From Dungeons to Starships
This past weekend I attended an immersive event at Universal Studios Hollywood where the audience could participate in live experiences based on both Dungeons and Dragons and the Star Trek franchise. These combinations of live theater and set design were incredibly well crafted, but they got me thinking about what these two ubiquitous media worlds have in common — they’re part of a new collective myth-making tradition in that often conflicts with our current economic / legal system.
Storytelling is one of the most basic human urges. Long before books or films, our ancestors sat around fires sharing myths of creation, heroic epics, and cautionary fables. We have always hungered not just to listen, but to participate – to internalize the roles of trickster or warrior, to retell tales with our own embellishments, to carry forward a shared narrative that gives shape to our world. Cognitive researchers and writers have described humans as essentially “storytelling animals,” biologically and socially attuned to narratives. Our brains latch onto characters and plots; through stories we make sense of chaos and find meaning in our experiences. This urge remains powerful today: we are, as a species, addicted to story. Even in the age of technology, we seek outlets to live inside the stories that move us, not just consume them passively.
Modern forms of interactive storytelling like role-playing games (RPGs) tap directly into this primal need. A game like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) provides a structure for friends to collectively imagine a world of magic and adventure. As one storyteller observed, RPGs “actively engage all participants” and create shared stories that players continue to tell each other years after the game ends. In a D&D campaign, each player becomes a character – a knight, a wizard, a healer – contributing their character’s actions and choices to an unfolding narrative guided by a Dungeon Master (the game’s primary narrator). The result is a true collaborative myth: an improvised tale that belongs to everyone at the table. Through these “imaginary adventures,” real memories and friendships are forged. The experience echoes the oral traditions of old, where each storyteller and each audience might shape a familiar legend in new ways
A New Oral Tradition
When Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s, they drew on mythic archetypes and fantasy literature. But what they unleashed was more than a game – it was a new oral folklore medium. Every D&D group plays in its own world or adapts a published adventure, but the story comes alive only through play. Around countless tables (and now virtual chat rooms), ordinary people become world-builders and storytellers. They slay monsters and negotiate with kings in their collective imagination, generating tales that get recounted with glee at later gatherings: “Remember when we tricked the dragon?” or “I can’t believe our bard talked the king out of declaring war!” These personal legends accumulate, turning into a canon of in-jokes and heroic memories for each group – their own private mythology.
Notably, this process mirrors how traditional folklore and myths evolve. In oral culture, a myth or folk tale was not a fixed text but a living narrative, changing slightly with each telling. In the same way, D&D campaigns have no single author and no definitive version – the story is co-created and varies with each play-through. The community ownership of the tale, passed along by word of mouth (or online posts discussing the session), makes it folklore. In fact, advocates for storytelling have explicitly recognized these games as modern folklore in action. The “whole variety of oral tradition, from mythology to personal stories, is included in the gaming experience,” as one storyteller noted of tabletop RPGs. The bards of today might just be clad in jeans, rolling dice and keeping rulebooks on hand.
Beyond entertainment, participating in such shared storytelling fulfills deep psychological and social needs. It gives players a sense of agency and creativity – instead of reading about a hero, you get to be one (at least in fantasy). It also fosters community and belonging. Just as ancient societies bonded through common myths, players bond through epic campaigns survived together. A D&D group develops its own mini-culture and lore, much like a tribe with its folklore. In a world where many feel isolated, gathering to tell a tale as a team can be profoundly satisfying. It scratches an itch that scripted movies or video games (with predetermined stories) cannot – the itch to participate and not merely observe.
Participatory Mythos in the Final Frontier
Pop culture franchises have their own gravitational pull on storytelling. The Star Trek universe that began on 1960s television has since spawned countless official series, movies, novels – and the fervent imagination of fans. Star Trek’s optimistic vision of the future and its rich lore of alien cultures and starship adventures have inspired generations. Fans don’t just watch Star Trek; many of them ache to enter that universe and contribute to it. This has given rise to a remarkable phenomenon: Star Trek fan films, in which fans produce their own episodes set in the Star Trek cosmos.
