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Miroslav KostyakovOn February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails' European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled "i am trying to believe." Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum.
Frank Rose журнал 'Wired' группа 'Nine Inch Nails' ARG ARG Year Zero Jordan Weisman on English mirror-0022
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12 Feb 11
Tracy TutenNine Inch Nails' ARG campaign
smm immersive games collective intelligence secret websites coded messages ARGs
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On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails' European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled "i am trying to believe."
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But I had a problem," he recalls, lounging on a second-floor deck of the house he's remodeling in Beverly Hills: how to provide context for the songs. In the '60s, concept albums came with extensive liner notes and lots of artwork. MP3s don't have that. "So I started thinking about how to make the world's most elaborate album cover," he says, "using the media of today."
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collective intelligence
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But when the cricket sounds were run through a spectrograph, they yielded a series of blips that gradually resolved into a phone number in Cleveland, Ohio. People who dialed this number (and some 1.7 million did) heard a horrific recording from a mysterious organization called US Wiretap: a young woman on her cell phone at an underground nightclub, with shrieking and gunshots in the background, screaming hysterically that someone had come into the club and killed her friend and that the cops had locked everybody inside and she was going to die.
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Now that the album is out, the game has gone cold. "I don't know if the audience was ready for it to end," says Susan Bonds, the president of 42 Entertainment. "But we always expected to pick it up again." Reznor, after all, had conceived Year Zero as a two-part album. "Those phones are still out there," she adds. "The minutes have expired. But we could buy new minutes at any point."
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28 May 10
emmanuel guilbertSecret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games
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lilian ricaudFascinating articles on how Trent Reznor used an immersive game before releasing his latest album: "In the '60s, concept albums came with extensive liner notes and lots of artwork. MP3s don't have that. "So I started thinking about how to make the world's
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29 May 09
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18 Feb 09
Miss MillerThe future of advertising isn't writing better slogans or using cool photography or video. It's creating interactive stories people can explore over their phones, on the web, maybe even through a flash drive hidden in a bathroom. It's a new art form. Just
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09 Feb 09
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For a while, he didn't even tell his label what he was doing. But the game was extremely effective at generating excitement.
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23 Dec 08
Brett Boessen"Reznor was stepping into a new kind of interactive fiction. These narratives unfold in fragments, in all sorts of media, from Web sites to phone calls to live events, and the audience pieces together the story from shards of information. The task is too complicated for any one person, but the Web enables a collective intelligence to emerge to assemble the pieces, solve the mysteries, and in the process, tell and retell the story online. The narrative is shaped — and ultimately owned — by the audience in ways that other forms of storytelling cannot match. No longer passive consumers, the players live out the story. Eight years ago, this kind of entertainment didn't exist; now dozens of such games are launched every year, many of them attracting millions of followers on every continent."
A piece about NiN's use of ARG structure to provide context for their futuristic concept album. Sweet.-
Reznor was stepping into a new kind of interactive fiction. These narratives unfold in fragments, in all sorts of media, from Web sites to phone calls to live events, and the audience pieces together the story from shards of information. The task is too complicated for any one person, but the Web enables a collective intelligence to emerge to assemble the pieces, solve the mysteries, and in the process, tell and retell the story online. The narrative is shaped — and ultimately owned — by the audience in ways that other forms of storytelling cannot match. No longer passive consumers, the players live out the story. Eight years ago, this kind of entertainment didn't exist; now dozens of such games are launched every year, many of them attracting millions of followers on every continent.
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Nikolaj Lykke NielsenThe future of advertising isn't writing better slogans or using cool photography or video. It's creating interactive stories people can explore over their phones, on the web, maybe even through a flash drive hidden in a bathroom. It's a new art form. J...
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zpinheadYears earlier, Reznor had heard about a complex game played out over many months, both online and in the real world, in which millions of people across the planet had collectively solved a cascading series of puzzles, riddles, and treasure hunts that ulti
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On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails' European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled "i am trying to believe." Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum. People started typing "iamtryingtobelieve.com" into their Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something called Parepin, a drug apparently introduced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agents, but in reality, the page declared, it was part of a government plot to confuse and sedate citizens. Email sent to the site's contact link generated a cryptic auto-response: "I'm drinking the water. So should you." Online, fans worldwide debated what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what?
A few days later, on February 14, a woman named Sue was about to wash a different T-shirt, which she had bought at one of the Lisbon shows, when she noticed that the tour dates included several boldface digits. Fans quickly interpreted this as a Los Angeles telephone number. People who called it heard a recording of a newscaster announcing, "Presidential address: America is born again," followed by a distorted snippet of what could only be a new Nine Inch Nails song. Then, a woman named Ana reported finding a USB flash drive in a bathroom stall at the hall where the band had been playing. On the drive was a previously unreleased song, which she promptly uploaded. The metadata tag on the song contained a clue that led to a site displaying a glowing wheat field, with the legend "America Is Born Again." Clicking and dragging the mouse across the screen, however, revealed a much grimmer-looking site labeled "Another Version of the Truth." Clicking on that led to a forum about acts of underground resistance.
