When I was 8 years old, my favorite toy in the world was LEGOs, and my favorite franchise was Star Wars. I still have dozens of LEGO sets in my childhood bedroom, and I carry distinct memories of watching the Star Wars: The Clone Wars television series at my mom’s office while she worked. Aside from playing with LEGOs, my favorite pastime was playing videogames on the family Nintendo Wii, so imagine my excitement when I found out there was a LEGO Star Wars video game!
A promotional banner for the most recent LEGO Star Wars game
As a child, I loved the LEGO games, and even though they’re definitely aimed towards children, I still love them as an adult. The defining features of these modern LEGO video games are cartoony violence with explosions of LEGO studs, a ballooning character roster, and bastardized versions of scenes from the source material using LEGO humor. During gameplay, each of these elements are at the forefront of the player’s experience, emphasizing the fact that you’re playing a LEGO game. This is a great example of Bolter and Grusin’s hypermediacy, which describes media that is self-aware of its own medium and presents itself as such. The fact that the LEGO games are “LEGO games” is an integral part of the personality of the media, and an integral part of the player’s experience.
Obi-Wan cutting off Darth Maul’s legs in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Obi-Wan cutting off Darth Maul’s legs in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
As an example, let’s look at the moment in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace when a young Obi-Wan angrily halves Darth Maul in retaliation for the death of his master, Qui-Gon Jinn. In the original film, this is an incredibly tense and emotional moment, with all hope seemingly being lost just moments before Obi-Wan’s epic maneuver. However, in the LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga video game, this moment is played comedically, as are most other scenes in the LEGO Star Wars games. An already-chopped-in-half Maul stabs Qui-Gon while Obi-Wan freaks out about Maul’s amputated legs which are running around in a comedic way. Another aspect that adds to the hypermediacy is the fact that the legs have the same stubs that LEGO legs have, which wouldn’t make sense for realism, but make perfect sense for a LEGO game.
The LEGO games rely heavily on the player’s prior knowledge of a story or characters to apply the comedic LEGO remediation on top of this prior experience. The early LEGO games didn’t even have voice acting, probably due to financial limitations. Instead, the characters expressed dialogue through grunts and yells, and the story was largely based on the player’s prior knowledge of the source material. I really like the style of the LEGO video games, and I like seeing how they remediate beloved stories into fun, family-friendly experiences. They are some of the best examples of good remediation and hypermediacy.
Sources:
https://en.brickimedia.org/wiki/Video_game
TT Games, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. 2022
LucasFilm Productions, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. 1999
New Media: Storytelling in Literature, Films, and Games 