On YouTube and at fan conventions, you can find lovingly crafted projects made by fans, for fans – complete with Starfleet uniforms, convincing props, and even original characters. Why do these fans devote time and money to create unofficial episodes of Star Trek? Much like D&D players, they are satisfying the urge to participate in a shared mythos. Star Trek, after half a century, has taken on the status of a modern myth. Its stories of exploration, morality, and identity have the weight of lore. By making fan films, enthusiasts effectively become folklorists and storytellers, extending the myth with new tales.
A fan film might explore a side character’s backstory or depict a new starship crew on a parallel mission. In doing so, the fans are treating Star Trek not as a sealed property owned by a corporation, but as a living narrative space where they too have authority. This is very similar to how oral traditions work: a folk story belongs to the community, and anyone can add a new chapter or variant. Fan fiction and fan films are the modern digital form of that communal ownership of stories. A well-known fan series like Star Trek Continues produced eleven full-length episodes continuing the original 1960s show’s storyline, essentially modern folklore on film – a group of creators building on stories that inspired them, for the love of it.
Modern Myths & Ownership
Unlike ancient folklore, these modern collaborative myths exist in a legal and commercial context that can stifle them. Dungeons & Dragons and Star Trek are intellectual properties (IP) owned by companies (Wizards of the Coast for D&D, and CBS/Paramount for Star Trek). Intellectual property law grants creators and rights-holders exclusive control over their works for a period of time, to ensure they can profit and protect their creation. In principle, this encourages creativity by rewarding original creators. In practice, it can clash with the natural human impulse to retell and transform stories as a cultural commons.
Fans who create within these universes walk a fine line. When a group of friends plays D&D at home, they’re in the clear – the game is designed for that. But what about publishing a D&D story or selling a supplement with new rules and lore? That is where rigid intellectual property rules kick in. Recently, the D&D community faced an uproar when the parent company considered tightening the license that allowed fan-made content, which fans saw as a threat to the creative ecosystem around the game. Similarly, Star Trek fan filmmakers long operated in a gray zone of tacit approval – until a high-profile fan production raised substantial money and drew the ire of the studios. In one famous case, the makers of a planned fan film called Star Trek: Axanar were sued for copyright infringement by CBS/Paramount for abusing the lax allowances traditionally applied to the Star Trek creative universe.
In response, the studio, in 2016 issued official guidelines that strictly limited what fan films could do. The new rules capped fan films at 15 minutes in length (or 30 minutes if split into two parts) and required they be non-commercial and only use amateur actors – among other restrictions. Essentially, the corporate owner set boundaries to ensure fan creations remained small-scale and couldn’t be mistaken for official productions or undermine the market for the real thing. From the studio’s perspective, this protects their brand and profits. But from some fans’ perspective, this felt like a heavy gate being slammed on the playground of shared storytelling. One fan production team, upon hearing of the new rules, decided to strip all Star Trek references from their project and rebrand it as original sci-fi rather than violate the guidelines. In effect, the myth-world of Trek was being fenced off – you could play only under tight constraints.
This tension highlights a key difference between traditional folklore and modern franchise “mythologies”: ownership. No one owns the old fairy tales or Greek myths – they belong to everyone, to adapt and reinvent. But a story like Star Trek or a game like D&D starts as someone’s property. The law treats unapproved use as theft, even if the intent is homage or creative expansion. As fans become creators, they risk legal consequences. For instance, an author of fan fiction (stories written by fans using a book or show’s characters) technically violates copyright if the original work is not in the public domain. In the worst cases, companies have sent cease-and-desist letters to fan websites or projects. The mere possibility of ruinous lawsuits – with statutory damages up to $150,000 per infringed work in U.S. law – casts a long shadow. This can make would-be storytellers think twice before “borrowing” their beloved fictional universe for an unlicensed spin-off.
