This Is The Rickstaverse

Part 1: Welcome to the Rickstaverse, It’s All Fun and Games

If you didn’t bring your inter-dimensional goggles, you’re out of luck. Sorry, pal. We’re on the hunt for Garbolvian Bootleggers here, hombre, and you should have come prepared. A Mr. Meeseeks Box could spawn an obedient drone-bot to help us out if we’re lucky, but those are few and far between and they love to malfunction. Don’t get your hopes up. A word of caution too; keep far away from the testicle monsters, they’ll use you as a sex toy if you get too close (unless you’re into that sort of thing, no judgment passed). Another word of caution; don’t accidentally set off a neutrino bomb — those kill all living things. Another other word of caution; Geriatric Morty is always angry. Do not engage. All this might sound like junk from an obnoxious imagination crafting a children’s game, and if it does to you, you’re zooming down the right wormhole. This game exists, it’s called The Rickstaverse, and it’s just as ridiculous as it seems, only it’s decidedly not for children at all. It’s the spawn of a (very) adult universe, one just as if not more ridiculous; a television show called Rick and Morty. As an American adult animated series created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for [Adult Swim], the show follows the misadventures of an alcoholic scientist named Rick Sanchez and his grandson Morty Smith, who split their time jostling between domestic family life and inter-dimensional travel. Roiland voices the series’ eponymous characters, while the series also stars the voice talent of Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer, and Sarah Chalke. The series has its origins in an animated parody of Back to the Future created by Roiland for a film festival called Channel 101. [Adult Swim] approached Harmon for television show ideas, and he and Roiland developed the program based on the short’s two characters. Thus, Rick and Morty were born.

The Rickstaverse game (found at @rickandmortyrickstaverse on Instagram), developed and produced by Carrot Creative in partnership with [Adult Swim], is a collection of 80 linked accounts on the platform that utilize its tagging feature and a taxonomy of layered images to create an explorable virtual world, giving hints and clues as to some of the more nuanced plot elements of the show and also standing alone as an entertainment device the likes of which have never before been implemented. Fans can explore up to 11 different planets featured in Rick and Morty through The Rickstaverse, allowing them to dive in and out of photo-powered versions of worlds seen on the show. The collectable objects include interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ videos and comic strips, giving special insight to the show that uninvolved, less intelligent and less curious fans will never, ever find. Scouring some of the secret collectables leads fans to private Instagram accounts that promise users exclusive clips throughout the second season.

The show itself tiptoes along a challenging, thin line between disgust and intrigue, but manages to make most viewers laugh as they traverse the tonal trapeze, wrangling the goofy, witty, nerdy types of the world into a tremendously passionate fandom that is growing larger and larger as Rick and Morty prepares for a third season, launching late 2017. The distinctive art direction, intricately woven plot, easily recognizable name, and ever burgeoning fan base are both elements and evidence that the show has evolved from mere foul-mouthed television fodder into a fully fledged brand, and that it is now fit for a deeper conversation removed from a purely aesthetic or journalistic context, but rather one more sociological and psychological in its explorative aims.

This analysis of Rick and Morty as a brand and The Rickstaverse as a product produced for a social media campaign to propel that brand’s second season and grow its fan base for a third will investigate the gravity of its existence as an academically acknowledgeable virtual world, and will include a spatial and temporal discussion of The Rickstaverse’s nested account taxonomy on Instagram and the types of communication the infrastructure encourages in addition to its novelty in the mobile, digital creative space. The community fostering attribute of The Rickstaverse will be tackled as well, and we’ll discuss why it is intriguing and ultimately effective from a social, psychological perspective, in addition to its potential effects on its users perception of the show before finally quantifying the success of the project and making further recommendations about how the creators of Rick and Morty can continue to use social media in creative ways. Ready? It doesn’t matter. We’ve already crossed the event horizon. We’re going in!

