Monday, March 19, 2007 at 7:00 am
Lyst: Cuse and Lindelof on Lost and Videogames
It occurred to me after I posted my rambling last week about the similarities between Lost and the computer game Myst that I actually brought that up in an interview with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof last fall, and that I should go back and ransack my recording. Here are the producers on how the look and structure of the show reflected those of games:
Lindelof: We have a lot of gamers on the writing staff. They still game; Carlton and I don't have the luxury of time anymore. For me certainly, the big game-changer was Myst. There's a lot of that feeling in Lost. What made it so compelling was also what made it so challenging. No one told you what the rules were. You just had to walk around and explore these environments and gradually a story was told. And Lost is the same way. The problem on Lost has always been, no one has told the characters what to do. If you're on Grey's Anatomy, every episode starts out with a patient coming in--you know what you have to do. If you're on a cop show, your lieutenant calls you into his office and tells you what you have to do; in a law show, your client comes in. On Lost, our characters would be sitting around on a beach if we didn't create stories for them, and [like Lost] videogames don't have "franchises" unless you're a spy or something. Grand Theft Auto is the same way. It's more about the exploration of the environment than a self-contained conflict.
Cuse: We also felt that since Lost was violating a lot of rules of traditional television storytelling, including having a large and sprawling cast and having very complex storytelling, we felt that videogames were one model that showed that if audiences get invested, they love complexity. In fact, the more complexity the better, and the challenge of that complexity was an asset as opposed to a liability. Those are the games that people actually respect, you know?
On the producers' and fans' use of the gaming term Easter egg, and how these hidden clues and allusions can lead fans to think production errors are clues:
Lindelof: We've all been that person who spots the gaffe, and we can't blame our audience, because we've trained them to dissect the show by hiding these Easter eggs. And whenever you send a kid on an Easter egg hunt, they're going to find an Easter egg you didn't hide.
The holiday season is approaching, by the way, so as a Tuned In public service: If your child comes back from an Easter egg hunt with an "egg" you didn't hide, do not let him eat it. Especially if it's chocolate.
6 Comments to “Lyst: Cuse and Lindelof on Lost and Videogames”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
About Tuned In
James Poniewozik writes TIME magazine's Tuned In column, about pop culture and society. Tuned In, the blog version, is about the stuff we used to call "TV," whether it's in your living room, on your computer or -- once the networks figure out the technology and line up the advertisers -- in your dreams themselves. Read more
RSS Feed
 |
Daily Email
Recent Posts
Tuned In - TIME.com Archives
Blogroll
- Aaron Barnhart’s TV Barn
- About Last Night
- Alan Sepinwall
- Arts & Letters Daily
- Blogher Career
- Brazen Careerist
- BuzzMachine
- Defamer
- Heather Havrilesky
- James Wolcott
- Matt Zoller Seitz
- Maureen Ryan
- Melanie McFarland
- Metafilter
- Peter Ames Carlin
- Popwatch
- Romenesko
- Television Without Pity
- Tim Goodman
- TV Guide blogs
- TV Newser
- TV Tattle
- Undercover Black Man
- Virginia Heffernan
- Zap2It’s TV Blog
More TIME Blogs
http://rss.time.com/web/time/rss/top/index.xml
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Top Photoessays and Slideshows
- Venice Floods
- 20th Century Britain in Pictures
- Pictures of the Week
- Mumbai Sifts Through the Rubble
- Two Days of Terror in Mumbai
- Over 100 Dead as Terrorist Attacks Overwhelm Mumbai
- Photos: The Kitsch of Thanksgiving
- Animated Movies: Not Just for Kids
- Photos: Anbar Sheiks Come Together
- Photos: Two Decades of Guns N' Roses
Monday, March 19, 2007 at 10:59 am
Until you mentioned it, I hadn't really connected Lost and Myst in my mind, but I think you really stumbled onto something here. In both, the beauty/tranquil nature of the surroundings always seemed unsettling - while you were safe and nothing was going to jump out at you on Myst, you always felt like something bad MIGHT happen. Mysteries in both have been solved by using logic and noting patterns, and like Myst, Lost frequently answers one mystery only to open up another mystery.
