I spent the last two weeks of June at Scholarship in Sound & Image: A Workshop in Videographic Criticism at Middlebury College. A generous grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH made it possible for fourteen scholars to live and work together for two weeks, resulting in an experience that is among the most rewarding of my entire career.

Our hosts Chris Keathley and Jason Mittell, both faculty members in Film & Media Culture at Middlebury, designed a workshop that conveyed technical skills and stimulated discussions about how to craft scholarship in the form of the video essay. The combination of carefully planned exercises and informal conversations at our shared dorm, at the dining hall, or at the computer lab made this a truly unique and intensely lived experience.

We spent the first week learning how to use Adobe Premiere (or, in some case, refining existing skills) through a series of five exercises. Starting on Day 2, we spent the mornings in small groups discussing our finished exercises and then usually screened everyone’s videos, followed by receiving our next assignment. Afternoons consisted of learning new aspects of Premiere and starting our video of the day. The assignments included a videographic Pecha Kucha, a trailer, a video with voiceover, a response to someone else’s video using multi-screen technique, and a video using epigraphs (see Jason Mittell’s post Making Videographic Criticism for more details on these daily exercises). Considering that as academics, our attention is often divided between many different tasks, it was wonderful to focus on finishing only one project at a time.

Each participant selected one familiar text to work on during the entire first week, ranging from The Water Nymph, Trouble in Paradise, The Magnificent Ambersons, Imitation of Life, Belle de Jour, The Stepford Wives, Suspiria, to La Ciénaga. I worked on the web series Husbands. I had closely analyzed the series before in traditional academic writing, but cutting up and rearranging it revealed new aspects about content and characters. For example, I re-evaluated my previous rather harsh critique of the queer representation in the series, and I realized that one of the protagonists is on screen more frequently than the other. At the end of the week, I also knew far more about video and sound editing than I had anticipated (shout-out and thank you to Ethan Murphy, Film & Media Culture’s Digital Media Specialist, and Stella Holt, a recent graduate of Film & Media Culture, who were always around to provide technical advice).

During the second week, we worked on drafting a video essay, and we had videographic experts Eric Faden, Catherine Grant, and Kevin B. Lee join our workshop. It was immensely useful to hear Eric, Katie, and Kevin talk about their approaches to creating video essays and to be able to get their feedback on our drafts. I talked to both Katie and Kevin at length about how to structure my video essay on Husbands since I didn’t want to include a guiding voiceover but rather wanted to let the argument emerge mostly through editing and select on-screen text. My intention to skip the voiceover—a staple in many video essays—certainly stems from my familiarity with fan-made remix videos that excel at cultural critique through the use of editing and music alone.

Spontaneous screenings of works-in-progress in small groups provided further suggestions. This intensely collaborative atmosphere set the workshop apart from the often solitary work of Humanities scholars and makes me wish that we could create scholarship in collaborative ways more often.

The second week ended with a four-hour screening and discussion of our video essay drafts. The range and creativity in the presented works was impressive, especially considering that most of us had never used Premiere before arriving at Middlebury. A selection of these video essays will be revised for a special issue of [in]transition, a peer-reviewed journal of videographic criticism. We have also begun talking about a workshop for the upcoming SCMS ’16 conference. I certainly hope that another iteration of this workshop will happen again, either at Middlebury or at another institution. What we learned during the two weeks at “video camp” is too valuable not to share more widely. There is also much left to explore regarding the format of the video essay and which kinds of scholarship it suits best. For form and content analyses, the video essay is a rich tool, but I still wonder how the video essay can work for Media Industries Studies, for example, which is a field of inquiry dedicated to exploring the production, circulation, and reception of media texts. How can you represent a para-textual analysis in the format of the video essay?

To my fellow videographers, I’m already looking forward to our reunion at SCMS next year, and remember: we’re all winners, baby.

My multi-screen exercise “Brady and Cheeks Watch TV,” which samples videos made by other workshop participants. Inspired by the remix video Channel Hopping from _mesk on Vimeo.

