Fauxbots 3: Mental Samurai

Hello! Today I continue the trek up my personal Everest: thinking through the idea of fake science in reality TV. If you haven’t read parts 1 and 2 on this topic, please do.

When last I covered this topic, I focused on the show Too Hot to Handle and its use of an omniscient “robot”—aka producer’s voice coming through a speaker—named Lana. Now, I bring you Ava. Ava lives on a show called Mental Samurai, hosted by Rob Lowe.

So first, Mental Samurai. The show is both entirely about the robot and has nothing to do with her. Basically, it’s a quiz, with the added flair of a machine which flings contestants through the air as they embark on what the show describes as a mental obstacle course. The “Towers of Samurai” (unfortunately, there is lots of nonsense lingo on the show, making the job of explaining it a lot more difficult) represent different categories: puzzles, memory, sequences, and knowledge. Each tower has several games a player might encounter.

As a player gets questions right, they win more money, and as they progress, questions get harder. Standard game show fare. There is limited time for each answer, and little time between questions, so the rapid-fire nature helps frazzle the players; when a contestant gets an answer wrong, they are instantly eliminated. Initially, the questions are surprisingly easy, and in some cases they remain so throughout, while other contestants face a sudden uptick in difficulty. This is the first sign that perhaps Ava is not as neutral as she purports to be.

So given this context, we return to Ava herself. Unlike Lana, of Too Hot to Handle fame, Ava is a bit amorphous. When players enter Mental Samurai, they strap into an orb attached to a kind of crane. Is this orb-crane Ava? I think so. The orb loves to spin contestants around, swinging them from tower to tower & often upside down, while Rob watches from the safety of a balcony. It’s like a mini amusement park ride, and we’re never told what purpose this person-tossing serves.

In addition to being the orb, Ava is also the robotic voice that reads challenges to contestants and tells them whether or not they got the answer right. Furthermore, she’s in control of the questions. So let’s discuss the dynamic here. There’s Rob, the contestant, and Ava, who is essentially the embodiment of the game itself: she occupies every role in the gameplay except player and host.

Rob has no effect on the game. He roots for you, and he wants to defeat Ava. His attitude toward her is a resigned fist shaken at the sky. Everyone at the show wanted you to win, but alas, Ava had other plans. She’s treated like an entity of her own, autonomous and omniscient. We’re to believe that she created these questions based on her infinite robot knowledge, which also gives the questions a veneer of intellectualism. This isn’t a producer lamely asking you to remember which of five emojis was in a pretend text message, this is a robot! We’re meant to believe that there’s some psychology we aren’t understanding, that this is all deeper than it seems. Everyone is just at the mercy of Ava, the superior, mechanical brain.

So why add Ava to an already convoluted show? Here’s my guess.

There are a million game shows out there, all hosted by famous/famous-ish and charming/charming-ish people. There are a million places to get this content and it’s impossible to keep track of it all. So what if you added a monstrous robot that shook up your contestants? That would add a kind of thrill or fear factor without actually being scary, and would definitely be a point of differentiation. But you can’t really just stick someone in a machine and make them answer stupid questions.

Sidenote: one must wonder why the questions are (generally) so much easier than on most shows. Is it because people need to believe they have a shot, that the game is fair? If the questions are so easy, why does everyone keep losing? I don’t have an answer. I have to assume that people are flustered and literally shaken up. And maybe shaking people to make them correct less often gives you license to ask dumber, more entertaining questions. Maybe it makes for a better show.

Not only might you look greedy—making someone so dizzy that they can’t answer questions, never letting them win money—but the dynamic might be awkward. Just Rob Lowe commentating into thin air as players get spun around. Wouldn’t it feel strange to register that a person wrote with the perfunctory question, “can you tell us which food is more perishable, pickles or sushi?” And if a player answered wrong, would they be humiliated?

Maybe most importantly, the show would seem too arbitrary, all these disparate elements cobbled together so that the network has something to put forth. It’d all be too transparent.

With the addition of Lana, suddenly there’s a reason for everything. The questions are AI-manufactured, so answering them wrong is like failing an alien’s test. Even if the questions are asinine, who could blame you for losing when you’re up against a higher power?

Humans are so willing to assign personhood to anything that even if our rational brains know a producer is in control of the whole show & that Lana doesn’t really exist, we still somehow think of her as real. Lana gets to be a common enemy among the audience, producers, Rob, the player. She’s a scapegoat, but she also lacks human greed. We can attribute winning or losing to her, never thinking the producers are responsible. She unites, she distracts, she’s a presence in the way that having a dog in the room gives you something new to talk about. The pressure’s off of everyone, including Rob. He’s on your side, always.

I don’t think Lana is sinister. Strange as the show is, its construction is classic. The contestant enters in good faith, hoping to go from 0 to something. They don’t stand to lose money; it’s not gambling, aside from an airline ticket and hotel or time taken off work, childcare, etc. Yet, as in gambling, you’re up against the house. Producers have to make it difficult, but not too difficult, for you to win money.

Once you sign up, they can do anything to you, because they only promised to give you a shot, nothing more. And you, the contestant, have to be to blame if you lose. It’s not their fault you didn’t know the answers to the questions.

But apply that to a reality show like Too Hot to Handle, where answers aren’t black and white. Ava doesn’t pretend to have a personality, she just lobs you questions and flips you upside down. Lana affects interpersonal dynamics. She can lie to you or manipulate you into losing money. Maybe not all omniscient robots (faux-bots? LMK) are alike. What do we make of the fact that all the robots are of course voiced by humans, adjusted to sound more classically robotic? More to come.

Love you love you, bye!