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But when the cricket sounds were run through a spectrograph, they yielded a series of blips that gradually resolved into a phone number in Cleveland, Ohio. People who dialed this number (and some 1.7 million did) heard a horrific recording from a mysterious organization called US Wiretap: a young woman on her cell phone at an underground nightclub, with shrieking and gunshots in the background, screaming hysterically that someone had come into the club and killed her friend and that the cops had locked everybody inside and she was going to die.
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So he planted hints in the music — a few seconds recorded out of phase on "The Great Destroyer," for instance. Played on a monaural device, the music briefly canceled itself out, leaving nothing except a barely audible voice saying something like "red horse vector." At redhorsevector.net, players would find a top-secret report suggesting the source of the nightclub massacre — a weaponized virus called Red Horse that caused acute homicidal psychosis.
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On April 13, all the players who had signed up at a subversive site called Open Source Resistance were invited to gather beneath a mural in Hollywood. Some of those who showed up were given cell phones and told to keep them on at all times. Five days later, the phones rang. The players were told to report to a parking lot, where they were loaded onto a ram-shackle bus with blacked-out windows.
The bus delivered them at twilight to what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse near some railroad tracks. Armed men patrolled the roof. The 50-odd players were led up a ramp and into a large, dark room where the leader of Open Source Resistance (actually an actor) gave a speech about the importance of making themselves heard. Then they were led through a maze of rooms and deposited in front of — a row of amps?
With the sudden crack of a drumbeat, Nine Inch Nails materialized onstage and broke into "The Beginning of the End," a song they had never before played in the US. "This is the beginning," Reznor intoned, as guitar chords strafed the room. He got out one, two, three, four more songs before the SWAT team arrived. Then, as flashing lights and flash bombs filled the room, men in riot gear stormed the stage. "Run for the bus!" someone yelled, and the players started sprinting. The bus sped them back to the parking lot and the cars that would take them safely home. But before they drove away, they were told they'd be contacted again.
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Pelle Sten”Reznor was stepping into a new kind of interactive fiction. /.../ The task is too complicated for any one person, but the Web enables a collective intelligence to emerge to /.../ solve the mysteries, and /.../ tell and retell the story online. ”
trent_reznor nine_inch_nails spel marknadsföring musik arg wired.com
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15 Jan 08
urban sheepDeveloped by Jordan Weisman, then a Microsoft exec, it was the first of what came to be called alternate reality games — ARGs for short. After leaving Redmond, Weisman founded a company called 42 Entertainment, which made ARGs for products ranging from
advertizing inspiration storyTelling userExperience viral writing from:WiredCom
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11 Jan 08
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Michel BauwensThese narratives unfold in fragments, in all sorts of media, from Web sites to phone calls to live events, and the audience pieces together the story from shards of information.
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09 Jan 08
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08 Jan 08
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06 Jan 08
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04 Jan 08
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03 Jan 08
Alan LevineTrent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails on creating an ARG for music."So I started thinking about how to make the world's most elaborate album cover," he says, "using the media of today."
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02 Jan 08
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Hapax LegomenaInteresting Wired article on alternate-reality games, focusing on Trent Reznor's newest
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01 Jan 08
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"Games are about engaging with the most entertaining thing on the planet," he says, sipping coffee in his guesthouse, "which is other people."
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"When done well, ARGs can be extraordinarily effective," says Ty Montague, creative director of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency. That's because the games offer marketers a solution to a growing problem: how to reach people who are so media-saturated they block all attempts to get through. "Your brain filters it out, because otherwise you'd go crazy," Weisman says. That's why he opted for a "subdural" approach: Instead of shouting the message, hide it. "I figured that if the audience discovered something, they would share it," he explains, "because we all need something to talk about."
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During the development of that first ARG, Weisman argued that no puzzle would be too hard, no clue too obscure, because with so many people collaborating online, the players would have access to every conceivable skill set. Where he erred was in not following that idea to its logical conclusion. "Not only do they have every skill on the planet," he says, "they have unlimited resources, unlimited time, and unlimited money. Not only can they solve anything, they can solve anything instantly."
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From 42's perspective, it hardly matters whether you call the game "marketing" or not. What matters is that someone — Reznor, Microsoft, Disney — writes a check. And, for now, the checks generally come from companies trying to sell something. As a result, many ARG developers want to break out of marketing entirely and find another way to make money.
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31 Dec 07
Doug Adamsalternate reality games (args)
games marketing arg viral advertising play technology trends videogames gaming
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29 Dec 07
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28 Dec 07
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Stephen TurnerAnother article on Alternate Reality games, this time looking at the recent Nine Inch Nails thing. Goes right back to the AI game in 2001. Interesting stuff, and wonder why it hasn't been done as much in Australia. And there's some kind of puzzle in the a
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27 Dec 07
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cross channel scripting & advertising
mobile advertising marketing trends games viral for:ssalmenkivi
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Pablo StafforiniThe initial clue was so subtle that for nearly two days nobody noticed it.
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23 Dec 07
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22 Dec 07
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