October 24, 2005
LOST
Who's running the show?
"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...As director and lead designer at 42 Entertainment...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...
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..." From Who's running the show? by Joanna Weiss, Boston Globe, October 23, 2005.
Posted by jo at October 24, 2005 10:31 AM
