It’s intriguingly difficult to describe the show and the media explosion surrounding it without immediately falling into what sounds like total hype, but I’ll take a few stabs at doing so in this post. When my wife eventually reads this post, I greatly anticipate only further cajoling at how far this thing has sucked me and an ever-growing population of other people into its engrossing vortex, but why fight an addiction to something that’s so richly assembled.

In an unfairly condensed synopsis, here are a few of the underlying premises of the broadcast element of the series: Multiple survivors of a single plane crash find themselves miraculously left alive on an island somewhere in the Pacific ocean, and gradually (over the course of the first season) manage to reveal a lot about themselves and where they came from prior to the plane crash. In the midst of these flashbacks, they begin and continue to encounter a range of baffling occurences, seeming coincidences, and stranger things on the island itself.

The season one cliffhanger focused on the discovery of a buried complex that the survivors were able to blast their way into and then stand pensively at the entrance to, leading into season two’s revelation that there’s not only a fairly jam-packed complex under their feet, but someone who’s been manning the complex the whole time they’ve been exploring the topside geography of the island.

LOTS has continued to ensue over the course of the second season, and it’d be unfair (plus take up WAY too much posting space) to recap all of it to those who haven’t even seen season one - suffice it to say, the hatch / complex that they discovered has lead at least to realizing that the survivors are on an island that seems to hold major importance to one or more major scientific & industrial organizations that may or may not still be running some sort of testing and experimentation on the island itself, plus may or may not be involving the survivors in all of the above.

If you’ve heard friends or acquaintences mentioning groups like the Dharma Initiative, The Hanso Foundation, Widmark Industries, or a continuingly growing list of shadowy fictional agencies that the show is compiling, consider yourself in “Lost” country and welcome aboard…These names continue to get bantered about across any number of sites and discussion boards that seemingly pop-up in droves on a weekly or even daily basis.

Here’s where things get especially interesting for the designers watching this program - Cuse, Lindelof, and Abrams decided that they didn’t simply want to leave the massive audience for the show with nothing but reruns to scour for information & details over the course of the summer. They successfully talked ABC / Disney into “hosting” an ARG (alternate reality game) during the summer months that would start to tell some major backstory on Dharma, The Hanso Foundation, and all things considered. The “heart” of this game is the fictional Hanso Foundation’s website, which was introduced to viewers initially by an on-air TV spot for The Hanso Foundation during one of the last new episodes of the season.

As ABC continues to rerun the past year’s episodes, they also continue to broadcast new web links that are associated with continuing clues and information trickling out of the Hanso site. Parallel to the site are more and more “shadow” sites that provide fans with passwords, clues, vague references to where other information may be “hidden” on the main site, and further threads in the MAJOR tapestry of conspiracy and coverup that the writers / creators of “Lost” are weaving.

From a design standpoint I find the tremendous range of design styles / design vernacular being associated with the bits and pieces of the puzzle fascinating - here are a smattering of the parallel sites to check out in terms of the wide visual palette the media development team is playing in:

The “Retrievers of Truth” site

The “Save Joop” protest site

The fictional DJ Dan broadcast site - I’m not sure how the actual DJ Dan feels about this parallel reality version of him, but you can visit his own site if you’d like to e-mail him and find out!

Rachel Blake’s “blog” and it’s covert doppelganger providing what Rachel is really writing about. This is a particularly curious portion of the whole experience - we’re now meeting a third live actor portraying an in-game character via web-delivered media (the first was a character who showed up on Jimmy Kimmel Live to write off the whole Hanso connection within “Lost” as nothing more than fiction, at the same time presenting Hanso as if it was a legitimately existing company!

The second on-line character, Gary Troup, is discussed below)

And then comes the even more genre / reality-twisting variety of connected sites - the in-game websites that are sponsored by major corporations:

Sprite’s sponsored password site - This has now changed into an exclusively commercial site for Sprite products, but initially had a single “game” which provided a needed password to access sections of the main Hanso site. Nate covered the curious marketing angle that Sprite has taken with the Lymon campaign in his previous post, but it’s amazing how “normal” the whole campaign seems when viewed within the lense of the other “Lost” ARG elements and series elements.

