Post by Forever Xena on Oct 26, 2005 1:05:26 GMT -6
For fans, 'Lost' is 'alternate reality game'
Joanna Weiss
Boston Globe
Oct. 24, 2005 05:25 PM
Somewhere around the time he glimpsed the shark with the tattoo, a rabid "Lost" fan named Elan Lee knew there was something different going on: This was a TV show that liked its audience.
Really liked its audience - enough to reward it with treats that only the most devoted viewers would catch. The shark, which appeared in the season's second episode, had a logo on its fin that showed up elsewhere in the show, a possibly significant clue in the realm of "Lost" mythology. It was the sort of thing you'd only see if you froze the frame and watched very, very closely. If you were looking for just this sort of trick. And if you had a community of fellow viewers doing the same thing.
To a sizable portion of its audience, ABC's Emmy-winning drama - the tale of a group of plane-crash survivors, stranded on an ever-more-strange desert island - has become a different way of experiencing TV. To its most devoted followers, "Lost" is part metaphysics seminar, part jigsaw puzzle, part scavenger hunt. It's a collaborative experience, a game to be played and shared. And an acknowledgment that, even on network TV, the audience can have power, too.
"It's really interesting to see how the show and the writers are trying to put in a bunch of extra little goodies for only them," Lee says. "They feel like the more they poke at this bizarre thing, the more it pokes back."
Lee should know; most of the time, these days, he's poking from the other side.
As director and lead designer at 42 Entertainment, a break-the-mold marketing company based in Emeryville, Calif., Lee is a pioneer of an interactive form of storytelling, which depends on the Internet and on the audience taking part. It's known as the "alternate reality game," or ARG, and it's the medium that, for its most devoted fans, "Lost" has come to most closely resemble.
The ARG still ranks as a cult phenomenon, the realm of Internet junkies and video game aficionados, but it's a fast-evolving form of storytelling with millions of devotees. The principals at 42 Entertainment devised what many consider to be the first full-fledged ARG in 2001, when they worked at Microsoft. Steven Spielberg had come to the company - which had bought the video-game rights for his upcoming film "AI" - with a request for an unconventional marketing campaign.
What Lee and his co-workers devised was less a pitch than an immersive experience - an exercise in buzz creation, in the form of an Internet-based game. They never mentioned the film itself, but they created a story, loosely connected to the world of the film, and left it for the audience to uncover. It was a hybrid of the serial novel and the Darwin-era scientific process, says science fiction novelist Sean Stewart, who served as head writer for the project. (He's serious.) The programmers spent six months constructing a narrative, breaking it into a million fragments, and hiding it on nearly 1,000 web pages laced with clues, along with certain spots in the physical world.
"One of the bets we placed was that we could put a clue in the newspaper in Istanbul in the morning and a kid in Iowa would be thinking about it in the afternoon," Stewart says. "This turned out to be spectacularly true."
Solving the puzzle - which came to be known, in-house, as "The Beast" - called for knowledge in areas as diverse and sometimes arcane as html computer language, Italian futurist paintings, and 16th-century French lute tablature. It required collaboration, a network of shared ideas and expertise, the sort of collective entity The Beast's designers called the "hive mind."
At the start, the programmers simply hoped that people would be intrigued and take the bait, Stewart says. But it turned out that the hive mind was engaged, and it was smart. The mystery was supposed to unfold over nine months, but "the audience had completely stripped it bare in three days," Stewart says. "So we looked at each other with wide, panicked eyes and said, 'I guess this is where we start tap-dancing.' "
That's an axiom of the ARG, which "Lost" producers seem to have taken to heart: The audience is wise, and must be followed. It might not know the ending, but it still can drive the story.
"We have time and time again found audiences really latching onto a character or latching onto a particular theme in a narrative that we were going to downplay," Lee says. "And all of a sudden we let that become the focus of the second or third act of our story."
Since creators of The Beast broke off to form 42 Entertainment, their ARGs have become even more visible. The group's second game, a marketing rollout for the Halo 2 video game, compelled people to answer ringing payphones across the country to hear pieces of a radio-style drama. The company's current project, "Last Call Poker," a stealth promotion for a Wild West-themed video game, has induced hundreds of people to play poker at graveyards.
