Keeping Up With the Reality TV Producers

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Keeping Up With the Reality TV Producers

The colors are bright pastels and, like in many reality TV shows, the setting is a Malibu beach home. But the extroverted cast members in The Crush House are as goofy and floppy-limbed as the inflatable figures outside gas stations.

In this video game’s luxurious mansion, complete with a conversation pit and a wet bar, players are dropped into the role of a producer whose job is to race around capturing hookups and squabbles while keeping the audience satisfied and the show from being canceled.

It begins as a time-management challenge. After choosing four cast members from a selection of mismatched individuals, can you get into position to film the fireworks and still maximize revenue by switching to commercials during any downtime?

Soon you are thinking about budgets, too. With the money you make from commercials, can you buy the right furnishings for the house that will in turn lead to memorable moments on camera?

Things quickly become murky, however.

Some parts of the show’s vocal audience will respond only to the most extreme content. Although you are not supposed to talk to the cast members under any circumstances, they will initiate contact. And what happens at night when the cameras stop running?

The increasingly sinister tone makes sense for a genre that has not been free of controversy since “The Real World” first captivated MTV viewers in 1992. Observers have questioned how certain shows construct their reality, and if the people whose relationships are dissected are adequately protected.

Nicole He, the director of The Crush House, said the lasting appeal of the genre was that “you get to experience the pleasure of gossip without the social consequences.” It is irresistible, in other words, but you are meant to experience a little guilt too. In reality TV, even the audience is complicit. The Crush House’s designers are hoping that this is just the kind of ethical problem that media-savvy fans of narrative games will enjoy exploring regardless of their own viewing habits.

The Crush House is part of He’s artistic exploration about the interaction of technology and intimate aspects of human nature.

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offered participants a plastic hand that would swipe left or right on a dating app so they did not have to. The fiction offered by a video game gives designers the freedom to amp things up, He said.

In The Crush House, players must cater to in-game audiences such as those who are purely there for glimpses of feet; other demographics might be tuning in purely for the quarreling, while others value fancy camera work. A *********** swirls around the fate of the cast members when they leave the show.

“I think there is no unproblematic show in reality TV,” He said.

Even though The Crush House is satire, things happen on reality shows that He says are far more disturbing than anything she would put her avatars through.

“It almost feels that we have to treat these video game characters with more humanity and more respect than people actually have to do to some actual reality TV cast members,” she said.

The Crush House, which was developed by Nerial and was released for the PC and Mac on Friday, could help players further contemplate their own relationship with reality TV.

Danielle J. Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University and the author of “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us,” said the genre was valuable because it served as a fun house mirror. Extreme as some reality TV shows are, they can reflect back our social preoccupations, our fault lines, our deep-rooted conservatism. “These shows show us ourselves in amplified forms, and we can learn from that,” she said.

Lindemann said that, at their sharpest, reality shows remind viewers that we all have shifting layers of social personality. Luann de Lesseps from “The Real Housewives of New York City,” she said, is criticized for playing a range of different roles across the show, social media and in the news.

“But that’s not unique to Luann,” she said. “We all play different roles across the different stages of our lives. It’s just Luann’s on a ******* stage than we are.”

You can glimpse this social plasticity at work in The Crush House as cast members calibrate their behavior with one another. The players might even sense it in themselves as they switch between capturing the cast’s most extreme antics to satiate the audience, and reacting to events in a more empathetic manner out of view of the cameras.

At the end of a semester, Lindemann said, students will often accuse her of ruining reality TV for them. They will suddenly feel bad about watching shows that are steeped in sexism, racism and heteronormativity.

“I don’t think people should feel bad,” Lindemann said. “I guess we are all complicit. But these things, like sexism, racism, classism? These exist apart from reality TV.”

Shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and games like The Crush House are just showing them to us in high definition.

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