Select work produced by #videographic participants at the workshop:

Corey Creekmur’s AmbersonsBachelard

Allison de Fren’s Stepford Wives Trailer

Shane Denson’s Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)

Liz Green’s Velvet Elephant

Patrick Keating’s Epigraph Exercise: Trouble in Paradise

Jaap Kooijman’s Close|Up

Jason Mittell’s The Logic of Mulholland Drive

Even though NYTVF bills itself as independent TV festival, more and more legacy media companies are present at the festival. In the case of this year’s Digital Day, digital studios or digital programming units that are part of established TV networks, channels, and studios were well represented on all panels. The majority of panelists were from legacy media companies, including the digital branches of Comedy Central, the CW, Starz, and Universal. Others represented established players in digital distribution, including My Damn Channel and Vimeo. While the panel make-up depends on who is willing and available to appear, there seemed to be a clear trend toward including legacy media representatives at NYTVF.

The audience—or at least the imagined audience evoked by panelists—consisted of content creators trying to break into the industry. Panel discussions and questions centered on how to catch the attention of the companies represented by panelists and get a pitch meeting. The discussion thus did not center on how to create a web series that one would self-finance and distribute on a platform like YouTube, at least not in the long run. This focus struck me as different from much of the usual discourse around web series and the conversation at least year’s Digital Day, which included panels about Kickstarter or other ways of self-financing and featured creators like Adam Goldman (creator of web series like The Outs and Whatever This Is), not executives.

Another marked shift from previous years resided in the panelists’ description of preconditions an independent creator needs to meet in order to get a development deal. Executives emphasized that they are looking for two things: one, a fully fleshed out show that has a few episodes under its belt and an “established social following”- or, in other words, a guaranteed loyal audience. Ideally, you should also have a marketing strategy. Simply pitching a great idea is no longer enough. As David Katz (VP of Digital Media at Starz) put it, “bring that entire eco-system to me.” Listening to these preconditions made me wonder just how independent the digital TV landscape is; all of the talk of pitches and development deals echoed pilot season rather strongly- except merely having a pilot is not enough to get picked up by Starz or My Damn Channel. Moreover, the financial prospects don’t seem to be that promising, either. As Jed Weintrop (VP, Head of Production, Condé Nast Entertainment) pointed out: “Nobody gets rich here,” which was echoed by other panelists throughout the day.

Finally, the many callbacks to legacy media history surprised me. Perhaps it shouldn’t have. After all, one panel was called “Supply and Demand: Why Indie TV Will Be the New Indie Film.” Throughout all panels, executives evoked the history of film and cable TV to frame the current digital TV landscape. For example, Rob Barnett of My Damn Channel stated that digital TV was like “baby cable” and added that it feels like it’s “’80, ’81,” before the big players in cable had emerged. New Yorker columnist Adam Sternbergh described the discovery of exciting new digital content as “going to Sundance in 1988, ’89.”

Stray observations:

• Panelists identified Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu original programming as “television,” not “digital content.” To panelists, the dividing line was budget and programming length. Aimee Carlson (VP, Digital Development and Production, Universal Cable Productions) defined “digital content” as short form, low-budget, episodic video that premieres exclusively on digital platforms. The half-hour and hour-long programs on Amazon et al do not fall under this umbrella even though they are also made exclusively for digital distribution.
• Jennifer Titus (SVP, On Air Creative, CW Seed) pointed out that the average age of CW viewers for “linear” (i.e. primetime programming) is 38. For their digital content on CW Seed, the average age is 22.
• Another common piece of advice across panels: connect to specific audiences; don’t throw your product at a broad audience. Sam Toles (VP of Content Acquisitions and Business Development at Vimeo) was particularly adamant about this strategy. He stated that millennials aren’t engaging with traditional media/advertising, which is why “indie TV” creators need to connect with them in a targeted way. As a strategy for cutting through the noise of digital content, he advised attaching content to a specific audience already invested in the genre/topic and “seeding a clip across social media so they notice it and start sharing it.”

The monetization panel introduced two options for funding a web series: crowdfunding or a sponsor/brand liaison. Much of the panel’s discussion focused on how to create a crowdfunding campaign that stands out (“offer personalized rewards” was one suggestion) and how to find a sponsor (one panelist remarked that if great content doesn’t fit a brand, it will have less of a chance of gaining sponsorship). The Digital Distribution panel offered insights into My Damn Channel and CW Seed, including the notion that for online distributors, the boundaries between marketing, distribution, and audience engagement are collapsing because content circulates via social media. CW Seed’s Rick Haskins also rejected the long-standing idea that online video content needs to be short in order to be successful, observing that the CW’s statistics show an increase in mobile viewing of hour-long dramas. “A screen is a screen,” he remarked and explained that convenience trumps quality of the viewing experience.