This is an intense form of participation, to be sure. But Stewart and Lee imagine it could be the future of entertainment. And, in the context of a show like "Lost," it could be the future of TV, says MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, author of the forthcoming book "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Intersect."
With "Lost," "I think the cult audience is the leading edge," Jenkins says. "It's experiencing a new kind of power and a new kind of knowledge that's only possible when you combine the Internet with television."
The "Lost" -ARG analogy isn't perfect, of course. As Jenkins points out, The Beast and its successors are self-conscious games, devised with a clear expectation of what the audience would do. In the case of "Lost," he says, the viewers started the process. "This is something that audiences are demanding, not something that is thrust upon them," Jenkins says.
Indeed, like most TV content, "Lost," started in a vacuum, with neither an audience nor a sense of its own future. Creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof started by plotting a "mythological roadmap" that answered the show's central questions, says Carlton Cuse, the show's co-executive producer. But he says the producers conceived the show as a character drama, often building the plot around personal stories they wanted to tell, or chemistry they noticed among the actors. On a basic level, Cuse says, "Lost" remains a character show, designed to appeal to 22 million viewers, many of whom don't bother to check online when an episode is through.
But as it became clear that the mythology had sparked a degree of fan obsession, Cuse says, the show began to adapt. Producers weren't sure, for instance, how viewers would react to the six possibly magical numbers that have showed up on a lottery ticket, in a transmitted radio message, and on the door to a buried hatch. But when the idea created a fervor - at least one fan site is devoted entirely to spotting the numbers throughout the show - "we spent more time on that aspect of the mythology," Cuse says.
Fans' oft-voiced frustration at last season's finale, when the characters opened that hatch but the viewers didn't see what was inside, drove the writing of this season's early episodes, Cuse says.
"Our response to that was, 'OK, we will give the audience a huge chunk of information,' " Cuse says. ' "We'll actually give them a film.' " So they devised a cloudy orientation film that describes a 1970s communal research compound and makes cryptic reference to an "incident." It also orders the viewer of the film to type the six numbers - which add up to 108 - into a vintage computer every 108 minutes. Or else.
And when one character's response to the film was a deadpan, "We're going to need to watch that again," many viewers saw a winking reference to themselves.
This second season, loyal viewers say, they've noticed more deliberate nods to the audience base, acknowledgment that many are watching with DVR remotes at the ready, prepared to rewind, freeze-frame, and slo-mo to hone in on possible clues. The rewards for such intensity include the tattooed shark - which required a certain level of collaboration to spread through the fan base.
Had it not been discussed immediately on www.televisionwithoutpity.com, "I never would have seen it," says Daniel MacEachern, who writes about "Lost" for the site. "If you miss it, I don't think it's going to detract from your enjoyment of that episode," he says. "But if you find it, you feel like you're a part of something a little more secret. You feel like you're an active part of the show." (Note, too, that the screen command to appear at the computer every 108 minutes is similar to the network demand to watch the show on time every week.)
The writers have also been more overt about dropping hints - or red herrings - in the public arena. A few weeks ago, in a newspaper report, a "Lost" writer hinted that viewers should check an upcoming episode for a reference to the 1940s British novel "The Third Policeman." (Its main character is dead but doesn't know it.) Paperback sales of the book quickly spiked. But in the episode in question, the book was little more than a passing flash. And Cuse, true to his role in the game, won't say what that means.
The book "was carefully chosen as a way to suggest a possible theory about what was going on on the island," he says. "Does it mean that was real, or does it mean that we were just teasing the audience and being sort of self-referential? I can't answer that question for you."
Producing a show in this environment is a challenge, Cuse says. Though the writers have communicated with fans from the start, largely through a site called www.thefuselage.com, Cuse says he and Lindelof, another executive producer, tend to filter fan reaction through others on their staff. They want to maintain the isolation and freedom that helped lead to last season's success, he says.
On the other hand, it was Cuse's idea to set up www.thehansofoundation.org, a site about the fictional foundation that created the hatch experiment. What he didn't expect, he says, were the copycat sites that have cropped up, appropriating some of the same characters and symbols. Or the guy who created a flash animation film, featuring the "Lost" characters, against the backdrop of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."
