LOST's Dharma Initiative ARG a Disappointment so Far

LOST is in another long hiatus, and if you are a fan of the ABC show, you know that can mean only one thing: an alternate reality game (ARG) to keep the die-hard fans interested.

This year's game takes the form of a recruitment drive for a newly reconstituted Dharma Initiative. The game kicked off with an advertisement during the season finale for a company called Octagon Global Recruiting that would be recruiting DI members in San Diego the weekend of July 27. Astute viewers quickly made the connection that this was the same place and time as the 2008 ComicCon.

True to their word, a booth for Octagon Global Computing appeared at ComicCon and offered potential recruits the opportunity to take a test to determine their worthiness for the Dharma Initiative. All of this was tied in to the LOST panel at ComicCon with the story that the panel this year was sponsored by the Dharma Initiative. A few carefully scripted events unfolded during the panel, culminating in the leak of a secret video where the man in the orientation videos, first known as Dr. Marvin Candle and now named as Pierre Chang, delivered a message through a pinhole in time.

All of this dragged on a bit but delivered in the end. Fans enjoyed the DI representative on the stage with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof and went crazy when the secret video was shown. Unfortunately, the rest of the game does not seem to be on the same track.

The main web site for the game, DharmaWantsYou.com, is plagued by server problems and slow updates. After weeks of anticipation and a missed deadline, the first recruiting test went live and turned out to be a timed jigsaw puzzle, ostensibly to test the recruit's spatial perception. There seems to be a scoreboard planned to provide bragging rights to the top 10 scorers, and the test is supposed to help determine the recruit's role within the Dharma Initiative. Both of these promised to be in place within 24 hours of the August launch date, but as of the afternoon of August 22, neither was operational. The team behind the game missed another deadline.

This track of underwhelming developments and missed deadlines is not going to win any new fans for LOST, and may even be enough to turn off some of the die-hard fans during the hiatus. ABC needs to learn to provide more funding to support the infrastructure of its LOST ARGs, or it needs to find a new promotion company that will be capable or running a different kind of game with the funding available.