Using an ARG to Create Liveness in HBO's Westworld
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Name: Hans Klijn 29 June 29, 2019 Student nr: 11318163 Supervisor: Misha Kavka Second reader: Markus Stauff MA Media studies – Television and Cross-Media Culture Universiteit van Amsterdam Using an ARG to Create Liveness in HBO’s Westworld: The influence of the gamified story on the viewer’s experience of the series’ temporality. 1 Table of contents - P. 3: Introduction o P. 4 Discover Westworld o P. 6 Methodology - P. 8: Chapter 1. Theoretical Framework - P. 17: Chapter 2. Liveness and temporality o P. 18 Part 1 - Exploration phase o P. 20 Part 2 - Narrative phase o P. 21 Part 3 - Episodic phase o P. 27 Liveness - P. 29: Chapter 3. Engagement and shared social reality o P. 34 Engagement through immersion - P. 37: Conclusion - P. 40: Bibliography 2 Introduction Series with incredibly complex narratives such as Lost (2004-2010, ABC) almost necessitate repeated viewings just to make sense of all the plot points that are branching out and tying together throughout the story. Being able to record television series as well as buying the DVD box-set or now simply (re)streaming episodes on your television is not only a convenient way to watch television when you want to, but also to understand series’ narratives better. People once gathered on online message boards to make sense of the convoluted series of events that was shown. But not only did the narratives of the television series become more complex; they also expanded beyond the realm of television onto different media platforms. During the second season of Lost the show’s producers decided to not only have a story that was told through the television series, but to add additional backstory in different media. This backstory, which explored the background of a malicious company that was central to Lost’s plot, was told through websites, e-mails, phone calls, commercials, and flash mobs, among other media. The result was a fragmented story containing details of a fictional company which existed within the alternate reality established by the television series’ storyworld. This caused the viewers to become players in a gamified rendition of the narrative where they themselves had to find the fragmented pieces of the story and put them together. Participating in this Alternate Reality Game (ARG) was not necessary to follow along with the story told through the television series; its main purpose was to support the storyline that was told through the television series by expanding the storyworld. Since the early 2000s many more television narratives have bled into other media. With its slogan “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” the subscription-based broadcaster HBO has portrayed itself as more than just television. It lives up to this notion with complex narratives and characters, as well as elaborate marketing campaigns. For the series True Blood (2008-2014, HBO)and Game of Thrones (2011-2019, HBO) for example, the network launched marketing campaigns that spread across multiple media platforms where the audience could explore the storyworlds of the series and become immersed in them. These campaigns happened ahead of the airing of the pilot episodes, with the main focus being to create awareness of the stories and characters as these series moved into new territory for HBO with genres (horror and fantasy, respectively) that the network had not aired before (Bourdaa, 2014). Creating these moments of immersion into the storyworld through other platforms is something HBO has kept exploring and expanding on since. For its series Westworld (2016-, HBO), which delves into yet another new genre for HBO, namely science fiction, a marketing campaign not 3 only preceded the pilot, but kept going throughout the series’ run. Ahead of its initial release the audience could explore the alternate reality in which Westworld was set through mostly online content, but as episodes began to be released new content would also be added to these online platforms. Analyzing Westworld and its use of the ARG offers a unique insight into the methods that are employed to stimulate the viewer to participate in the temporal flow of the series. In the case of Westworld HBO operates on a weekly release model. By following this temporal flow, and thus viewing episodes ‘live’, through both the TV series and the ARG the viewer is able to engage with the content in a much more immersive way. By offering quality engagement the audience is encouraged to become a live viewer and thus a loyal viewer. Discover Westworld Westworld is a science-fiction series that started airing on 2 October 2016. To date there have been two seasons, with the second season’s finale airing on 24 June 2018. The series is set in the not-too- distant future in a theme park named Westworld that allows wealthy individuals to experience the old West. The theme park, which is run by the fictional corporation ‘Delos’, is inhabited by so called ‘hosts’, who are robots driven by artificial intelligence, but who forget what happened to them at the end of every day. Other than their 24-hour memory, they look and act like humans. The show deals with existential themes such as what it means to be human and when artificial intelligence could or should be considered consciousness. It does so by showing the viewer what the hosts undergo by being subject to both emotional and physical violence at the hands of part visitors. The hosts process this initially simply by having their memory reset every 24 hours, but this changes when some of the hosts become self-aware. This ability to remember the cruelty that they experience and becoming aware of the nature of their existence as robots in a theme park ultimately lead the hosts to revolt. Similar to the ARG that accompanied Lost, the marketing campaign surrounding Westworld allowed to audience to explore the company that is central to the series’ plot, Delos Incorporated. From a few days before the pilot aired pieces of the storyworld became accessible through websites, the first of which was the Discoverwestworld website, which were quickly recognized by the audience as part of an ARG. While the audience may initially just have browsed the Discoverwestworld website and read about the park, a chatbot named Aeden soon prompted the visitors to ask some questions. A set of questions regarding, for example, how to get to Westworld or what activities visitors of the park can partake in lead to perfectly understandable answers. However, many people soon found that asking more critical questions about characters from the show, for instance, would lead to ‘error messages’ which were riddled with easter eggs. This in turn caused people to believe they were dealing with a 4 game rather than a non-interactive text. The easter eggs then quickly started leading people to hidden portions of the website which was aimed at consumers, as well as to a different website which seemed to serve as a platform for Delos’ business-to-business communication. The ARG allowed the audience experience what it might be like to be a prospective visitor of the park, or even a client of Delos Incorporated. Even though the series is set in the future, about one or two centuries from now, the information on the webpages is framed as part of the present that the audience experiences. While the ARG is set in the ‘present’, the plot involves multiple timelines, although throughout the series there is much ambiguity as to which events belong to which timeline, as the story is not told chronologically and there are often no clear indicators which timeline is being shown. The timelines are complicated by the fact that the series features both human and host characters, the former of whom age and the latter of whom do not. The human characters are either guests, whom we follow as they visit the park, or employees of Delos, the company that owns Westworld. The audience rarely gets to see different groups of guests interact with each other, but they do see different groups of guests interacting with the same hosts in different scenes. Because hosts do not age, it is difficult to discern whether or not the guests are interacting with the hosts in the same timeline. A couple of notable timelines the series follows are, for one, the timeline in which William, who is married to the daughter of James Delos, the founder of Delos Incorporated, visits the park for the first time with his brother-in-law. In another timeline we see the so called ‘Man in Black’, who is clearly much older than William and his brother-in-law, interacting with some of the same hosts we see William interacting with. Neither parties are shown interacting with other noteworthy human characters until the end of the first season, when the park’s former director greets the Man in Black as ‘William’ and we learn that William and the Man in Black are the same person a few decades apart. The show features many such reveals, where the viewer learns something that they thought happened in the present (the timeline furthest in the future, which runs parallel to the ARG) actually took place days, months or years earlier. The television series’ ambiguity regarding its chronology is one reason for the complexity of the overall plot, as well as the sheer amount of narrative information that is put into each episode. With each episode the chronology of the narrative becomes a little clearer, as viewers piece together the information they are given to make sense of the puzzle that is the Westworld plot. This level of complexity is often met with a tendency towards binge-watching by the audience to be able to more easily relate the events from one episode to those of another (Jenner, 2014).