Who's running the show?
Ubiquitous
experience
By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | October 23, 2005
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, acknowledgments 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 can be reached at we...@globe.com.
--
This episode of LOST was brought to you by the letters L, O, S, and T,
and the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42.
Tony Calguire
>
> As creators draw inspiration from fans, 'Lost' becomes an interactive
> experience
> By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | October 23, 2005
>
>
> 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.
>
Are these guys idiots? If they put the same set of six numbers in
disparate places throughout the story, OF COURSE viewers are going to
expect those instances to be connected, and of course they're going to
look for those connections. Are we to believe that they really expected
to just throw two or three instances of the numbers into the plot, leave
it at that, and expect the audience to chalk it up to coincedence?
> 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.
>
When they spend the last half-dozen episodes of the season centered on
the discovery and unearthing of The Hatch, do they really believe that
fans WOULDN'T demand to know what was on the inside? Now, I don't fault
them for that final shot of season one; the cliffhanger is a perfectly
valid dramatic device, and I wouldn't have expected anything else from a
season finale. But this description makes it sound as if viewer outrage
somehow fueled the decision to show us the hatch in season two. Are we
to believe that they really would have just let the hatch drop and move
on to other things? Or not show us the hatch at all? Are they really
this naive in the ways of storytelling?
>
> 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."
>
This is absolutely true. For example, I've really enjoyed the last four
seasons of "24", but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you how any of them
actually ended. The only ones that stand out are season 1 with Nina
killing Terry, and the season with Jack chopping Chase's hand off in the
school... and I can't even remember why they were in the school.