Our discussion of fan fiction and the "canon" of fictional properties on Wednesday made me think of no franchise more than Star Trek. As arguably the oldest and, at times, most nitpicky fandom, the question of Star Trek canon is almost always involved whenever fans come together to discuss the series, and particularly when new additions to the franchise are in the works.

While Trek has not, to my knowledge, been the subject of an ARG (with the exception of the ARG that I hear is currently running in conjunction with the upcoming movie), I think we can approach questions of how we construct fictional worlds like Star Trek's in very much the same fashion as we would the fictional world of an ARG - indeed, the issues are, I believe, almost entirely the same.

Star Trek, as a franchise, encompasses more than forty years of material: six television series (with more than 700 episodes amounting to in excess of 500 hours of television), ten (soon to be eleven) theatrical release movies, a few dozen video games, hundreds of paperback novels, and stacks and stacks of reference guides, technical manuals detailing in-world objects, game books, and so forth. And that's just the officially-licensed tip of the iceberg.

Explore online a little and you'll find, I'm certain, an uncountable number of fan fiction stories, several fan series (some of impressive quality, all things considered), music videos, more video games, and even audio dramas. And most of these things presumably add to the tapestry that is Star Trek as a whole.

The official Paramount line is that the only truly canonical things in the Star Trek universe are the TV series and movies, and they even exclude the second series in the franchise's history, Star Trek: The Animated Series (which is not as bad as it sounds). Anything and everything else is fine until and unless it contradicts something that appears on film, at which point the film version wins. And while I don't know many fans (though I'm sure they exist) who are intimately familiar with more than a handful of the novels (if any), plenty of fans know those canon episodes pretty well, and are alert to things that contradict.

Consequently, new entries into the Star Trek universe come under extreme scrutiny. Case in point, the upcoming Star Trek film, which revisits Kirk, Spock, and the rest for the first time since Star Trek VI in 1991. The J.J. Abrams-helmed prequel film has met with varied response from fans along its entire production life - from those who think that the guy most identified with properties like Lost, Alias, and Cloverfield can help revitalize the franchise, to those who are fundamentally against the idea of anyone other than William Shatner playing Captain Kirk (though, in defense of the new movie's casting, I think Zachary Quinto has about as good a chance of being a Nimoy-worthy Spock as anyone).

It's a fascinating phenomenon, I think: the way that the Star Trek fan community, even amongst those Trekkies who are not the crazy, hardcore, entire-episode-quoting, Klingon-headridge-wearing fanboys that a lot of people think of as going along with that term, pay rapt attention to what comes out and are very put off when something conflicts with previously-established canon. This is where you get the same loss of realism and immersion that This is Not a Game champions so strongly: when the players - or, in this case, viewers - find something that breaks the realism of the universe.

And, to be sure, realism is generally a goal for any dramatic production, interactive or otherwise, and for more than just the diehards amongst fandoms. Think for a moment about Star Wars instead (yes, mentioning the two in the same discussion is totally allowed). What makes the original trilogy so great? Well, lots of things, but of relevance to this discussion is the degree to which the original trilogy presented us with a fantastic and diverse universe that these characters occupied, and gave us believable characters and organic locations that made the Star Wars galaxy seem like it could be a real place, within its own set of rules (obviously, Jedi and the Force still require a certain acceptance of things being not-quite-like-our-reality).

Now fast forward to 1999 and the highly-anticipated Episode I. And for all of its flaws, one of the biggest bones of contention with viewers of the movie - even those that didn't really care about Star Wars that much when there wasn't a movie coming out - was the introduction of the idea of midi-chlorians, microscopic organisms that cause Jedi, and those like them, to be able to manipulate the Force. This pseudo-scientific infusion into what fans had come, for more than two decades, to accept as a mystical philosophy, to believe in as a completely unscientific thing, rubbed almost everyone wrong, it seems, because it suddenly broke the continuity as we understood it of the Star Wars universe.

I think that how we create these massive universes for ourselves - very much in a shared fashion - is intriguing, and the dedication of many participants to play by the rules even more so. To return to the topic of Star Trek, I played for a while with an online play-by-e-mail group, of which there are a huge number set in the Star Trek universe, which had, as one of its GMs' main duties, to make sure that any plots, objects, or characters introduced during the (very free-form) game fit within the established canon of the universe. It was important to everyone involved that we played by what rules had been established by the television series, because that was where we found not only a way to organize and limit our play (and that of people who might otherwise go a little crazy), but a sense of realism and believability in the proceedings, without which the game would've been much less involving.

Similarly, to return to the upcoming movie, fans have had a thus-far negative response to the appearance of the Starship Enterprise in the film. Because the film is a prequel, it presumably involves the same ship and crew from the original series, and while everyone accepts that the original cast is too old (and in some cases deceased) to play the roles again, the ship is just a special effect; it's appearance is, from a technical standpoint, arbitrary. But people know what it should look like.

So let's do a little side-by-side. The top image is the new version, the middle image is a computer-generated image of the original version from the 1960s series (it has been seen briefly in more recent Trek productions and go the CG facelift, but besides not being a model is unchanged), and the bottom image is the Enterprise from the six movies which featured Kirk & Co (it looks different because, within the context of the first film, the ship received a major refit). Note that I didn't make this image.Enterprise Comparison

Now, considering that the top two images, which are supposedly the same ship in the same stage of its life, are very different, this raises the question of how well this film will fit into continuity. For any standalone movie - or even a Trek film involving a new ship, for instance - this would be no problem. But some fans have spoken against this design, saying that they like the look of it, but it isn't the Enterprise. In real life, a vehicle - a car, say - doesn't just look one way on day and another way the next without good reason, and so this breaks some of the believability of the Star Trek universe - it creates a moment where a viewer is forced to face the fact that a different set of people made this movie than made the original series forty years ago, and this set of people decided that they wanted the ship to look different. Similar decisions were made with the most recent and oft-reviled series, Star Trek: Enterprise, which was also a prequel, though it went another century into the past and involved new characters and a new ship.

So the question of believability extends well beyond the ARG world. We've probably all, at some point, faced a situation with a book or movie where we were turned off by something that simply wasn't believable to us, even within the context of that world's rules. It may be funny to think about something being "unbelievable" in, say, a fantasy setting, but the best-crafted worlds still have the same sense of internal order and logic as the real one does, even if they work on different principles entirely.

It seems to me that our current need, more than ever, for things to be coherent and make sense over time - for that never used to be an issue for TV shows or books or anything, which only had to make sense within a given episode or volume - is an interesting sign of the times. I'm not sure of what. But now, it seems, we want more badly to be able to believe in the fictions we create, and to do that we often accept an unspoken pact to follow the rules within them - and to oppose anyone who would choose to break them. I see this tendency even in people who aren't dedicated to one of the universes most known for its attentive fan base. Indeed, that is a prime reason why Heroes has lost much of its wide appeal: things within the plot and characters stopped making coherent sense. At one time, the average viewer wouldn't have batted an eye at this; they would have just gone along with it. Now, though, even the least discerning television viewer tends to pay attention, even if they aren't actively aware of it. I find the entire situation, as Spock might say, "fascinating."