In April of 2001, cryptic messages started appearing on posters and in trailers for the movie “AI.” If you took these messages to be clues and followed up these clues on the Internet, you were pulled into an experimental, interactive marketing campaign / game that masqueraded as reality and involved you in the story in ways never attempted before. You would receive emails and phone calls from the game, dubbed by it’s creators “the Beast,” and you were told to make calls and send faxes to real numbers in order to advance the plot. It was an incredibly rich and immersive experience that no one has been able to duplicate, neither in depth nor in popularity.
That doesn’t mean folks haven’t tried, though. Between the second and third seasons of the ABC show “Lost,” the producers started their own Alternate Reality Game called “The Lost Experience.” And, while thousands of people participated, it has left some Lost fans feeling cold. Some even contend that the Lost Experience is a factor in the drop off in viewers this season. I tend to agree. So I’m going to try and flesh out the argument that the missteps of the Lost Experience may, in fact, be a reason for declining ratings.
1. Back to the beginning
Before the Beast, there was no such thing as an Alternate Reality Game. It was the first and so far the most popular. So, what was it’s model? According to Wikipedia, ARGs follow these basic design principles:
- Storytelling as archaeology. Instead of presenting a chronologically unified, coherent narrative, the designers scattered pieces of the story across the Internet and other media, allowing players to reassemble it, supply connective tissue and determine what it meant.
- Platformless narrative. The story was not bound to a single medium, but existed independently and used whatever media were available to make itself heard.
- Designing for a hive mind. The design was directed at a collective of players that shared information and solutions almost instantly, and incorporated individuals possessing almost every conceivable area of expertise.
- A whisper is sometimes louder than a shout. Rather than openly promoting the game and trying to attract participation by “pushing” it toward potential players, the designers attempted to “pull” players to the story by engaging in over-the-top secrecy.
- The “this is not a game” aesthetic. The game itself did not acknowledge that it was a game. The narrative presented a fully-realized world: any phone number or email address that was mentioned actually worked, and any website acknowledged actually existed.
- Real life as a medium. The game used players’ lives as a platform. Players were not required to build a character or role-play being someone other than themselves.
- Collaborative storytelling. Game designers incorporated player content and responded to players’ actions, analysis and speculation by adapting the narrative and intentionally left “white space” for the players to fill in.
2. Breaking the rules
Establishing and following these parameters paved the way for the Beast to be such a successful game. The creators of the Lost Experience didn’t comply with several of these rules and set themselves up for potential failure.
Rule #4 is maybe the most important of all. Consumers, for the most part, don’t like being pandered to. This is especially true of fans of a show like Lost. All that participants of the Beast had to go on were ambiguous phrases on movie posters and trailers. With the Lost Experience, the producers announced that it was going to happen. They sent out press releases telling everyone it was coming. They didn’t trust their audience’s curiosity to let the viral marketing do it’s job. They spoon-fed their audience, disengaging them from the start.
To make matters worse, they broke rule #5 by allowing sponsorships to creep in. Who knew that Alvar Hanso worked for Jeep? Or that Rachel Blake loves Sprite? I’m exaggerating, but these sponsorships are like flashing neon signs saying, “This is a marketing campaign! This is not reality!.”
And finally, one of the things that made the Beast so great was that the game designers would change content and storylines on the fly because of things the participants would do. The Lost Experience was planned from beginning to end, defeating the spirit of rule #7. If you’re just going to tell a story, why not tell it in your TV show?
3. The last straw.
Despite the flaws in the game structure illustrated above, the Lost Experience could have pulled everything together with a killer storyline. In the Beast, the story was set 50 years after the events in AI. The characters and plot stood on their own. You didn’t need the game to enjoy the movie, but the game enriched the movie, giving the universe of the movie an added layer of intrigue for those who followed the Beast.
With the Lost Experience, the producers gave away one of the most integral mysteries of the first two seasons of the show: the meaning of those damn numbers. So, if you didn’t follow the game, you’ll never get resolution to what was presented as a pretty important element of the show. I can imagine watching seasons one and two and hearing over and over again about these numbers. There’s an entire Hurley episode dedicated to them! Then here’s season three, and there hasn’t been a single mention of them yet. Why? Because we covered all that during the Lost Experience. Oh, you weren’t there? Tough tacos. I bet, as word of this crept out to the viewers who didn’t participate in the game, so many loyal folks were disenfranchised. Nobody likes to feel excluded, especially by a TV show.
And that’s where the Lost Experience dropped the ball big time: they made it matter too much when it was just supposed to be a game. If they had just followed the blueprint set out by the Beast, maybe their ratings wouldn’t be on the decline. Or maybe if they’d start giving us some concrete answers to their increasingly convoluted mythology: that might help, too.
