longlostposter wrote:Yeah, I do think it's unfair. After all, if it's an ARG, then how could they have it all planned out?
Well, that's a funny story, which I'll try to explain as best I can (bear with me; I might ramble a little).
I understand your point, and that's why I thought that my comment there would be seen as unfair considering the fan angle on this whole thing. However, I still think it suggests a lack of planning that should be in place, because something like a true fan-based input-output system would never work, and hasn't even actually been consistently used in LG15.
At best you could reasonably expect to get fan input to determine a specific, non-major choice every once in a while, but when all is said and done, you're really going to need to have to create an overall narrative yourself. At least you'll have to if you want that narrative to be of high quality. You will inevitably have to shape it to be the best it can be yourself (as random decisions from fans won't make that happen), so you might as well have it in place from the start. If you don't, it's going to show (as it has at times here).
The ironic part of this to me is that the Creators realized (from the beginning or as time passed, I wonder? I'd love to know) that the level of fan interaction couldn't be too intense. They said a while back that while fan input could have effects, LG15 wouldn't become a "choose your own adventure" thing. "Choose your own adventure" was really the impression many of us got early on when the idea of fan input having results was introduced.
The reason I say it couldn't be left too much to the fans is because the only basis by which one would have to determine where fan input sent things would be the concept that the majority rules - which isn't always a good system. Especially where passionate, dedicated fans with opposing opinions are concerned. So, really, it all falls back on the producers anyway.
They can't use the tyranny of the majority system without alienating one segment of fans or the other (potentially up to 49% every time) from decision to decision, and even if one did think it was the way to go, sometimes the majority of fans can't be trusted to make the decision that's
needed. This was potentially the case with the test for Jonas several months ago. Though the majority of forum members ended up voting in favor of going to Jonas' (after the deck was carefully stacked in that direction), the decision had already been made to send them there and the video was already filmed.
That's where the story needed to go, and the Creators knew that. They also knew that they couldn't just run the risk of trusting us to recognize that. I for one didn't recognize it, and found the whole idea of Jonas way too convenient and suspicious. In Bree and Daniel's position, I myself would have never chosen to go to his place, nor would I have advised them to. But, as far as what the story needed, I was wrong, and so were those who agreed with me at that time.
The story needed to move to Jonas' place (and we got a great character out of it, who I've actually come to like and trust), so the Creators made sure it did, regardless of what the fans could have decided. I for one have since been very proud of the Creators when I realized the ruse about the forum "deciding." Not long before that, during a big discussion that was analyzing what various forum members believed to be problems in the story and production as a whole, myself and some other forum members had implored the Creators to do what they thought was needed, no matter what we fans said - because we could be wrong about where the story should go, but the Creators hopefully shouldn't be.
I can't prove much of what I'm about to say; it's largely conjecture, but I believe it's a series of good guesses. I think Miles, Mesh, Amanda, Greg, and whoever else had been listening to everyone too much before that, and trying too hard to do too many things at one time. That was a transitional period for the series, and I think they were hesitating to make the needed transitions.
They were trying to please the people who thought LG15 should be those cutesie videos that actually had little place in what LG15 was becoming, yet also trying to please those of us with a taste for a sophisticated, suspenseful, mystery with mature themes. It also seemed like they were trying to listen to what everybody thought they should do, and momentum in the plot just ceased to exist. The whole thing got stagnant. Were they going to go to Jonas' or weren't they? Could he be trusted or couldn't he? After a while, it got to the point that even those of us who saw going to Jonas' place as the absolute worst idea imaginable said "Good God, just make them go so something will happen."
I hope somewhere in all this rambling my point's coming into focus: a story (even an ongoing one) can't be run by fan input. It just can't work. At least not if any potential profit value is going to be realized. It can't be left to chance, or the random whims of a vocal group that could actually be the fanbase's overall minority.