And wasn't the idea of Myst that these magical books created new worlds/dimensions? And time/fate/destiny could be manipulated or changed (I really don't remember too well...)? Even Myst's sequel, Riven, involved it's own "magic" number - 5 - a la Lost's magic numbers (4-8-15-16-23-42)....
Monday, March 19, 2007 at 11:32 am
Chad,
Please don't type those numbers. They are bad luck dude.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007 at 5:16 pm
'Complex storytelling' is a misnomer; the story is largely generic conspiracy boilerplate with dollops of castaway stories. Indeed Cuse/Lindelof show a distressing myopia in their description of the characters: if the writers weren't inventing overheated Freud-101 backstories often devoid of anything but superficial interest (wanting facts isn't the same thing as caring about the characters), the castaways would be...going about the incredibly complex, interesting business of building a civilization on the beach while trying to get rescued.
It's the writers' staggering failure to engage with their promising premise that's pushed them further into Myst territory. If they gave a damn about the island community, only limply gestured at over the last 2.5 years, the show would be a mix of Deadwood (on the beach) and The X-Files (Jack/Kate/Locke/etc. having pointless boys'-adventure-novels troubles inland). With much, much, much worse dialogue, of course - there's nothing to suggest that most of the Lost writers are even capable of the kind of sharply-observed wit and empathy that Milch fills even his least creations with.
(And in any case Myst was a boring-as-the-tomb Zork knockoff about which the less said the better.)
Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at 10:17 am
"Indeed Cuse/Lindelof show a distressing myopia in their description of the characters: if the writers weren't inventing overheated Freud-101 backstories often devoid of anything but superficial interest (wanting facts isn't the same thing as caring about the characters), the castaways would be...going about the incredibly complex, interesting business of building a civilization on the beach while trying to get rescued."
And the show would be cancelled, because people don't give a rats rear parts about that.
What you off-handedly refer to as conspiracy boilerplate sets people's minds in motion, trying to bridge the gaps. And that is where magic happens.
You write as if with some authority, that Lost is a staggering failure, which is interesting, considering Lost's track record.
So maybe-just maybe--you just need to face that perhaps Lost isn't a staggering failure, but your expectations for the show are... well... warped.
It's called storytelling, you should look it up, it's fascinating.
(Myst was fine, and it is no more a Zork knockoff than Star Wars is a Star Trek knock-off).
Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Michael sez:
"...the castaways would be...going about the incredibly complex, interesting business of building a civilization on the beach while trying to get rescued."
And the show would be cancelled, because people don't give a rats rear parts about that.
Don't be a buffoon. Haven't you seen Deadwood? Or for that matter Swiss Family Robinson? To be sure, Lost's popularity is positively affected by the fact that it's a faux-profound potboiler that makes the audience feel like it's thinking. But the show's creators really do have pretensions to seriousness; listening to Lindelof and Cuse talk is slightly embarrassing at this point, as they shuffle around trying to justify the emptiness of the show's endless plot maneuvers and explain away the dead ends and dropped balls that plague it.
The audience is shrinking for the same reason The X-Files's audience shrank: viewers are running out of patience, and justifiably so.
Lost's artistic impact is a good deal smaller than you suspect; it's not treading new ground at all, formally or metaphorically. Its immediate commercial impact has already sailed past, in the form of doomed over-plotted hackwork like The Nine and more interesting formal experiments like Daybreak. Oh well.
Since you're presumably kidding about Myst and Zork - what debt could be clearer, after all? - I'll refrain from making fun of your analogy.
Best,
Wa.
Sunday, April 1, 2007 at 12:35 pm
You may want to take a good look at http://www.LOSTisaGame.com
It explains my long standing theory that LOST is a video game.
My theory is the most comprehensive theory available to date about LOST. It explains the mythology, character development, mission accomplishments, deaths, and rules of the game.
It also explains all of the duplicates in names, situations, professions, repeated dialogue, and why so many of the characters resemble each other.