Part 2: Digital Space, A Frontier (Maybe)

“‘The Rickstaverse’ isn’t just a game, everybody. It’s a whole living, breathing, universe to explore, right inside of Instagram… this is about exploring over 25 different worlds, right here in your phone, in INSTAGRAM!” That’s Rick expounding upon the significance of The Rickstaverse in The Rickstaverse Walkthrough, the introductory video to the mechanics, infrastructure, and objective of the game. Seeing as though it’s his namesake, obviously he would argue on behalf of its anthropomorphic qualities, but a deeper, less biased inquiry from an academic standpoint comes to a similar conclusion. Rick is a scientist, after all — an iconically mad one, but a scientist nonetheless.

Gürsimek, another scientist probably a bit less mad and definitely more actually human, expounded upon the multimodality and co-creating of meaningful places in multi-user virtual environments in 2014. The article focuses on a social, semiotic analysis of collaborative design practice in Second Life, the online game, a community-authored and time tested prototype of virtual worlds composed of connected virtual places designed by its residents. While, in contrast, user adventurers in The Rickstaverse are not at all the game’s architects or creators, a handful of the papers’ substantive points about the elements that enrich Second Life can be comparably attributed to The Rickstaverse as well. One of the more notable of those is his categorization of virtual worlds as “places which accommodate both functional and semiotic dimensions of user experience in computer mediated, multi-user, persistent virtual environments.” The parallels are unassailable. While in Second Life, users create and manipulate avatars as semiotic representations of their selfhood and agency in mimicry of their actual physical form or as fanciful imaginary creatures, it’s Instagram user accounts themselves that occupy the same psychological space and execute the same function in The Rickstaverse as well as on Instagram as a platform irrespective of the game. Users can upload images of themselves (or of whatever, even) as avatars, more commonly called profile pictures, for their account and as content for their page, creating a collection of visual and aural symbols for their identity and previous experiences in the real world by way of photos and videos of real things, or their likes and dislikes as a curation of content from elsewhere on the web. Additionally, in The Rickstaverse it’s not desktop computers or laptops that mediate the parameters of reality between tangible and digital, but rather adventurers’ mobile devices. Multiple users are navigating the account taxonomy of the game at any given time, leaving comments and sharing information both in and out of The Rickstaverse as well, which itself persists as an entity beyond the amount of activity it is or is not facilitating, another important feature of a virtual world that we’ll get back to in a bit.

Gürsimek (2014) also comments on the multimodal configuration of various design elements, like logos, posters, 3D objects, and other verbal/non-verbal signifiers in Second Life that “operate on the interpersonal semiotic function by setting the mood and the style.” Essentially, cool things to look at and hear that create a specific environment. These elements can be observed as a design strategy purposed to “signify particular messages, guide visitors to specific directions, or emphasize social activities.” In The Rickstaverse, these elements come in neat little squares of content. 1,100 of them span the 80 accounts linked in the nested taxonomy of the game, comprised of animated video clips and graphics, even 8-bit mini games in the aesthetic style of the show, with captions that are infallibly entertaining and occasionally provide hints towards the goals of the game. The Rickstaverse’s art direction serves a dual purpose, then; first expanding the universe presented in the show through an extension of its visual characteristics and landmarks into a new, mobile digital space more proximal to the user than a television screen or computer monitor, and second reiterating the gamification of that universe at points by implementing an 8-bit graphical style stereotypically associated with classic video games, reminding users subconsciously that they are not only navigating but are too indeed interacting with and manipulating this virtual world, and thus are a part of it, a tactfully immersive tool. But wait, there’s more. Another researcher investigates the phenomenon of virtual worlds from a similar perspective, and she’s got a lot to say.