Jeep’s sponsored in-game site which continues to grant fictional access to the computer accounts of in-series characters. Many of the file links, e-mails, and images within these “folders” provide further information about elements of the larger conspiracy.

Verizon’s piece of the puzzle - Actually, Verizon seems to be the one hosting / sponsoring the “Retrievers of Truth” site, but this site is currently the live ‘link’ in the chain. I’m going to leave it up to your investigative curiousity to find out how this actually fits into the current chapter of the ARG.

Monster.com’s sponsored site - In a certain way, this is actually my favorite of the reality/non-reality blends within the viral campaigns embedded in these sites - Monster seems to have picked such a great, logical way to feed into the fiction while also accurately representing their true service offerings. Why not a fictional site advertising positions within a fictional company? Nothing allows a user to actually submit resumes or “try out” for the jobs, but the copywriting on the career descriptions does SO much to add to the mystique of the parent fiction.

(I HIGHLY suggest those really interested in tracking this thing get very acquainted with the Lost Forum plus any of the parallel forums that you can find within it - it very often serves as the Rosetta stone for finding and unlocking the various pieces of this labyrinthine puzzle.)

And mentioning the websites leaves out the phone numbers that have been provided for viewers to call and access the voicemail accounts of characters, obtain passwords from “messengers” hidden in phone trees, or simply to hear further references to obscure details of the show itself. Plus, crazy CRAZY marketing crossovers like the “Bad Twin” book by Gary Troup a fictional fiction-writer who did not survive the crash, but whose book manuscript did make it out alive and is now available at every major book store for readers to scour - search around a bit and you can also find a Charlie Rose-style talk show segment that features Troup discussing his book and his curious frustrations with the Hanso Foundation (and the fiction just keeps going further and further, layer upon layer…)

And we still have the rest of the summer to continue watching how many more of these sites pop up and how many more rabbit holes the creators are able to send us all down to find out more…

The uncanny thing about all of this (and the main reason that I find so much of it targeted at least at an audience that’s very familiar with web and print graphic authoring software) is how much of the unraveling of it requires some Photoshop knowledge, HTML experience, Flash file decompiling, and general problem-solving / puzzle-solving understanding. For those unwilling to devote the time to personally unlocking the puzzles, there are plenty of others doing so and publishing “their findings” across blogs, boards, etc. But for those who want to unravel it all firsthand, there are photos that need to be converted from one image mode into another, color balanced to reveal coded messages, inverted and then decompiled in one form or another to separate information layers - what a couple of writers have referred to as a shocking amount of work just to learn more about a total fiction!

Moreover, I find it all targeted at the design population - one of the prevalent “communities” where you’ll consistently find the unique blend of obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, the constant desire to assemble meaning from fragmentary elements, dedication to exploration / experimentation, all combined with dashes of media-savvy and media fascination. This ARG has coupled all of this with an extreme amount of imagination, knowledge, and literary experience (the show has also managed to continue “name-dropping” countless books of growing obscurity that all semi-vaguely seem to include many of the same themes that the program does.)

You could write the whole thing off as cynical product-placement gone haywire, as fiction-writers and pranksters gaining access to major media outlets and just seeing how far they can joyride with them, or as an entertainment of a strikingly new color: the first of a breed of cross-media, immersive entertainment “experiences” that changes its audience from simple viewers into complicit participants in the narrative arc. I’ve caught myself on several random occasions beginning to wonder about certain strange commercials, billboards, and print ads being still-hidden aspects of the “Lost” game only to sort of shake myself out of the fugue and just grin at what Cuse, Lindelof, and Abrams continue to accomplish…

Hopefully this might lead a few more BE A readers to get caught up in this tangled web as well…

But that’s FAR too many words to simply get to the question: how many Others are there lost in the mix even as I write this, and what do we think of the whole affair?