That's something ARG players do, too, Lee says. "We put up a bunch of websites, and then the fans go up and create their own. There's this wonderful point of confusion halfway through: People aren't sure which ones are part of the game and which ones are fan-created. ... At first we were really worried, and then we figured out, you know, this is all good. It shows that an audience is appreciative and wants to participate in this thing."
Now, as he watches television borrow some tricks from the ARG, he imagines both forms evolving.
"I love to watch what a community does with information: what they do, where they take it, what kinds of things they enjoy and don't enjoy," Lee says. "The Internet as a part of a TV show is something that is brand new, and there's so much to learn. Even the audience hasn't figured out who they are and what role they play yet."
"Lost" fans do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the show, to the extent that, for some, it's practically a full-time job. Amy Bauer, a music theory professor at the University of California, Irvine, says she spends up to 20 hours a week on "Lost"-related projects, including the creation of a quasi-academic site called www.loststudies.com. Part of her work, she says, involves reading, indexing, and archiving small essays on ever-more-elaborate general theories. Of late, the various boards have seen treatises about existentialism, Greek mythology, cryogenics, and behavioral psychology. On the site Bauer helps run, www.lost-tv.com, the "they're in Purgatory" theory, debunked early by the show's producers, has been dubbed "The Theory That One Shall Not Name."
On another site, a writer recently posted several pages of speculation that Jack, the character played by Matthew Fox, is really in a mental asylum and the entire show exists in his mind. Cuse, who doesn't offer much, refutes this one, too. "You're not going to find all these characters in a snow globe," he says, referring to the controversial ending of the 1980s hospital drama "St. Elsewhere."
Still, Cuse is aware of another risk of fan participation: The real right answer might not measure up to the audience's rich ideas.
"You have to watch because you're enjoying the journey, not because you are waiting for the endgame, " Cuse says. "Your imagination is probably greater than whatever solution we'll give you."
Bauer knows, in her heart, that he's right.
"There's no doubt that 98 percent of what's talked about will never have anything to do with the show," she says. "The fandom has taken on a life of its own. And it doesn't matter to me. ... We're getting a lot of enjoyment and even education out of just spinning off these theories. And the fact that it could come for naught is fine, as long as the show itself does have a satisfying explanation."
Joanna Weiss
Boston Globe
Oct. 24, 2005 05:25 PM
Somewhere around the time he glimpsed the shark with the tattoo, a rabid "Lost" fan named Elan Lee knew there was something different going on: This was a TV show that liked its audience.
Really liked its audience - enough to reward it with treats that only the most devoted viewers would catch. The shark, which appeared in the season's second episode, had a logo on its fin that showed up elsewhere in the show, a possibly significant clue in the realm of "Lost" mythology. It was the sort of thing you'd only see if you froze the frame and watched very, very closely. If you were looking for just this sort of trick. And if you had a community of fellow viewers doing the same thing.
To a sizable portion of its audience, ABC's Emmy-winning drama - the tale of a group of plane-crash survivors, stranded on an ever-more-strange desert island - has become a different way of experiencing TV. To its most devoted followers, "Lost" is part metaphysics seminar, part jigsaw puzzle, part scavenger hunt. It's a collaborative experience, a game to be played and shared. And an acknowledgment that, even on network TV, the audience can have power, too.
"It's really interesting to see how the show and the writers are trying to put in a bunch of extra little goodies for only them," Lee says. "They feel like the more they poke at this bizarre thing, the more it pokes back."
Lee should know; most of the time, these days, he's poking from the other side.
As director and lead designer at 42 Entertainment, a break-the-mold marketing company based in Emeryville, Calif., Lee is a pioneer of an interactive form of storytelling, which depends on the Internet and on the audience taking part. It's known as the "alternate reality game," or ARG, and it's the medium that, for its most devoted fans, "Lost" has come to most closely resemble.
The ARG still ranks as a cult phenomenon, the realm of Internet junkies and video game aficionados, but it's a fast-evolving form of storytelling with millions of devotees. The principals at 42 Entertainment devised what many consider to be the first full-fledged ARG in 2001, when they worked at Microsoft. Steven Spielberg had come to the company - which had bought the video-game rights for his upcoming film "AI" - with a request for an unconventional marketing campaign.