Ironically, this can mean that the most popular modern stories – the ones that feel like shared myths – are the least free to share. You can film your own low-budget rendition of Hamlet or write a sequel to Pride and Prejudice with impunity, because those works are long in the public domain. But do the same with Harry Potter or Star Trek and you could land in legal trouble, because those are protected by copyright. It’s a cultural paradox: the stories we feel we collectively own, we legally don’t.
The Case for a Public Domain
Public domain is the legal term for creative works that are not under copyright protection, meaning anyone can use or adapt them freely. Folklore and myths of old reside in public domain by default – they arose before modern IP law, or their authors are long dead. This freedom allowed stories to be retold and evolve over generations. Many beloved Disney films, for example, are adaptations of public domain tales (Cinderella, Snow White, etc.). In fact, Disney built an empire remixing public domain fairy tales. Yet Disney has also lobbied aggressively to extend copyright terms and keep its own characters (like Mickey Mouse) out of the public domain. Such extensions have been so successful that for many decades, virtually no major works entered public domain in the United States. Copyright now lasts the life of the author plus 70 years (or 95 years for corporate works) – meaning whole lifetimes went by without new cultural classics “reverting” to the public.
Why does the public domain matter? Because it is the soil in which new culture grows. When creators can freely draw on old works, they create fresh interpretations and innovations. Nearly all art is a conversation with what came before. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, writers and artists “wear their influences on their sleeves,” and borrowing is nothing new – Virgil’s Aeneid was essentially fan-fiction of Homer’s epics, and Fifty Shades of Grey famously began as a piece of Twilight fanfiction. “The Internet speaks in the language of pop culture: GIFs, mashups, retellings, fan fiction — all find life on the Internet,” celebrating and recombining stories we love. But that flourishing of creative re-use is only legally safe when the underlying materials are free to use.
A robust public domain ensures that once a story has enriched the culture for a time, it eventually becomes common cultural heritage, open to reimagining. Copyright is meant to be limited – it’s a deal granting creators a temporary monopoly in exchange for eventually returning the work to the public to build upon. Without that, our modern myths risk becoming locked treasures. Imagine if ancient mythologies had “owners” – one couldn’t tell a new version of a Hercules story without paying a fee or facing a lawsuit. It would have frozen myth in place, preventing the regional variations and creative retellings that ultimately gave those stories immortality.
Dungeons & Dragons and Star Trek fan creators highlight this issue. They act out of passion, not profit – a labor of love that arguably keeps the franchise communities vibrant. In a sense, these fans are unpaid evangelists, sustaining interest in the mythos between official releases. Some companies recognize this value and tolerate or even encourage fan creations (with guidelines). Others take a harder line, seeing any unlicensed use as a threat to their brand control. There is, however, a growing argument that fan creativity does more good than harm, and that embracing it can enhance the legacy of the original works.
Ultimately, the push for a healthier public domain is about ensuring that stories can enter the realm of folklore. After a certain point, a story like Star Trek or Harry Potter becomes so culturally significant that it feels like it belongs to everyone. When legal walls remain up indefinitely, it’s as if a piece of our shared culture is kept privatized. A strong public domain would mean that today’s proprietary sagas can become tomorrow’s open legends, just as Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, or Alice in Wonderland (all now public domain) have spawned new adaptations by fans and creators worldwide.
Modern shared myth-making – from collaborative RPG tales to fan-produced films – demonstrates that people will participate in storytelling with or without permission, because it fulfills a human need. Rather than treat these creative fans as infringers, society benefits by finding ways to legitimize and encourage this participatory culture. This could mean more flexible licenses, official fan production programs, or simply waiting out the copyright term. In the end, nourishing the public domain is not about taking away from original creators, but about enriching culture. As one digital rights advocate put it, more works entering public domain means more building blocks for new art and more access to old art – it “allows new generations to rediscover works of old” and use them in inspiring ways. Our collective imagination is expansive, and it operates best when stories can be freely shared, remixed, and carried forward.