Book (2004), in a paper about the adoption of MMORPG technologies in non-gaming enterprises leading to a more diverse future for virtual worlds, outlines six distinctive features of virtual worlds that differentiate them from mere chat rooms and multi-user dungeons (MUDs). The first of these is shared space, or “a world that allows many users to participate at once.” The Rickstaverse has several worlds, because it’s a universe and that’s what universes have, and at any given moment a number of users are navigating, commenting, following and unfollowing the accounts, activities all of which constitute as forms of participation, all at once. Users share the space in the sense that although they have a unique, individual perspective on the many pages of The Rickstaverse, so does everyone else, and thus it becomes a public environment not unlike a playground or a classroom. The second of Book’s features of virtual worlds is a graphical user interface (GUI), or the presentation of a world “depicted visually, ranging in style from 2D “cartoon” to more immersive 3D environments.” The Rickstaverse adheres to the latter, utilizing illustration and animation in a 2D plane to create a primarily visual and graphic infrastructure for navigation, but one that also includes sound in certain bits of content. It may not be as perceptually immersive as a navigable 3D environment or 360 video virtual reality simulator, but the graphical interface in two dimensions still creates an environment with a certain level of visual likeness to our real world, even amidst the ridiculous alien creatures and landscapes. The third of Book’s features for virtual worlds is immediacy, or the stipulation that “interaction takes place in real time.” In The Rickstaverse, there are two types of interaction; interactions between user and user, and interactions between user and interface. Interactions between user and user are constrained by the architectural design elements of Instagram as a platform, but have the capacity to take place in real time depending on the attention, focus, and motivation of the users. Instagram’s private instant messaging system, for example, provides users the opportunity to chat with each other via text in real time, even displaying message read receipts. The commenting feature as well, with the ability to direct comments and specific users in a public forum format with @s, provides an alternative with less immediacy. Alternatively, interactions between users and the interface are always in real time during navigation. ‘Warp portals’ using the subject-tagging feature pop up on tap command, providing immediate access to deeper levels of the taxonomy and the content within them.

Book’s fourth feature of virtual worlds is interactivity, or features that “allow users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content.” Although The Rickstaverse Instagram game doesn’t do that, there is a strong collection of Rick and Morty fan art floating around online, primarily on Tumblr, DeviantArt, imgur and other niche communities, that can be considered customized content attached to and created for the Rick and Morty universe as a whole rather than the social media product. Thus, the fulfillment of this criterion depends on the level of analysis. Book’s fifth feature, persistence, explains, “The world’s existence continues regardless of whether individual users are logged in.” In the same way our real universe, for all we can gather, existed before humans did and will persist after we die off, The Rickstaverse doesn’t necessarily need users inhabiting it and actively interacting with and on it to continue to exist. Even when not a single user is in the strip mall, for example (@warp_to_strip_mall) it’s still there, on Instagram, waiting for us to come back and investigate further. Finally, Book’s 6th feature, socialization / community, makes note of worlds that “allow and encourage the formation of in-world social groups like guilds, clubs, cliques, housemates, etc.” Here, the tagging feature of Instagram and interactivity play a special role in allowing The Rickstaverse to fulfill this final feature. An analysis of the comments on the various pages in the game seems to suggest that people are navigating the universe in exploratory groups, tagging their friends when they find something cool or important. They move not in nomadic herds from world to world in unison, but rather in an opposite manner, dividing and conquering to explore the universe alone, make discoveries, and report back to their clique when they find something funny or meaningfully goal oriented. Although this is a game that users can play alone, many of them don’t, leaving comments that aren’t even really substantive comments at all, just captions of fellow users’ profile handles using @’s to notify them of something of interest on a given page in the taxonomy, like breadcrumbs for a community of brothers and sisters to find their way on a harrowing adventure.

Both Book’s and Gürsimek’s substantive points on the elements of design that combine to elevate a virtual platform to the status an inhabitable virtual world can in many ways be applied to The Rickstaverse, and this all just adds to the impressiveness of not only the social media product itself but the general idea that in the digital age with the proper ideation and development even a strictly social platform meant to house windows into our tangible, real, physical world can be tweaked to take on its own solidarity and encapsulate an experience much like that palpable reality.

