sand People is a sovereign conflict. Accordingly, the Czerka protocol officer specifically contracts players to eliminate the chieftain of the l?c~ Sand ~eople a~d retriev~ the gaffi stick that serves as the unique signifier of his authority over his people and his tribe's claim to its planetary legacy.

The attempts by the Czerka Corporation at sovereign destabilization are even more pronounced on the Wookiee home world. Known to Wookiees as Kashyyyk, the planet is referred to as G5-623 by representatives of the corporation and is called "Edean" by the company's stockholders. The of the name "Edean" is telling in that it recalls the mythical garden of Eden. the context of the Czerka Corporation's activities on the planet, the name strikingly appropriate, for just as Eden comes to represent the !-'V,>L-J.d!-','dlldU descent of humanity into servitude in the medieval tradition, "Edean" comes

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represent a similar legacy for members of its indigenous Wookiee population, who are being "harvested" by the Czerka Corporation and sold off-world as "thralls.v" In order to facilitate its Wookiee slave trade, the Czerka Corporation installs a puppet government headed by the Wookiee Chuundar, who agrees to exchange "healthy Wookiees" for weapons. Chuundar also agrees to teach his Wookiee subjects "Galactic Basic," which, as one of the game's many loading screens makes clear, is a universal language meant to facilitate trade among the galaxies' various alien races - the language of "the economy," so to speak. In the context of the Czerka Corporation's operations on Kashyyyk, however, knowledge of Galactic Basic serves to prepare the Wookiees for servitude off-world.

Players soon discover, however, that Chuundar's rule is illegitimate. As the "runt" of his litter, Chuundar gains power by exiling first his brother and then his father, with the help of the Czerka Corporation. As is the case with Darth Malak, Chuundar rises to power by inverting the sovereign order - an inversion that, in Chuundar's case, is made possible not by the technology of the Star Forge, but by the economic imperatives of the Czerka Corporation. The end result, however, is the same: although Chuundar is nominally spoken of as the rightful sovereign of the planet by representatives of the Czerka Corporation and many of his Wookiee subjects, he is ultimately as subject to the dictates of his corporate masters as are the "thralls" that he sells into bondage.

In thus identifying the technological and the commercial with the subversion of the sovereign ethical order, Star I.%rs: Knights of the Old Republic presents players with a version of the Star I.%rs universe in which the good/ evil, light-side/dark-side ethical organization of the traditional romantic worldview is in danger of being supplanted by a version of the medieval that is devoid of not only values, but also the center (the Coruscant that is often spoken of, but is always absent in the game) that gives those values meaning. Thrust into this conflict, players are forced to assume the role of the disenfranchised sovereign who, in recovering his powers, rises from obscurity to beat back the nameless, faceless threat of a vast technological and commercial conspiracy. The overriding desire in the game is thus not for a return to the Old Republic, but for the realization of an ideal medieval world free of the taint of technological or commercial imposters. This desire is given voice early in the game by one of the alien refugees on Taris who longs for the security of his medieval home world: "in my world," the alien tells players, "I lived in a splendid castle, but here on this planet, I'm forced to hide out in this slum." Here, the alien's lost castle is synonymous with his lost sovereign agency - his being "forced" passively to endure the deprivations of the Taris "slums."

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In their quest to restore the ideal, sovereign medieval order, players, then, do not confront evil, per se, or even chaos, but what Frederic Jameson describes as the defining characteristic of:

[aJ figural process presently best observed in a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature - one is tempted to characterize it as "high-tech paranoia" - in which the circuits and networks of some putative global putative computer hookup are narratively mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous and interlocking information agencies in a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind.f

Although Jameson is referring here to the Cyberpunk science fiction of William Gibson and others, he could as easily be speaking of Star n::ars:

Knights of the Old Republic and, arguably, of many other medievalist narratives that equate technological excess with attempts to usurp the apparently natural sovereign order. Indeed, the game not only involves players in what Jameson describes as the predominant struggle between modernism and postmodernism (the struggle for and against a center that, in the works of E. L. Doctorow, is frequently also a struggle for the past and the future), but also presents this struggle to players in the context of a labyrinthine technological construction: a narrative of lost sovereignty relayed through a fundamentally disorientating pastiche of intertwining (and sometimes divergent) levels, symbols, allusions, dialog choices, and sub-narratives that, in their frequent recourse to the medieval, blur even the distinction between science fiction and fantasy.

