I don’t normally write about television here as, well, I barely watch it anymore. But as we’re now at the midway point of the final season of Lost, I thought I’d put down a few random thoughts I’ve had recently regarding Lost and games.

In graduate school the last several years, Lost was one of our only weekly “water cooler” shows — the days after airing were filled with questions about what had happened, theorizing about the show’s mysteries, and interpretation of the show’s meaning. Now, as a group of students studying and making games, this always struck me (and I presume my friends) as normal — there was something built into this show that seemed strongly about games. Incidentally, I found it odd that the media studies students I knew who studied television had, for the most part, long ago given up on the series, while nearly everyone that studied games still kept up with it, and wondered if this was more than just coincidence.

Since the beginning of the series, games have cropped up over and over again. Most prominent (and, it seems, prophetic) was John Locke’s first season explanation of backgammon to Walt, a game he described as featuring “two players, two sides — one is light, one is dark,” and one that was very, very old. As the series has come back to these themes in recent weeks, it’s drawn my attention back to how games have appeared during its six-year run.

Various things we put in the family of things called “games” have been scattered through the series, and in multiple forms — as abstract mind games (The Pearl station; most of Ben Linus’s storyline in seasons 2-5), sports (the Red Sox winning the world series; Desmond’s critical soccer game), computer games (Locke’s game of chess at The Flame), and board games (backgammon in The Swan; Risk played in the barracks). Games are a key motif that I’d initially missed, but seem to be one that the show’s returned to over and over again.

Games are, of course, more than just something the show’s writers are using as window dressing, and have been employed to useful thematic effect. Most notably, the metaphor of a game has been used repeatedly to show the struggle between two groups at a time competing on the island, hinting at complex strategizing that might underly an otherwise confusing set of events. As the series is wrapping up, these themes have come back stronger than ever, and we again see the “team conflict” that’s permeated the show since the first season. A “taking of sides” has cropped up over and over again, from the first season’s “man of science” (Jack) vs. “man of faith” (Locke) to the later conflict between the Oceanic survivors vs. “the Others” to the combined Oceanics and Others vs. the Freighter folk (Naomi and Keamy, primarily) — and now the currently brewing Team Jacob (Jack, Hurley, Ilana, Sun) vs. Team Smoke Monster/Man In Black/”Angry Man” (Fake Locke, Sayid, Claire, Sawyer) showdown.

At times, ludic elements of these conflicts have been alluded to, with constraints and rules being mentioned by the Man in Black vs. Jacob this season as well as Ben vs. Widmore in season four. Now, with this (potentially) final game between two god-like mysterious beings, “gaming” has gone from a subtext to being, quite possibly, the answer to the biggest mystery of the series — why is all of this happening in the first place? Games are moving from being purely subtextual to being oddly diegetic (if that terms works here) and is, I suspect, going to be a core aspect of the show’s narrative from here on out. That’s a fascinating twist to the series, if it comes to pass like they’ve been hinting.

Anyway, I’ve found myself reflecting on my watching of the show for the past few years, and considering that the appeal of the show all this time has had something to do with gaming — or at least, gaming-like practices as activities the viewer does (puzzle-solving, piecing together the narrative, trying to predict the next step of the story), something the characters are engaged in (increasingly overtly, as with Hurley’s recent vocalizing of fan theories), and something the show’s writers have most likely had to do just to draw all of the show’s strands to a satisfying conclusion.

It’s this last, behind-the-scenes bit that now interests me the most, perhaps because it’s all speculation: We can look at the writers’ task for the first three seasons as the creation of a set of “pieces” and a “board” for them to move around on, and the negotiation of the series’ end (during the show’s third season) meant the writers had to first solve the puzzle themselves. Or, to put it another way, the writers themselves were forced to do (at least somewhat) what fans have been doing — problem-solving, trying to take the narrative elements they’d set up in the beginning of the show and have it all make some kind of sense by the end — in order to choreograph the series’ final three seasons (an unprecedented task, as far as I know).

Though he hasn’t been directly involved with the series for a while, executive producer J. J. Abrams clearly loves games (note the t-shirt above). He discovered Michael Giacchino by playing games that Giacchino had scored, and managed to turn a print magazine (Wired) into an interesting game artifact for an issue last year. Alternate reality games (The Lost Experience and the Dharma game) have played a significant role in exploring corners of the story that couldn’t be explored easily in the show, and the otherwise execrable Lost: Via Domus (which I’ve purchased now an inexplicable four times — don’t ask) actually successfully foreshadowed events in the fifth season much more than I had ever expected a game tie-in to. Games are part of the set of paratexts around the show that make it work, but, I suspect, work because the show itself seems so fundamentally game-like. Or, at least, does the practice of watching it serially, in communities of friends who also care about and find themselves “gaming” the show (similar to my experiences reading the original Watchmen comics).

As tomorrow’s episode will show the backstory for Richard Alpert’s mysteriously long-lived character, I’m guessing we’ll see a revisiting of an earlier stage of the Jacob/Man In Black “game” and more uncovering of the show’s larger narrative. Games are as old as narrative itself, and while I’ve been teaching a course this term on the limits of understanding games as narratives, it’s the relationship in the other direction — games can help shape how we read and collectively make meaning of ongoing linear narratives — that I’m finding most compelling about Lost as it gathers steam and heads into the final few episodes.