With the inevitable result being that the producers of the project will have to take over either way, to get the best quality out of it as a whole, it might as well be planned out in large part from the very beginning. Of course, it's possible that I'm still not being fair. I'm sure when I referred to this series as an experiment I wasn't wrong, at least not about its first few months.
This is more conjecture on my part, but I bet they wanted to see if fan input really could guide things to a great extent. Maybe they just wanted to see if it
could work. Truly, perhaps it was in large part an experiment to that effect. If they pondered that, I think they got their answer. It won't work, and I don't think it ever can. At least not as an etertainment medium when the commodity in question is one that's trying to be - and needs to be - a coherent, serious and bankable story (and LG15 being bankable remains as important - or more important - as the answer to the question about whether fan guidance can work).
longlostposter wrote:It would be nothing more than a TV show or mini-movie.
Essentially, that's what it now is, and how many of us see it. Minus the ARG elements, that's all it would actually be, and most of the fans don't play the ARG anyway. Even those of us who are constantly staying apprised of developments in it.
Like I said, in those early months after the outing of LG15 as a production, I do believe the fans got a considerable amount of power. Even more than they realized they had. I bet Daniel and Bree taking to living in motels was the fans' power at work. The existence of the Watchers probably was too. But, again, things stagnated, and I firmly believe it was largely because there was little in the way of a clear-cut consensus on what should happen - so the Creators had to take control.
Since the Bree/Gemma/Jonas chat and the "test" for Jonas, the Creators have hardly even played at the idea of fan interaction being what they once talked about it as. I do still believe they read our comments and consider our input, but I think (from around mid-December)
they've been guiding it where
they knew it needed to go. And thank God for it.
There's been much more coherency since then (despite some apparent slow and irrelevant times), much more obvious relevance to various happenings (the slow and apparently irrelevant times in January ended up having a clear purpose), and improved pacing - yet none of the talk about the fan input.
So, that's my long-winded dissertation on why I think a high quality story demands producer/creator guidance/planning from start to finish, and why significant fan input can be more of a problem than anything (to the point that it should hardly be entertained most of the time). That said, you do still make some interesting comments below that I'd like to consider now.
longlostposter wrote:Also, that's what Sam has seven friends did..the had great writers, the videos were like something out of Hollywood, the acting was incredible, but because there was no fan input, it didn't get a good fan following going. That show was by far the superior one (as far as plot, professional-looking videos), but since there wasn't the fan input, it just sort of collapsed.
I didn't follow that series as closely as this one (not sure why), but I think there's too many potential variables that could have played into why that series didn't get as big as LG15. It could have been more because it was presented differently (LG15 was presented as an apparently authentic vlog at first; Sam Has 7 Friends was always presented as a production). Maybe it was because one was on Revver and the other was on YouTube. Maybe it was because SH7F followed in the wake of LG15's hype and couldn't possibly match it.
I don't think there's enough data to conclude that SH7F failed to achieve the same level of popularity that LG15 achieved because of solely the issue of fan input. While that's certainly a potential factor that we can't dismiss, I feel compelled to point out that there's so many television programs with huge viewership that have no more fan interaction than SH7F has, yet they're as successful as LG15, or even more successful. For most of them, the fan interaction begins and ends at the same point it did for SH7F: discussing the series on a forum. Heck, SH7F probably had a slightly higher level of fan interaction, because the people making it would be more likely to pay close attention to what viewers were saying on a forum than the corporate moguls behind CSI would be likely to.
There's also to consider the various vlogs that get tens of thousands of viewers, when only a few hundred people comment. The large majority of viewers with those videos (and LG15 videos, for that matter) never even comment, so their interaction never goes beyond just watching. I think there's got to be something more to it than fan interaction. I don't know what it is, but it just doesn't seem like the answer to me based on what little I know.
longlostposter wrote:I'm still hoping they do the second season, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Even though I still haven't watched all the episodes in the first one, I hope so too. It would be a shame to leave it incomplete.