I found the panel on building an audience most intriguing. The panel highlighted only one way to build an audience: social media, by which panelists meant Twitter. The panel might as well have been subtitled “how Twitter will save television.” Moderator Fred Graver, Head of TV at Twitter, emphasized that Twitter has special values by being live, public, and conversational. The liveness of Twitter came up several times during the panel. The panelists focused on two main strategies for building an audience: branded content or ads that appear in the Twitter stream and showrunners’ /casts’ direct engagement with viewers via Twitter. Graver heralded branded content as “closing the loop” between seeing a tweet and watching television, especially via Comcast’s new “See it” initiative.

The singular focus on Twitter surprised me—after all, there are numerous online platforms on which viewers engage with TV. For example, the complete absence of Tumblr at this panel struck me as significant oversight. In addition, this panel conveyed the idea that the industry has never had the opportunity to engage so directly with audiences before when viewers have discussed television online for decades now, and this isn’t the first time that the industry has discovered online audience engagement. Let’s remember articles like Marshall Sella’s The Remote Controllers from 2002, which describes message boards like Television Without Pity. But Twitter’s liveness—and its potential to foster live viewing—is what sets it apart from more asynchronous sites, and offers a reason why the industry is cultivating Twitter as a TV engagement tool: because it fits the networks’ needs and preferences for advertising and ratings. In addition, Twitter tends to be public and centralized. Instead of trying to locate dispersed audience-created content and opinions on various sites, industry insiders can execute a key word search on Twitter that results in easily accessible data for a range of TV shows.

Beyond praising Twitter’s general capabilities for connecting audiences and TV, panelists also agreed that paying attention to Twitter has become a must for showrunners and writers. As Embassy Row’s Mike Davis put it, Twitter functions as a barometer of the audience that is more productive than a focus group (although both are similarly limited in offering only a small and very selective slice of the audience). Law and Order: SVU showrunner Warren Leight shared his experiences using Twitter to build buzz for SVU. Leight candidly spoke of NBC’s disinterest in promoting the show and needing to find ways to promote SVU that doesn’t cost the network any money. NBC only considered using Twitter to funnel audiences toward the official SVU website, an effort that Leight deemed unproductive. Calling TV show websites the “rust belt” of the internet, he highlighted the cast and crew’s tweets as better alternative because their tweets, especially images and links, get picked up by an average of ten to twenty entertainment websites in addition to being spread via retweets. Leight’s comments reminded me of the central argument in Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s Spreadable Media, namely that the industry needs to shift away from keeping content and audiences locked in one place (like an official website) and toward making content mobile so audiences can spread it wherever they want (a model that makes tracking impressions more difficult but demonstrates an understanding of how audiences engage with content today).

Leight’s recognition of spreadability’s importance also came across in his anecdote about last summer’s #savebenson campaign. The campaign and hashtag originated (unsurprisingly) in fans’ tweets in response to SVU’s season finale. Leight described the surprise and delight of coming across the hashtag. The writers pushed the hashtag to keep conversation going about SVU over the summer. Despite the new ways of engaging SVU viewers, Leight’s ultimate concern and focus is still on ratings. For example, Leight observed that good East Coast Twitter buzz can translate into a ratings bump for the West Coast and highlighted the potential of guest stars with a large Twitter following who can tweet about their guest appearance, which might also translate into an increase in ratings. While there is ultimately no way to correlate Twitter buzz/engagement and ratings increases, Leight’s analysis says much about his investment in Twitter as a space of maintaining interest in a show that is off the network’s (and critics) radar. Overall, Leight described his cast and crew’s Twitter engagement as “complete anarchy” because there are no coordinating talking points for what happens on Twitter. While he mused that the corporate world will likely get very anxious about this free-for-all mentality, Fred Graver added that Twitter advises networks not to interfere because it relieves them of responsibility when inappropriate comments surface.

The overwhelming focus on Twitter in the panel on audiences, with frequent gestures to Twitter appearing in the other panels as well, was noticeably different from the previous year, when Digital Day centered on second screen apps offering program-related content. It is interesting to speculate, and invite you to do so in the comments, whether or not this emphasis on Twitter constitutes a silent concession that content-based second screen apps are largely failures because the audience won’t budge from Twitter as virtual watercooler.