Yet, as Jameson makes clear, this is not a struggle for or against technology. Pointing out that "[tjechnological development is [ ... J in the Marxist view the result of the development of capital rather than some ultimately determining instance in its own right,"43 he writes:

our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even. deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself 44

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Read in this context, Star n::ars Knights of the Old Republic asks players to confront and defeat the forces that made the game's publication possible: the decentered technological and commercial production that characterizes the culture industry in third-stage capitalism. Moreover, the game structures this confrontation in such a way that if players follow the rules and apply themselves, its defeat is, if not inevitable, all but assured. In this context, the medieval is more than simply a desire for a simpler time, for a value system that is structured and organized around clear, sovereign principles. In its emphasis on the triumph of the hierarchical and the chivalric, the medieval constitutes a desire for what Jean Baudrillard (who revises Freud's understanding of the phrase) identifies as a "reality principle'Y': a "collective demand for signs of power"46 that can simulate the absent, absolute referential and disguise the fact that "power has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblancer"?

In this respect, Star n::ars Knights of the Old Republic not only simulates the larger struggle between the real and the hyperreal, but constructs this struggle so that the player's inevitable triumph over the game (as a representative of the hyperreal) preserves the illusion that there is still something to struggle against: a reality principle that exists and that can be reached. In scripting its own end, the game thus encodes what Baudrillard states is the only recourse left to power:

To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis, negativity and antipower: this is the only solution-alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious cycle of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its already seen and its already dead."

It is telling, then, that when players reach the end of Star n::ars: Knights of the Old Republic - when, in a reprise of the ending of Star n::ars: Episode Iv, players stand on a platform and receive commendations for delivering the absent republic from its ruin - they are not treated as sovereigns but as soldiers, as cogs in a larger military machine. Players thus end the game where they began. This is the irony of Star n::ars: Knights of the Old Republic and of many other such science-fiction computer games that invoke the medieval and, in particular, the sovereign as an antidote to the ostensibly unnatural, de-centering forces of third-stage, technological capitalism: in the final moment, when the time has come for players to ascend the dais and assume the crown that they have earned by defeating the game (a defeat that was pre-ordained from the beginning), the game does not reward player with power (which is, of course, impossible to do), but instead defers and offers players the next best thing - the sequel and the chance to do it allover again.

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NOTES

1. Kathryn Hume, "The Medieval Romance and Science Fiction: The Anatomy of a Resemblance," Journal of Popular Culture 16:1 (1982): 15-26.

2. David C. Hartwell and Catherine Cramer, "Space Opera Redefined," in James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, ed., Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 264.

3. Hartwell and Cramer, "Space Opera Redefined," 262. On the Western as neochivalric narrative, see John Fraser's America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 12-14 and 40-41.

4. Star wars IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas, 20th-Century Fox. 1977.

On the role played by the' film in the revival of space opera, see Hartwell and Cramer, "Space Opera Redefined," 263. The overt medievalism of the original Star wars films has been widely noted in both popular press and scholarly sources. See, for example, Tom Henthorne's "Boys to Men: Medievalism and Masculinity in Star wars and E. T.: The Extra- Terrestrial," in Martha W Driver and Sid Ray, ed., The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffi (jefferson, NC:

MacFarland & Company, 2004), 73-85; Verlyn Flieger's "A Distant Mirror: Tolkien and Jackson in the Looking Glass," in Richard Utz and Jesse G. Swan, ed., Postmodern Medievalisms, Studies in Medievalism 13 (2004), 67-78; Sylvia McCosker's "The Lady, the Knights and 'the Force' or How 'Medieval' is Star Wars?," culture@home.com <http://old.anglicanmedia.com.au/old/cullStarWars.htm>, accessed December 15, 2006; and Jim Paul's "The Medieval Mind of George Lucas," Salon. com, 1999 <http://www.salon.com/people/bclI999/05/ 18/lucas/index.htmb,

accessed November 22, 2006.