Part 3: Get the Message?

We’ve established now that The Rickstaverse is, for all intents and purposes, a functional virtual world that lives on social media. As social beings, for most of us the most rewarding and fulfilling aspect of participating in a virtual world, like the real one, is building and sustaining meaningful relationships with acquaintances, colleagues, and friends. To do that, we communicate. The differences are simply found in the ways that we do it. A study by Amit, Wakslak, and Trope (2013) investigates the effect of distance on medium preferences in interpersonal communications. In the study, a series of experiments showed that people’s preference for using pictures versus words is increasingly higher when communicating with temporally, socially, or geographically proximal others. Essentially, that when we feel close to someone or something, we prefer to see what is being said it rather than read what is being said. Predictably, the opposite was found to be true as well, that preference for words is increasingly higher when communicating with those who were distal. Participants also showed greater reception of communications when the medium and distance are congruent. In the context of The Rickstaverse and its application on Instagram, these studies suggest that users may feel even more immersed in the game because of its highly visual and graphic presentation, which can psychologically feel more proximal and close than if it were a written narrative or adventure book rather than a video game. Additionally, users being forced to communicate with each other in comments and direct messages in written word can be argued as a psychologically congruent form of communication as presumably the other users may be internet associates or real life friends that are not in the immediate vicinity, otherwise users would just tell them what they’ve found in the game in person, with their voice thingies rather than their cell phone keyboards. These elements combine to further immerse users in the proximal, graphically stimulating Rickstaverse and encourage and facilitate appropriate forms of communication with other users, wherever they may be.

Part 4: One Baby Step for Mankind

Since we’ve established that The Rickstaverse can be qualified as a virtual world given its design features and analyzed the types of communication that happen on the platform, further analysis should investigate whether it’s a good world or not. Let’s take a hedonistic stance, imagining ourselves as the testicle monsters we’ve been trying to avoid, and posit that pleasure and satisfactions are virtuous goals. Given the trials and tribulations of the physical human experience, many people turn to digital spaces and virtual worlds as a form of escapism, and The Rickstaverse provides an innovative adventure for a break from daily trouble. This innovation combines use of Instagram, a popular, now even potentially classifiable as traditional (if you’re a digital native, perhaps) platform in an expressive way on two levels, architecturally and aesthetically. Lavie & Tractinsky (2004) in an article investigating the perceived visual aesthetics of web sites find that “recent research suggests that the visual aesthetics of computer interfaces are a strong determinant of users’ satisfaction and pleasure,” and that, fittingly, “users’ perceptions consist of two main dimensions, which [they] themed ‘classical aesthetics and expressive aesthetics.’” Architecturally, The Rickstaverse uses the navigation design features embedded in Instagram to support its explorable universe, tapping into the classical dimension of Lavie & Tractinskys exposition, while simultaneously using them in in a fresh way as ‘warp holes’, expressively altering their function from standard Instagram use, lexically providing the user with an exciting novel feature grounded in classical user expectation. Aesthetically, The Rickstaverse, using an art style reticent of Rick and Morty the show, which itself is in many ways referential to other popular cartoons of a similar genre like Family Guy, South Park, and Futurama, again taps into the classical user expectation and familiar perceptual vein while expressively placing it on a platform where users more commonly see edited, filtered photographs of half-eaten lunches, people looking at paintings in art museums, landscapes, or selfies. Presenting such a familiar yet unique set and style of visual acuity on a platform that typically omits them is similarly and simultaneously classical and expressive, again providing users with a hedonistic satisfaction that is both pleasurable and good.

