Plasma Pool

I’m really not that good at The Hills Backchannel game, “where fans gather to talk about The Hills as it happens.” The game takes place in what is essentially a souped up version of what we ’90s-era children know as online chat rooms, only everyone in the room is simultaneously watching The Hills on TV. There are special names for each room, or “Game Zones,” all of which have to do with that city where the only match for the smog is the stars, our beloved Los Angeles: We have Rodeo Drive, Hollywood and Vine, Sunset Strip and Redondo Beach, the East Side, the West Side, the list goes on.

Game Zone: "Santa Monica"

Once you enter a Backchannel room and join the game, there are two alternating roles you play, “Tagger” and “Clicker.” See, you don’t only get to write your own comments, or tags, you also get to watch other comments pop up on the screen, forming constellations of quips directed at the wealthy young women whose “real” lives we follow on the screen. As a Clicker, the game’s instructions explain, you click on the comment “you think will be the most popular”; and if you’re right, you’re awarded points. You’re a Clicker for about 80% of the game, while you wait in line for your turn to write your own tags.

The way MTV frames this key role of Clicker reveals one of the game’s most peculiar features: it asks you not to choose the comments you like best, but to click on the comments you “think will become the most popular.” The game is not so much about discussing your favorite show, then; it’s about anticipating how others think they’re supposed to think. As a Clicker, rather than clicking on the comments you like, you click on the ones you suspect other Clickers will like as well. Likewise, as a Tagger, you write tags not necessarily for the other players in the room, but rather for a generalized idea of the Other Player.

To give you an idea of what I mean, let me use as an example a particularly high point in the game for me. Now I confess I hadn’t watched the show before I played, so there’s a good chance I made more than a few comments that were totally off, but it turns out this doesn’t matter much. One of the only comments I made for which I earned points was about some kind of wonderbra featured on a Victoria’s Secret commercial. (Yes, you get to comment on the commercials too!) My comment was simply “Stan needs one of those!” People chose my comment as the most popular, and I was, for a moment, the highest-ranked commenter in the room. Surprisingly, though, there is nobody named “Stan” on the show. There’s a chance the other players thought I meant, in all my Newbieness, Heidi’s boyfriend, Spencer, probably the most bashed person on the game–but whatever the case, my tag was deemed better than all the others, “better,” at least, based on what each person in the room assumed the Other Players would choose. My comment didn’t make much sense in the context of the game, but it did earn some players points.

Audrina, Lauren and Whitney

While the point system seems to be mostly about achieving new skill levels–you can become a Scenester, a Socialite, even a Luminary!–you do in fact compete for something more tangible: the chance to see your comments displayed on television. “MTV has picked the funniest, snarkiest, and most popular Backchannel comments and put them on The Hills,” the MTV website reads. “Watch clips from The Hills User Comment edition to see if your comments made it on TV.” There’s as much emphasis on getting your words on TV as your face; and while that opportunity is certainly appealing, I can’t help but think it’s just a consolation prize. We watch reality shows like The Hills not to see our words flash across the screen, but to imagine, if only for a not-so-conscious moment, what it’s like to lead a life vastly different from our own.¹ I wasn’t too surprised, then, to find that a majority of the comments made in my Game Zone were not really about the show’s storyline at all, but instead dwelled on the socioeconomic factors of the actresses–or, excuse me, “real” people–starring in the show: “I wish I was that rich,” one player announced. “God, so lucky, so many hot guys,” wrote another.

Even in a room called Rodeo Drive, you can’t escape the fact that the majority of your fellow Backchannel players are in circumstances as unfamous and as normal as your own. In this online space, you can voice your desire to be part of the world of The Hills with the guarantee that everyone in the room will simultaneously empathize with and ignore your sentiments. The point of the game, after all, is to focus on choosing what you think will be judged to be the most popular reaction to the particular scenes, not what probably is the most popular. There’s no chance anyone will think comments about how you wish you were as rich as the stars will be deemed the most popular by any Other Player, no chance any comment like that could ever make it on TV. Consequently, as a Backchannel player, you can make your thoughts public without making them too public, too central to the discussion at hand. They can travel from your head to your screen to the entire anonymous world of the game without ever actually being explored or taken seriously by anyone else, simply because everyone is focused on–and distracted by–the task at hand: attaining more points and climbing the game’s social ladder from Newbie to Luminary.

There are currently 9497 players registered for The Hills Backchannel game. Out of those 9497, the highest-ranking player is travisclark, an eighteen-year-old freshman at Texas Tech University. His highest scoring tag is “Spwncer go get a job.” (That got him 60 points; my Stan comment got me 6.) So far he’s played 39 games of The Hills Backchannel. He’s featured as the top player on the game’s homepage, which links to his MTV Community profile page, where I was also able to click on the link to his blog, which he began in early October and which contains only this lone entry:

I’m not really sure what to write, truth be told I love to write and talk to people about anything and everything, but I never have like blogged or anything. Blog’s I guess are where people just write and ramble on about whatever they feel like getting off their chest or talking about? If so, this is the place for me…right now I don’t have time the time or space to talk about all my life stories so I will save that for another late night. To all my viewers that I know I don’t have, I bid you goodnight.

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1. Thankfully, Sonic has sponsored a sweepstakes whose grand prize, for some lucky viewer, is to hang out with the ladies from The Hills.