For more on the NYTVF, check out Aymar Jean Christian’s Can the New York Television Festival Get Past the Pilot?

Veteran transmedia storytellers Campfire previously designed campaigns for programs such as Game of Thrones and Bag of Bones. In those campaigns, as in the current one for Hunted, Campfire relies on a multi-pronged strategy to spread word of mouth about the program and increase brand awareness of the channel on which the program airs. As such, the campaigns combine an interactive web-based component, a physical object sent to opinion leaders, and, in the case of Game of Thrones and Hunted, targeted, local events. All elements of the campaign synch to provide potential viewers with an immersive experience of the program’s characters and storyworld.

The specific elements that comprise the Hunted campaign have been analyzed by multiple media outlets such as ARG Net, Huffington Post, and by Myles McNutt, so I will highlight only a few relevant features. The online component at ByzantiumTests.com consists of personality tests that supposedly decide if the participant is fit to work for Byzantium Security. As one might expect, it doesn’t matter how one responds to these tests—in the end, all participants are deemed to be part of the 1% that qualifies for employment at Byzantium (nevertheless, it is worth playing through all tests to get to the very last, the baffling outcome of which leads one to ask “but how did they do that?”). I found it interesting that the online component asks viewers to join Byzantium when the company is marked as an antagonist in the series itself, but as I previously explained regarding The Hunger Games, this strategy invites viewers into the diegesis while simultaneously not revealing too much in advance to the program’s premiere.

The physical component of the Hunted campaign takes the form of a wooden puzzle that has a secret compartment for a password-protected flash drive. After solving the fragmented anagram burned into the wood, one has access to exclusive materials. Campfire’s goal of sending out the puzzles to the lucky few—or shall we say, the lucky 1% of television viewers privileged enough to receive mail from Campfire—is also to spread the word about Hunted (full disclosure: I received one of those puzzles, too, and am presumably doing my part by writing this post). After all, as Campfire’s Creative Director Steve Coulson told me, an important goal of this transmedia campaign is to generate word-of-mouth buzz that connects a quality drama like Hunted with Cinemax. The dual goal of the Hunted transmedia campaign is thus not only to recruit new viewers for Cinemax, but also the elevate viewers’ opinion of Cinemax’s brand (Campfire created a campaign with similar goals for A&E and its Stephen King mini-series Bag of Bones).

Photo Credit: Armando Gallardo

So far, all of this is fairly standard in the world of transmedia storytelling. However, the last component of the Hunted campaign stands out. As part of a localized event, posters promoting Byzantium Security appeared in the area around Wall Street in time for the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. In contrast to the online component, which is easily identified as promotional material for Hunted because of its copyright disclaimer, the ads did not have any overt link to the program. Indeed, many people mistook the posters for real ads advertising security for the 1%.

The above photo circulated widely on Twitter and blogs following the OWS anniversary. The revelation that the Byzantium ads were “just” for a TV program didn’t necessarily improve opinions about the ad (see, for example, the reactions on OWS’s Facebook page). One could say that this reaction was a win for Campfire nevertheless since Hunted and Cinemax became part of a passionate conversation. However, seeing the ads either as marketing triumph or terrible co-option of activist language is too simple, especially because the program itself raises the question of what it means to work for a company that protects the 1%.  For me, ambivalence might be a better term for describing this mash-up of activist language and television promotion. While the ads might not promote a security firm for the 1%, they promote a program that targets those who can and will spend the additional monthly fee for Cinemax; a group we might imagine as the “1%” of television viewers. While the actual number of subscribers is larger than one percent, the discourse of quality television depicts viewers of premium cable drama as the elite among TV viewers (as suggested by Michael Z. Newman and Elena Levine in Legitimating Television).

There is also the question of commercial television’s role in contributing to a conversation about the issues addressed by OWS, like global finance. Is television depoliticized, as Alternet’s Sarah Jaffe observes, or is TV another venue in which this conversation happens? The first episode suggests that Hunted will follow the usual approach of commercial television and present the conflicts surrounding Byzantium in a personalized way, namely as a conflict between main character Sam Hunter and Byzantium, her employers, rather than offering a systemic critique of Byzantium as cog in the machine of global finance. Despite this personalization, it seems too easy to divorce a program like Hunted from the larger discourse surrounding OWS. Perhaps the ultimate achievement of the Byzantium ads is that it forces us to look more closely at how both the commercialized rhetoric of transmedia and the activist rhetoric of OWS engage in a conversation about the 1%.