What Lee and his co-workers devised was less a pitch than an immersive experience - an exercise in buzz creation, in the form of an Internet-based game. They never mentioned the film itself, but they created a story, loosely connected to the world of the film, and left it for the audience to uncover. It was a hybrid of the serial novel and the Darwin-era scientific process, says science fiction novelist Sean Stewart, who served as head writer for the project. (He's serious.) The programmers spent six months constructing a narrative, breaking it into a million fragments, and hiding it on nearly 1,000 web pages laced with clues, along with certain spots in the physical world.
"One of the bets we placed was that we could put a clue in the newspaper in Istanbul in the morning and a kid in Iowa would be thinking about it in the afternoon," Stewart says. "This turned out to be spectacularly true."
Solving the puzzle - which came to be known, in-house, as "The Beast" - called for knowledge in areas as diverse and sometimes arcane as html computer language, Italian futurist paintings, and 16th-century French lute tablature. It required collaboration, a network of shared ideas and expertise, the sort of collective entity The Beast's designers called the "hive mind."
At the start, the programmers simply hoped that people would be intrigued and take the bait, Stewart says. But it turned out that the hive mind was engaged, and it was smart. The mystery was supposed to unfold over nine months, but "the audience had completely stripped it bare in three days," Stewart says. "So we looked at each other with wide, panicked eyes and said, 'I guess this is where we start tap-dancing.' "
That's an axiom of the ARG, which "Lost" producers seem to have taken to heart: The audience is wise, and must be followed. It might not know the ending, but it still can drive the story.
"We have time and time again found audiences really latching onto a character or latching onto a particular theme in a narrative that we were going to downplay," Lee says. "And all of a sudden we let that become the focus of the second or third act of our story."
Since creators of The Beast broke off to form 42 Entertainment, their ARGs have become even more visible. The group's second game, a marketing rollout for the Halo 2 video game, compelled people to answer ringing payphones across the country to hear pieces of a radio-style drama. The company's current project, "Last Call Poker," a stealth promotion for a Wild West-themed video game, has induced hundreds of people to play poker at graveyards.
This is an intense form of participation, to be sure. But Stewart and Lee imagine it could be the future of entertainment. And, in the context of a show like "Lost," it could be the future of TV, says MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, author of the forthcoming book "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Intersect."
With "Lost," "I think the cult audience is the leading edge," Jenkins says. "It's experiencing a new kind of power and a new kind of knowledge that's only possible when you combine the Internet with television."
The "Lost" -ARG analogy isn't perfect, of course. As Jenkins points out, The Beast and its successors are self-conscious games, devised with a clear expectation of what the audience would do. In the case of "Lost," he says, the viewers started the process. "This is something that audiences are demanding, not something that is thrust upon them," Jenkins says.
Indeed, like most TV content, "Lost," started in a vacuum, with neither an audience nor a sense of its own future. Creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof started by plotting a "mythological roadmap" that answered the show's central questions, says Carlton Cuse, the show's co-executive producer. But he says the producers conceived the show as a character drama, often building the plot around personal stories they wanted to tell, or chemistry they noticed among the actors. On a basic level, Cuse says, "Lost" remains a character show, designed to appeal to 22 million viewers, many of whom don't bother to check online when an episode is through.
But as it became clear that the mythology had sparked a degree of fan obsession, Cuse says, the show began to adapt. Producers weren't sure, for instance, how viewers would react to the six possibly magical numbers that have showed up on a lottery ticket, in a transmitted radio message, and on the door to a buried hatch. But when the idea created a fervor - at least one fan site is devoted entirely to spotting the numbers throughout the show - "we spent more time on that aspect of the mythology," Cuse says.
Fans' oft-voiced frustration at last season's finale, when the characters opened that hatch but the viewers didn't see what was inside, drove the writing of this season's early episodes, Cuse says.
"Our response to that was, 'OK, we will give the audience a huge chunk of information,' " Cuse says. ' "We'll actually give them a film.' " So they devised a cloudy orientation film that describes a 1970s communal research compound and makes cryptic reference to an "incident." It also orders the viewer of the film to type the six numbers - which add up to 108 - into a vintage computer every 108 minutes. Or else.
And when one character's response to the film was a deadpan, "We're going to need to watch that again," many viewers saw a winking reference to themselves.