5. Henthorne, "Boys to Men," 78. Henthorne quotes Jay Cocks from John Baxter's Mythmaker: The Life and Work of George Lucas (New York: Avon, 1999), 243.

6. Hartwell and Cramer, "Space Opera Redefined," 263.

7. Hartwell and Cramer, "Space Opera Redefined," 264; Henthorne notes that "Star wars is more than just a coming of age story modeled on medieval and neomedieval romances, of course; it is also a product of the late 1970s, a time when Americans were increasingly conscious of their diminishing military power, rising crime, and decreasing standard of living. Many Americans - including James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Ronald Reagan - associated the problems America faced with the erosion of traditional beliefs and values. When considered in such a context, the reactionary function of Star wars becomes apparent: Lucas seems to be calling for a return to the traditional values just as conservative leaders of the late 1970's did" (79).

8. Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 51.

9. William Caxton, "Caxton's Preface," in Eugene Vinaver and P. J. C. Field, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3rd edn, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

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1990), cxlv; Felicity Riddy, "Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War," in Elizabeth Atchibald and A. S. G. Edwards, ed., A Companion to Mallory (Cambridge, Eng.: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 71.

10. Although a full discussion of these games is beyond the scope of this essay, the following survey of award-winning and best-selling games from recent years illustrates the prevalence of this general trend. Deus Ex (Eidos Interactive, 2002) begins by promising players that "soon there will be order again, a new age. Aquinas spoke of the mythical City on the Hill. Soon the city will be a reality and we will be crowned kings, or better than that, gods." StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998), which was developed from Blizzard Entertainment's medieval-therned strategy game warcraft, presents players with an alien race, the Protoss, whose path to "Khala," or ascension, is largely in the hands of a warrior class, the Templars. The Longest Journey (Funcomm, 1999) involves players in a series of quests that takes them from Stark, a Blade-Runner-like version of the near future, to Atcadia, a medieval land of "magic and chaos." And Syberia (The Adventure Company, 2002) presents players with a Steam-Punk version of post-cold-war Eastern Europe in which the player, cast in the role of an American capitalist, is drawn further and further into the ruins of the Soviet Empire in a quest to locate the inventor of the game's ethereal clockwork mechanisms - the craftsman-as-king whose absence is poignantly embodied in the machines that, though non-functional, give beauty to the game's increasingly desolate, bureaucratic landscapes.

11. Star wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC Version), Lucas Atts, 2003.

12. Danny Chihdo, "Not Your Evil Father's Old Republic," Xbox.com, 2003 <http://www.xbox.com/en- US/ games/ s/ statwarsknightsofoldrepublic/ firstencounter .htm» (para. 4 of 11), accessed November 20, 2006.

13. Chihdo, "Not Your Evil Father's Old Republic," para. 5 of 11.

14. Chihdo, "Not Your Evil Father's Old Republic," para. 3 of 11.

15. Lukas Kristjanson, "RPG Vault: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Diary #1," Ign.com, 2002 <http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/37 4/37 4872p Lhtml» (para. 5 of7), accessed November 20,2006.

16. Kristjanson, "RPG Vault: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Diary #1," para. 50f7.

17. Adam Baratz, "The Stage of the Game," Ars Technica 2001 <http://arstechnica.com/ reviews/ 01 q 3/ gaminghistory/ ghistory-4.htmb (para. 2 of 6), accessed November 24, 2006.

18. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1957), 113.

19. Auerbach, Mimesis, 119.

20. "Taris," Star wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2003, <http://www.lucasarts.com/products/ swkotorlW _taris.htmb, paras. 2-4 of 5, accessed November 18, 2006.

21. "Taris," para. 4 of 5.

22. For an overview of medieval renderings of the social hierarchy around the metaphor of the physical body, see Paul Strohm's "Chaucer and the Structure of Social Relations," in his Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989),3-10.

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23. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990),62.

24. Hume, "The Medieval Romance and Science Fiction," 19.

25. "Kashyyyk," Star wars: Knights of the Old Republic, 2003, <http://www.lucasarts.com/products/ swkotorlW _kashyyyk.htmb (para. 1 of 4), accessed November 18,2006.

26. "Dantooine," Star wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2003, <http://www.lucasarts.com/products/swkotorlW _dantooine.htmb (para. 1 00), accessed November 18,2006.

27. Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, 67-68.

28. For example, after players have recovered the serum and return to Forn's office, they are afforded the option of turning it over to Forn. If they do so, the game presents players with the following dialog choices:

1 Here you go.

2 Hold on. What about my reward?

Regardless of the option players choose, Forn responds by offering players a modest reward of "a few credits and two spare medpacs." The game then presents players with five additional options, two of which allow the players a chance to use their character's persuasion skill (as indicated in the game's dialog by the "[Persuade]" tag) to influence the outcome of the conversation:

1 Keep your reward, Zelka. You need it more than I do. 2 Thank you Zelka. That would be fine.

3 [Persuade] Are you sure you couldn't spare a little something extra? 4 [Persuade] That's it? After all the trouble I went to?

5 You better come up with something extra or I'll put a smoking blaster hole right between your eyes!

Although these nested narrative choices often lead to the same conclusion, they nevertheless contribute to the illusion that the game is highly interactive and affords players a large degree of narrative agency.

29. Henthorne, "Boys to Men," 77. See also Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry, 197-218. Alan Lupuck likewise discusses the development of knighthood as a moral concept in twentieth-century America in his "Visions of Courageous Achievement: Arthurian Youth Groups in America," in Kathleen Verduin, ed., Medievalism in North America, Studies in Medievalism 6 (1994), 50-68.

30. Hume, "The Medieval Romance and Science Fiction," 18.

31. Auerbach, Mimesis, 118. Auerbach observes that much of the combat in medieval romance occurs only for the sake of combat. He notes, for example, that in Chretien's Yvain "an ethical justification for [ ... ] [Calogrenant's] combat with the knight of the magic spring is nowhere given" (114).

32. "Bastel, -ile," in Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn, ed., Middle English Dictionary, 21 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952-2005), 663-64.

33. Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2.

34. Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, 3.

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35. Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999),2-3.

36. Auerbach, Mimesis, 118.

37. If players choose the dark-side option and do not tell Elise that they destroyed the droid, Elise runs off to begin an endless search for it. In this respect, choosing the dark-side path also restores the sovereign order in that it simultaneously destroys the problematic technological surrogate and punishes Elise for her involvement in the relationship.

38. We are grateful to Carol Robinson for pointing this out in her comments on an early draft of this article.

39. The text on one of the game's loading screens explicitly makes this point, informing players that the "Sith died out centuries ago - Sith of this age are not a species, but the followers of an ideal."

40. Kellie Robertson, "Branding and the Technologies of Labor Regulation," in Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel, ed., The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 144. See also Ernst Kantorowicz's classic study, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).

41. On the implications in medieval thought of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden for medieval peasants, who were held as the descendants of Cain, see Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 89-93, and Lee Patterson's "The Miller's Tale and the Politics of Laughter," in his Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999),262-70.

42. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991),38.

43. Jameson, Postmodernism, 35.

44. Jameson, Postmodernism, 37-38.

45. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 22.

46. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 23.

47. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 23.

48. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 19.