The Eyeball: To Hell, Back, and Beyond

A few weeks ago, I went to Hell.com. There was almost nothing there — just a black screen and a big letter H. I clicked around for a while and a warning appeared: "Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates its existence."

I found a link to a companion site, no-such.com. It was a "parallel Web" for artists. There seemed to be no way of getting into the site. There were no banner ads, no slew of pop-up windows, no dancing cartoon monkeys. I wondered if this was some kind of hip gimmick for an entertainment company. But nothing was for sale.

Eventually I found an e-mail address to the gatekeeper of Hell. His name was Ken. After proving my press credentials, Ken gave me a guest password to no-such, his "bladerunner Disneyland black hole in the virtual world." I scrolled through a list of 70 artist sites from 19 countries around the world, including the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan. I clicked on once-upon-a-forest.com, an interactive Flash installation. Each of the 22 circular buttons at the foot of the screen took me to a different texture of hypnotic animation and ambient sound. After a few minutes immersed in these abstract worlds I returned to no-such and clicked on another site, suture.com. The first page showed some monochrome photos of Vietnamese people on motorbikes. Suture, photojournalism, Vietnam: it's about war, I thought. But then I clicked on one of the photos and an illegible diagram appeared. I was confused. I liked it.

My quest continued via no-such to snarg.com, superbad.com, absurd.org, and many other sites. Some didn't hold my attention for more than a few seconds. But the journey itself was fascinating. I was reminded how exciting it was to explore the Web a few years ago, pre-Netscape, when it was still uncharted territory. I was struck by the power of the unknown, and the thrill of investigation.

The founder of Hell is acutely aware of his site's enigmatic allure, and eager to preserve the mystery. The site gets over a million hits a month, 90 percent of which is new traffic from people drawn by word-of-mouth or just tapping in the URL to see what's there. "This is a doorway to somewhere else," says Hell.com creator and conceptual artist Kenneth Aronson. "When people come to Hell they have no expectation of what's there. What they do find is indefinable."

The unknown has been a factor in many of my best online experiences. Sometimes I like the journey more than the destination. I wonder if this is a reason why online content destinations are still having such a hard time: They try to work against the basic functionality of the Internet. The business imperative of Web companies is stickiness, but the user imperative is fluidity.

At least one company has thought about this quandary and come up with a possible solution. In February, Electronic Arts released Majestic, an online game that uses the telephone, e-mail, instant messaging and streaming media to infiltrate the lives of its players. The premise — a conspiracy theory about the government and the Roswell Incident — is familiar from The X-Files, but the form is new. The site asks for data like cellular, fax and home phone numbers, and gathers personal information about you from questions asked in the game. Majestic then draws you into an experience involving e-mails and faxes from mysterious sources, video clips, and a search for clues through all kinds of Web sites, some created by the game designers, some real. Leaving ea.com is part of the game, rather than something the site tries to discourage. As a result, the company associates an entire navigational experience — through all sorts of non-EA sites — with an EA product.

Like Hell.com, it's the journey that counts in Majestic. As the drama unfolds across multiple devices and Web sites, what happens inside the player's head is more important than what happens on screen. "No computer graphics engine can possibly rival the human imagination," says Mike Griffin of Majestic production house Anim-x.

Both Hell and Majestic are interesting models for content producers and companies. We spend a lot of time talking about bandwidth on the assumption that streaming media will really arrive when everyone has it. But we've hardly scratched the surface of narrowband. Maybe it's time to look again at the basic pattern of most people's online behavior, and build entertainment experiences that harness that behavior. Don't bombard me with pop-up windows. Lure me in with mystery.