Additionally, Nasar (1984) found that “responses to urban scenes in Japan and the US were similar in that preferences increased with perceived orderliness, diversity, and novelty of the scenes.” Notably, three major dimensions were created to influence preference: visual richness, openness, and clarity. Preferences increased with levels of clarity and ornateness. The aforementioned distinctive art style of both Rick and Morty and The Rickstaverse is unquestionably visually rich and easily recognizable, and again, when shared on a platform mostly inhabited by photographs, the visual richness is only deepened in contrast. Openness, in the study, speaks to size and scale of the scene being viewed, and The Rickstaverse, with 1,100 pages stemming from a grand collage of merely 18 pages, is expansive and vast. The initial grid on the game’s home page is a vision of a large, strange universe with an array of exploratory opportunity and, based upon the study, that universe can potentially be pleasing and satisfying to witness. Finally, the clarity of the scenes presented contribute to their pleasant perception, and in The Rickstaverse, although the terminology and references may be obscure, they are very specific, and the visual scenes themselves, as well as the goal of the game, are made clear and concise.

Additionally, Joseph Pine, in a TED Talk regarding the economy of experience and the proliferation of traditional commodities, goods, and services into packaged, perceptually stimulating experiences rendered either authentically or… not so authentically, provides another lens through which we can analyze Carrot and [Adult Swim]’s social media product. He argues that consumers now need to perceive an offering as authentic to be truly attracted to it, in the face of the conundrum that all businesses truly only offer inauthenticity and that rendering such fakeness as real and creating value for the customer is the true work of a company. Interestingly enough, he continues to pontificate on the topic creating a space for offerings that are inherently inorganic and inauthentic, but acknowledge that as a part of their self identity and thus become transparently more real to the consumer; this is the space (pun intended) for The Rickstaverse.

The Rickstaverse, stemming from a completely fictional, wildly fantastic universe far removed from our conceivable reality positions itself as this very clearly fake thing that can feel as real as players want it to feel as they navigate the game, allowing them to immerse themselves in this fakeness for a real emotional experience. That transparency and understanding of the inherent fakeness of both the show and the game and implied acknowledgement of that fakeness, for example, in a way give credence and credibility to both worlds in the eye of the consumer, making it acceptable from a societal standpoint to engage with them. In contrast, think of, for example, the distaste or suspicion one might feel for friend or acquaintance who subscribes to a belief system or conspiracy theory that is very clearly inherently fake and inauthentic but regards itself as real, credible, tangible, and authentic, or a food item from the McDonald’s dollar menu that’s described as healthy, organic, and nutritious. It’s almost as if to say it’s okay to be fake, and in the case of Rick and Morty and The Rickstaverse, imaginary and unreal, if that pretense of fakeness is established and acknowledged. In the end, consumers just want the truth, whether the truth is a real, authentic one or not. The Rickstaverse offers a real experience with an explicitly fake universe, which works perfectly well with the contemporary economy of experience and the adventures that consumers are seeking.

Part 5: Facts, B. Why The Rickstaverse Rocks

A wise man once said, “If you build it, they will come.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? But that’s not necessarily true. Forbes reports that, although statistics on the topic vary from study to study, it is generally accepted that between 80 and 90% of startups fail. The Rickstaverse may not exactly be a startup, but it’s easy to imagine a parallel universe where nobody in the Instagram universe wants to explore our social media product of inquiry. That wasn’t the case, though. The Rickstaverse was a huge success for both Carrot Creative and [Adult Swim], and Rick and Morty has developed a large following. Immediately after The Rickstaverse launched on Instagram, word spread through Nerdist communities, flocking to Reddit to report the locations of hidden collectibles. Within one week, the experience earned 28,000,000 impressions and 78,000+ followers, which resulted in a 142% or 2.42x increase in average daily mentions of the show online. The initial success of the Rickstaverse incentivized the brand owners to rethink their approach mobile marketing, and redefine its initial objective of a social stunt for the launch of the show. Instead, The Rickstaverse became a productized, ownable entity, which can be updated during key moments of the lifeline of the show in the third season. At the show’s second season finale, the first expansion pack of the Rickstaverse launched. With no paid media, the followership blossomed to 88,300. The home page profile for the game, to date, has 98,000 followers, while the show’s Facebook page has 1.1 million likes. Carrot was even awarded with a Shorty, a coveted social media award for Creative Use of Technology in Instagram, for creating something user-friendly but unconventional that ignited fans and press to evangelize for the show.