The events of the season premiere allow Husbands to engage in a multi-layered critique of queer visibility in American culture. On the most obvious level, the episode offers a blunt attack on what frequently passes as acceptance of LGBT culture. As Brady’s agent Wes puts it, “Acceptable gays are overweight, over forty, overly professional with their lovers in public.” Cheeks refuses to feed into this veneer of acceptance. While the arguments arising out of Brady and Cheeks’ conversation have the subtlety of a sledgehammer, they are nevertheless an important commentary on the state of queer visibility on network television. After all, many gay and lesbian characters fit into tightly defined cultural norms: they are white, wealthy, professional, and live in monogamous relationships whose intimate aspects remain largely invisible.

Husbands takes a stance against this narrow definition of queer visibility (a stance that Espenson and Bell have discussed in a number of interviews). While Husbands offers a verbal critique of this definition, a visual critique remains largely absent so far. For a variety of reasons, it seems unlikely that we will see Brady and Cheeks get down and dirty in future episodes (e.g. Husbands‘ distribution via YouTube requires the series to abide by YouTube’s TOS, which prohibits explicit sexual imagery). Beyond the issue of depicting same-sex intimacy, Husbands does not really challenge the current norms of queer visibility. Brady and Cheeks are white, out-and-proud professionals in a committed relationship. As such, they inhabit the type of queer visibility that television has promoted as default mode of LGBT representation in programs such as Brothers & Sisters, Glee, and the upcoming The New Normal.

This overlap between Husbands and network TV is particularly interesting considering that the series also uses Brady and Cheeks’ diverging ideas about how to represent their relationship as means to articulate differences between traditional TV and web series. The crux of the argument between Brady and Cheeks in the season premiere comes down to Cheeks’ uncensored use of social media, including Instagram and Twitter. Via tweets, Cheeks constructs a picture of his marriage that diverges from Brady’s carefully constructed public image—an image managed by Brady’s agent. Considering Espenson and Bell’s embrace of Web-based media production, it is easy to read Cheeks as representative of web series while Brady embodies the conventions of traditional TV production.

From this point of view, Brady and Cheeks’ conversation about which public image of their marriage to project is also a rumination on who produces these images and to what end. Various statements by Espenson illustrate that she and Bell consider their web series a departure from and challenge to the TV industry. Explaining her interest in Web-based TV, Espenson emphasizes “[s]peed and maneuverability–being able to be very hands-on, without having to guess what the powers above me might want”; regarding the possibilities of LGBT representation, she explains that “[w]e wanted to do content that was a little spicier, a little intriguing, something you can’t get everywhere else and online is totally the place to do it.” Espenson and Bell’s emphasis on independence beyond the reach of network notes echoes in Cheeks’ insistence on using social media to connect directly to his fans, regardless of the “notes” sent by Brady’s agent. Whether Web series, including Husbands, are always as independent or provocative is up for debate, but the articulation of this critique via Brady and Cheeks’ debate about queer visibility is intriguing.

The season two premiere of Husbands ends on a provocative note. A brief post-credit scene features recognizable TV figures Tricia Helfer and Dichen Lachman lounging in skimpy clothes and discussing their boyfriends before having sex (off-screen). The staging recalls a set-up aimed at the straight male gaze and the scene draws on the “experimenting in college” trope. In contrast to the overt critique in the earlier conversation between Brady and Cheeks, this scene is presented without any introduction. Rather, it relies on the viewer’s ability to recall that the Helfer/Lachman scene was playing on a TV in the background during the episode. Presumably, this extra scene critiques mainstream representations of sexuality by pointing out that faux-lesbian sex is acceptable on TV whereas Brady and Cheeks’ marriage and sex life are not.

While I agree with this critique, I wonder if the lack of framing undermines the provocation issued by this extra scene. Another aspect that undoes the critique for me is that the “plot” of this scene relies on in-jokes about the characters these actresses played in Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse: “My boyfriend back home thinks college is gonna turn me into a sex robot,” Helfer’s character remarks. Lachman’s character replies, “Tell me about it. Mine thinks it’s going to turn me into a brainwashed sex doll.” Does the in-joke outweigh and deflect the critique? Or could we see it as a critical commentary on what types of roles are available to women, especially in genre programs? I would like to think so, but, as with the earlier critique of queer visibility, I am not sure it pushes far enough.