This second season, loyal viewers say, they've noticed more deliberate nods to the audience base, acknowledgment that many are watching with DVR remotes at the ready, prepared to rewind, freeze-frame, and slo-mo to hone in on possible clues. The rewards for such intensity include the tattooed shark - which required a certain level of collaboration to spread through the fan base.
Had it not been discussed immediately on www.televisionwithoutpity.com, "I never would have seen it," says Daniel MacEachern, who writes about "Lost" for the site. "If you miss it, I don't think it's going to detract from your enjoyment of that episode," he says. "But if you find it, you feel like you're a part of something a little more secret. You feel like you're an active part of the show." (Note, too, that the screen command to appear at the computer every 108 minutes is similar to the network demand to watch the show on time every week.)
The writers have also been more overt about dropping hints - or red herrings - in the public arena. A few weeks ago, in a newspaper report, a "Lost" writer hinted that viewers should check an upcoming episode for a reference to the 1940s British novel "The Third Policeman." (Its main character is dead but doesn't know it.) Paperback sales of the book quickly spiked. But in the episode in question, the book was little more than a passing flash. And Cuse, true to his role in the game, won't say what that means.
The book "was carefully chosen as a way to suggest a possible theory about what was going on on the island," he says. "Does it mean that was real, or does it mean that we were just teasing the audience and being sort of self-referential? I can't answer that question for you."
Producing a show in this environment is a challenge, Cuse says. Though the writers have communicated with fans from the start, largely through a site called www.thefuselage.com, Cuse says he and Lindelof, another executive producer, tend to filter fan reaction through others on their staff. They want to maintain the isolation and freedom that helped lead to last season's success, he says.
On the other hand, it was Cuse's idea to set up www.thehansofoundation.org, a site about the fictional foundation that created the hatch experiment. What he didn't expect, he says, were the copycat sites that have cropped up, appropriating some of the same characters and symbols. Or the guy who created a flash animation film, featuring the "Lost" characters, against the backdrop of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."
That's something ARG players do, too, Lee says. "We put up a bunch of websites, and then the fans go up and create their own. There's this wonderful point of confusion halfway through: People aren't sure which ones are part of the game and which ones are fan-created. ... At first we were really worried, and then we figured out, you know, this is all good. It shows that an audience is appreciative and wants to participate in this thing."
Now, as he watches television borrow some tricks from the ARG, he imagines both forms evolving.
"I love to watch what a community does with information: what they do, where they take it, what kinds of things they enjoy and don't enjoy," Lee says. "The Internet as a part of a TV show is something that is brand new, and there's so much to learn. Even the audience hasn't figured out who they are and what role they play yet."
"Lost" fans do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the show, to the extent that, for some, it's practically a full-time job. Amy Bauer, a music theory professor at the University of California, Irvine, says she spends up to 20 hours a week on "Lost"-related projects, including the creation of a quasi-academic site called www.loststudies.com. Part of her work, she says, involves reading, indexing, and archiving small essays on ever-more-elaborate general theories. Of late, the various boards have seen treatises about existentialism, Greek mythology, cryogenics, and behavioral psychology. On the site Bauer helps run, www.lost-tv.com, the "they're in Purgatory" theory, debunked early by the show's producers, has been dubbed "The Theory That One Shall Not Name."
On another site, a writer recently posted several pages of speculation that Jack, the character played by Matthew Fox, is really in a mental asylum and the entire show exists in his mind. Cuse, who doesn't offer much, refutes this one, too. "You're not going to find all these characters in a snow globe," he says, referring to the controversial ending of the 1980s hospital drama "St. Elsewhere."
Still, Cuse is aware of another risk of fan participation: The real right answer might not measure up to the audience's rich ideas.
"You have to watch because you're enjoying the journey, not because you are waiting for the endgame, " Cuse says. "Your imagination is probably greater than whatever solution we'll give you."
Bauer knows, in her heart, that he's right.
"There's no doubt that 98 percent of what's talked about will never have anything to do with the show," she says. "The fandom has taken on a life of its own. And it doesn't matter to me. ... We're getting a lot of enjoyment and even education out of just spinning off these theories. And the fact that it could come for naught is fine, as long as the show itself does have a satisfying explanation."