Today, Metacritic gives the series an 85, saying the show is of “Universal Acclaim,” and according to Time Warner Cable, the parent company to [Adult Swim], the demographic is made up vastly larger numbers of men compared to women. Of those men in the targeted audience 62% are Caucasian, 27% are African American, and just the remainder 11% self identify with multiple ethnicities.

A tweet sentiment analysis of the Rickstaverse additionally suggests largely positive affectations, with comments that are highly pleasant and confident on its emotional association scatter plot. The hottest zone in the heat map is a 7/10 on pleasantness and 6/10 on activeness, suggesting a majority of the tweets on the topic are positive and passionate. One, for example, from @jessgeneieve, calls it a “clever interactive #instagram campaign.” Yes, yes indeed, Jess. The same analysis of Rick and Morty the show suggests similar positive regard from a larger number of tweeters. @Nyxxrm says “I fucking love Rick and Morty”, duly noted, while @ghostfacekaler is “kind of in love with Rick and Morty.” He’s probably just being modest. Doesn’t want to come on too strong and ruin his chances for a second date. Tweet after tweet after tweet communicate excitement or intrigue for the universe of Rick and Morty, and the creation of The Rickstaverse is to thank, largely, for that.

Part 6: The End (Or is it?)

All in all, The Rickstaverse is a brilliant example of a stellar, well planned and executed social media campaign that defies our notions of the architectural constraints of Instagram. It stands as further evidence that virtual worlds can and do exist, and that given the right context we will move to inhabit them and communicate with each other like a manifest digital destiny. Several articles online mention future expansion packs to the game on Instagram, likely to be well received by an already passionate fan base, but there is also room for even more innovation. Newer platforms like Snapchat and Periscope, Oculus Rift and other virtual reality technologies offer frontiers beyond what we may have imagined as final, and new opportunities to be creative and think even further outside of the box. As whacky and zany as the creators of Rick and Morty and the creatives and developers at Carrot are, we’d be remiss if we didn’t expect something else just as exciting and unconventional from them in the future as the show continues into its third season. The only real question is: What can’t happen?

References

Amit, E. Wakslak, C., & Trope, Y. (2013). How do we communicate with otherpeople? The effect of psychological distance on preference for pictorial and verbal means of communication. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(1), 43–56.

Book, B. (2005). Moving beyond the game: social virtual worlds. States of play 2conference, October 2004. Cultures of play panel

Gürismek, R. A., (2014) Multimodality and the cocreation of meaningful places inmulti-user virtual environments. Online Journal of Art and Design, 2(2), 1–23

Lavie, T., & Tractinsky, N. (2004). Assessing dimensions of perceived visual aesthetics of Web sites. International Journal of human-Computer Studies, 60(3), 269–298.

Metacritic. (2014) Rick and morty: season 1, CBS Interactice, Inc. Retrieved from http://www.metacritic.com/tv/rick-morty/details&gt

Nasar, J. L. (1984). Visual preferences in urban street scenes a cross-cultural comparison between Japan and the United States. Journal of cross-cultural psychology, 15(1), 79–93.

Pine, J. (2009). Ted Talk: Authentic Experience. TED. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smu2pRFgx-A

Revsin, Yan. (2015, March 5) The main reasons startups fail — and how you can aviod them. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2015/03/05/the-major-reasons-startups-fail-and-how-you-can-avoid-them/#26c3e07811df

Time Warner Cable. (2014) Adult Swim, Time Warner Cable Enterprises, LLC. Retrieved from http://www.twcmedia.com/TWC/CT/Network.aspx?id=490&gt