The Hunger Games

Transmedia storytelling has become a familiar element of film and television promotion, especially for media properties incorporating fantasy and scifi elements (currently, transmedia campaigns are underway for Prometheus, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Dark Knight Rises). While many fans readily engage with official promotional material, they also create their own media. Transmedia produced for THG shows how multifaceted and sometimes conflicting interests among fans and marketing departments arise out of shared media platforms and a shared storyworld.

With the widespread use of Twitter and Tumblr, official and fan-produced transmedia increasingly share the same media spaces. Both fans and those who address fans through marketing use these spaces because they make sharing media easy. Indeed, sharing images and videos via reblogging is perhaps Tumblr’s core functionality and defining characteristic. Via reblogging and retweeting, fans spread news about the latest part of a marketing campaign faster and wider than a print ad, poster, or traditional preview could. Most importantly, reblogging turns officially produced transmedia into a personalized message: fans feel they receive an update about THG from a fellow fan, not from a studio’s marketing department. Or at least this is the perception that marketing departments try to create.

It is important to recognize that both Lionsgate’s marketing department and fans face constraints when producing transmedia for THG. Official transmedia’s main purpose is twofold: create interest in THG and persuade as many people as possible to purchase a ticket to see the film. In order to create this investment, official transmedia has to offer material about the world of THG that appears new and exciting to fans; at the same time, this material cannot give away too many details about the film itself. This is particularly crucial for a book adaptation because many fans are familiar with the story and are most interested in seeing how this story has been translated to the screen. In addition, official transmedia cannot stray too far from “canon.” It has to remain faithful to the story moviegoers will see. Working within these constraints leads to transmedia elements that focus on exploring places and settings rather than on expanding plot or characterizations.

Capital Couture announces the winner of its stylist contest. Fans reblog and respond.

Two core elements of THG transmedia campaign, namely the Capitol Couture Tumblr and the related virtual tour of the Capitol, focus on the culture of Panem’s premiere city. Both are perfect examples of official transmedia that provide new insights about the world of THG without spoiling the film or diverging from Collins’ canon. While the Capitol is an important location in THG‘s storyworld, neither the film nor the novel spend much time there. Offering a deeper insight into the city expands fans’ understanding of Panem without giving too much away. At the same time, a campaign that centers on the people and culture responsible for the terror of the Hunger Games is also a risky strategy. Fans might not have been willing to engage with this aspect of the book(s) and film. But the Capitol also appears as a decadent and alluring place in Collins’ universe, which makes it an interesting place to see even if one disagrees with its ideology.

Additionally, I would argue, fans can easily find the more sympathetic people and places of THG in fan-produced transmedia. Free from the constraints of avoiding spoilers and adhering to canon, most fanfiction and fanart delve into the lives of central characters, envisioning moments before, during, and after canon events. Fan creations spread across the same platforms as official transmedia: a new interpretation of a character might emerge in a tweet, turn into a story posted on a blog, and generate accompanying fanart on Tumblr.

Screenshot of the original Panem October ARG

Of course fans also face constraints: their creations are not officially sanctioned and often exist in a legal gray area, and they don’t usually have access to the resources that fuel official transmedia such as the Capitol tour. Frequently, these divergent sets of constraints in official and fan-produced transmedia enable new and largely complementary perspectives on the world of THG. This co-existence is less harmonious when fan productions appear too “official,” as was the case with Panem October, a fan-authored ARG that also revolved around a “citizens of Panem” theme. An early iteration, launched in spring 2011, was shut down by Lionsgate. The second version appeared simultaneously with the official ARG last fall. Thanks to fannish word-of-mouth, participation in Panem October grew to 50,000. Despite its popularity, the creator announced last December that he was abandoning the ARG to pursue other projects. It is unclear whether or not increasing pressure by Lionsgate motivated this decision.

Screenshot of Panem October, version two, on the left, and the official ARG on the right.

It is tempting to draw parallels between Panem October and THG trilogy’s overall story (a temptation the pursuit of which I leave to someone else). Regardless, it seems apparent to me that fan enthusiasm is most welcome when it stays within officially endorsed boundaries—as participation in the official THG ARG—and is tolerated as long as its focus does not encroach on commercially significant territory.